Bulls In Space!

I’ve been able to do two really great videos with my compadre and amigo, Bull Diego! This is our latest music video where we took it into the Blade Runner Universe! Check it out here!

Two Unlikely Friends showing at The Temple Cultural Activities Center through August

Two Unlikely Friends showing at The Temple Cultural Activities Center through August 2021.
Current Exhibition dates:  July 24, 2021, through August 31, 2021

This unique exhibit tells the story of two unlikely friends through drawings and a video presentation of the subjects.   Learn about their journey to a close friendship which began between parole officer and parolee leading to a relationship built on mutual respect and understanding.   

Artist, Sara Lee Hughes, starts with a storyboard, photos of the images and progresses to tell this story in a unique way.  The drawings took seven months to make, due to drawing, taking a photograph, then erasing to expand the drawing of each scene into the next frame. The exhibit is enhanced with a video and music by Steven Collins (DEADMAN) that narrates how the drawings depict the friendship and development of understanding between these unlikely friends demonstrating for all of us the value of love and friendship to bring our community together.

More info:

Cultural Activities Center

Sara Lee Hughes’ Event

2019 Work To See

We were able to be immersed in to the world of the blues, the bayou and great story telling in these new video for Connor Ray Music Records. They came to us with needing two music videos made for their artists. We did the concept, filming, production and edit on these two pieces for Steve Krase and Dry Johnson.

Take a look at the videos here!

The Huffington Post Premiers "Hole In My Heart"!

The folks at The Huffington Post exclusively premier the video for "Hole In My Heart" by Johnny Dango which was done entirely here at Troubadour Image + Sound!  Take a look at the article and the video here!

David Goldman Releases "Migrant Sugarcane Workers of India"

Photographer David Goldman worked with us to bring his web exhibit "Migrant Sugarcane Workers of India" to life.  David spent time in india photographing, videoing and interviewing the people involved in the migrant sugarcane industry to determine what motivated the people involved and what could be done, if anything, to improve the working conditions.

Steven Collins lent his version of "Joshua Gone Barbados" to the film.

View David's stunning images, watch the films and learn more at David's official website:

http://davidgoldmanphoto.com/projects/

Real Estate Video Marketing

If you are a real estate agent or broker, you know the real estate market is picking up steam, and is expected to further trend upward throughout 2016. We’ve noticed many in your industry are doing a great job of responding to this trend. We’re seeing you increase your production of attractive digital marketing collateral, noticing you publishing regular blog content, and observing how you are dynamically staying engaged with followers on social media. People in your industry are working hard to set themselves apart in this competitive market, which is why we want to be a resource to you – to help you up your video marketing ante!

As you know, an increasing number of buyers and sellers use channels such as YouTube and Instagram to research listings, as well as to determine which real estate professionals they should place their trust in. Videos and Instavideos are powerful tools for telling your story. You can leverage them to grow your listing business, build lasting relationships, and strengthen your reputation within your community. In addition to becoming your source for beautiful listing videos at affordable prices, we can work with you on video strategy for strengthening your brand both locally and internally.

Brand/explainer videos  

These videos should capture the timeless components of your brand, so they can be used to represent you for several years. They are incredibly valuable collateral, because you can use the footage for multiple purposes. A video such as this can: live on your website, auto-play on your YouTube page, add value to your presentations during conferences and other meetings, and be repurposed as your profile video for Facebook. These are only a few examples for how you can use them. Here’s a brand video we created for Vanessa Schuelke, a realtor at RE/MAX River Cities in New Braunfels, Texas:

Longer brand videos can be edited into several shorter videos to use on channels such as Instagram, Twitter, or Vine. Here's an Instavideo example: 

Testimonials and case studies   

There is nothing more relevant to people who are looking for the right real estate professional or company, than hearing from past clients who found your help buying or selling a home invaluable. Having a great reputation, and having this spread through word of mouth, is still the most powerful marketing tool available to you. Testimonial videos provide you with virtual word of mouth advertising. These videos can live on your website, be shared on your social media channels, and be used as part of your email marketing campaigns. 

Advice or “thought leadership” videos   

Whether you embed these in your blog articles, or as part of your service descriptions or advice segments on your website, these short, digestible videos cooperate with your written content to demonstrate your expertise in your market. They work to show people why they should trust you or your company, and choose you or your company, over the competition. They are great for setting yourself apart from the crowd as an educator on relevant housing-related and community topics, as well as for providing home selling and buying advice.

