When it comes to communicating a brand message to your audience, Hollywood’s big, brash, and real attitude will take your message much farther than international cinema’s challenging, understated, and experimental tone.
At the end of Nostalghia by Andrei Tarkovsky, one of Russia’s great film makers, a man repeatedly tries to carry a candle that he lit from one side of a church courtyard to the other. The scene lasts 9 minutes. With no cuts. In Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, the climactic scene is a slow 6-minute zoom out of a hotel window, where people move in and out of the frame. 6 minutes. One window.
For all its merits, the pantheon of international cinema may not be the best place to find a model for brand communication. European cinema tends to be challenging, experimental, understated, and full of grey areas. Viewers have to work to get the most out of watching one of these films. Not the ideal customer experience.
In brand communication, the truth of the matter is that the people you’re trying to reach don’t trust you yet. They aren’t going to let you experiment with their time or emotions—it’s basically now or never. Enter Hollywood communication.
The charm of Hollywood movies is that they trade experiment for impact, gray area for solid black and white, understated for big, bold, and overstated. Hollywood directors and producers know how to produce the sleekest, most efficient, most beautiful way of grabbing your attention and not letting go.
What kind of communication do you want for your brand?
I doubt anyone looking for video production in Orange County would tell me, “I want an advertisement that you have to watch several times before you start to understand it.” You want your audience to grasp your message immediately, intuitively. You want them to say, “Aha!” or “Ooh!” or “I know what they’re saying” and then move to the next step toward getting in touch with your product or service.
Cecil B. DeMille, the man many credit as having invented the Hollywood we know today had an obsession with the impact of realness in his films. His brother William tells a story of a day of filming where Cecil walked up and handed William a gun to be used in the next scene. William was going to shoot at a door to bust it down. He jokingly asked if the bullets were blanks, just to make sure, and Cecil told him that, no, they were real bullets, so be sure not to miss your cue, so that the people behind the door can get out of the way before you start shooting. William nervously asked if that didn’t seem a little dangerous, and Cecil replied, “Of course it’s dangerous; who said it wasn’t? But that’s pictures. We don’t fake anything in pictures; we’ve got to have the real thing.”
This commitment, while eccentric and, yes, dangerous in films is the perfect formula for brand communication. If you want impactful, you’ve got to make it as real as possible. This means telling your story. Odds are that if your product/service is worth anything, there’s a story behind it. Our job is to find the most intuitive, impactful, and real way to get your brand across. So if you’re looking for video production in Orange County, or even someone to help with brand communication, be real—movie magic may be possible in Hollywood, but shooting blanks simply won’t fly in branding.