Company culture videos    

These videos can live on your website and be blasted on your social media channels. They not only serve the purpose of inspiring and re-energizing your team, but they demonstrate to your community that you are a great company to work for and work with. Just like brand videos, these should capture the timeless components of your brand, so they can continuously motivate and inspire your agents for several years before needing to be updated.

Real estate photography     

At Troubadour Image + Sound, we are really excited to be able to offer beautiful real estate photography to our video clients. These unique still images, captured during the production of your videos, can be used to create powerful collateral for telling your story. They can inspire connections between buyers and sellers, buyers and property listings, buyers or sellers and agents, and your company and your local community. These unique, non-stock images can be used on your website, as part of your digital brochure or fact sheets, for your digital presentations, etc. 

If you are ready to set yourself apart from the competition through video, and need an affordable and creative team to work with, please contact us. One of our partners was formerly an agent, and we are paying close attention to trends in the real estate industry. Let us work with you to strengthen your brand relevance in your local community. 

Timelessness

In the studio, and on video projects, one of our main goals is to capture the timeless elements of the work our clients are doing. This is because we know this will give them unique identifiers in their markets. All of the elements – strategy, writing, direction, cinematography, editing, sound – need to come together cohesively in a way that will outlast fads or fickleness of culture, while taking the audience in a new direction they haven’t experienced before.

At Image + Sound, our continuous endeavor is to create work that requires and keeps people’s attention. This is why we’ve chosen timelessness as one of our core values.  

Make it memorable
When I think about memorable stories, the ones that come to mind are archetypes of the epic hero. These stories stay with us because we are enticed by how the journeys connect with our own human experiences. Whether it’s Star Wars, Harry Potter, legends of Greek demigods, or stories about Biblical heroes –the protagonists face struggles we’ve shared, such as: dealing with loss, overcoming pride or the dark parts of self, making and protecting important relationships and communities, learning and living by noble principles, and being willing to stand up and fight for loved ones and what is right.

We can take a chapter from these books to influence our own storytelling. Find a way to connect with your audience on a human level, and do so in a way that isn’t dated, and people will get to know and remember you.  But also, they will be reminded that they are human and hopefully be inspired.

Avoid nostalgia  
There is a sophisticated difference between work that is timeless and work that is nostalgic and dated. While you need the familiar to keep the story human, you also want your story to be forward thinking – to bring people to a new place that is still authentic. Often people are nostalgic about the 1960’s because it was a time of extraordinary creativity, but they ignore what made it such. People during that time were taking risks and experimenting – they weren’t nostalgic about the past . . . at all.  Rather they were pushing toward a new paradigm and a new society.  They took the ideas of the past about human dignity and they tested them, pushing ultimately toward a better modern society.

Nostalgia is not the path to speaking to the human experience in a way that influences change or progress any more than sticking to all the current trends is. We learn history so we know where we came from and so we won’t repeat our mistakes.

Push for a unique identifier  
If we want another time of complete explosion of culture at large, we have to risk experimenting now. When you gather people up where they are and take them along with you to a new place, you then you’re on the step to the unknown, and that is always what creates either serious failure or serious change.  Both are necessary for one another.  This is how you establish a unique identifier – something you will be recognized and trusted for in your market.

Placing high value on timelessness leads to creating work that causes people to straighten their backs and pay attention. Through this, you can build anticipation that will hold people’s interests and even cultivate longer-term relationships and support because the work resonates with them on a personal level.

Let's go on a journey: The Production of Angela McClure's "When the Day is Blue."

Artists need to connect with their audiences visually as much as sonically if they want to keep their attention. In today’s culture, people are watchers and listeners at the same time. As a producer, I want to facilitate creative aggregation between music and video, but I want to do this in a unique way that invites people into the head of the artist – versus the way music videos are traditionally done (though sometimes a traditional video is what is called for).

We’re moving toward an increasingly homogenized society. Nostalgia has become paramount, masking the void usually filled by artistic progress. Technology keeps us "wowed," but we are still alone in a crowd. People are searching for uniqueness. They always have been. The work we are doing at the studio, and with Troubadour Image + Sound, is something different because instigating progress is important to us. We are willing to take risks in order to find what makes our clients and our work unique.

A unique and timeless sound

For “When the Day is Blue,” we wanted to take Angie out of something she had done before. She writes on guitar, and writes from a traditional place. We wanted to combine those traditional elements with something modern, to come up with a unique and timeless sound. To avoid a dated sound, we kept the melody intact but lifted it out of a folksy sonic environment and focused on other instruments that might do what the guitar ordinarily would do.

The song has a drone like quality, with no chorus, so Roberto Riggio (co-producer) and I immediately knew we wanted to let it drone – like a meditation – and let the song unveil, as it got more complex. I then mirrored this with the unveiling in the video, so they both take the listener on a journey. When the song subtlety changes, this represents the changing of the songwriter inside the song.  

Combining traditional and modern elements

For the guitar we substituted an Oud, a Middle Eastern lead instrument. The Oud has it’s own sound, and an emotional tone. Then Sean Giddings came up with a counter melody to that on the piano, and Fred did a drum rhythm that worked really well to bring the song to a unique place rhythmically. 

Unless you are going for the Andy Warhol/John Cage thing, where you use alienation as part of what you want to get across, you want to keep some familiarity to show the audience how to feel at home. This makes them more inclined to go on a journey with you.

Fighting for Uniqueness

As a producer, fighting for uniqueness is part of my calling. I have a passion for working with artists in a way that provides them with a unique identifier for their work. A way they sound different – a sound they can be known for. No artist wants people to say: “I like that song, but I don’t know who it’s by,” But, unfortunately that is one of the consequences of playing it safe. Usually when you feel this way, as a listener, I believe it’s because the song hasn’t made enough of a unique impression for you to care about who the artist is.

Angela McClure is great to work with on these types of projects. She certainly cares about her audience and wants more people to experience her work, but experimenting is part of what keeps her working and fascinated. Her willingness to color outside the lines is why she has a unique way of sounding. Culturally, we are all craving those innovative and timeless qualities. We just have to have the courage to take the risks required to get to them. 

Purchase your copy of "When the Day is Blue" at bandcamp today! 

Not "Too Cool for School"

At Image + Sound, we have the goal of being known for doing really beautiful work. It’s important to us to bring all the pieces together – the strategy, writing, direction, cinematography, editing, and sound design – in a way that captures the authentic culture of a brand. But, we also want to be easy to work with (we aren’t snobby or pretentious) while pushing people to get the best out of themselves.

Things are moving fast for everyone these days. There are new things to learn every day, and there is something you can learn from everyone. People want to work with people who make their lives easier, not harder. That’s one of the reasons being down to earth is one of our core values. However – down to earth, to us, is about more than just being easy to work with. We extend the definition to include: being inclusive, always learning from the people around us, and staying willing to jump out of our comfort zones and do things differently.

Inclusive

You might not believe this, but some people haven’t had the best experiences working with people in the creative professions. At Image + Sound, we are so over people who are ‘too cool for school.’ As part of our team, as a client, or as part of our creative community – you will never be made to feel foolish – like you aren’t cool enough or expert enough to be in the club. Everyone is worthy, everyone has an interesting story to tell, and we all have things to learn (even within our own areas of expertise). We don’t like exclusion. We’re interested in what people have to offer.

Always learning

Maybe you’ve had that boss who hired a bunch of smart people, but for some reason refused to listen to them or learn from them. Or, perhaps you’ve been the newcomer to a team of people who weren’t open to any of your fresh ideas – people wanting to keep doing the same things they’ve always done in the same ways they’ve always done them. These are not unfamiliar stories. One of the great differentiators about the way we work with an arrangement in the studio, or with clients on a video project, is how we facilitate this incubator for imagination and inventiveness. Everyone who contributes becomes part of that synergy.

Getting uncomfortable

As Steven said in our article titled, You Don’t Have to Choose Boring, “doing work that matters requires jumping out of your comfort zone.” Anyone in music or in business who has ever done anything that matters has been willing to do this. People get sluggish when they get too comfortable, doing the same things in the same way all the time. Part of our job is to be courageous and try new things in our roles, but also to push you to take the risks you need to take to get the best out of yourself. When you do, it’s like riding a bike for the first time. You get to realizing why and how you are unique in a way that still connects with fundamental human experience – and you gather traction from that.

If you need video or video marketing strategy, work with us to tell your story. Our vision is to be Good Samaritans in the world of marketing, people who are willing to risk being more authentic in our own work while also being eager to help others. 

Why You Should Care

Compassion is something you don’t hear about much in business. In the age of selfies, cover photos, and the numerous hours and resources brands spend curating their own images – it seems like people are pretty focused on themselves. Yet, we all know people who inspire us, people who offer value to others while making their own work and lives meaningful in the process.  

What we’re describing is not unlike that of a talented chef, who has taken the time to prepare a meal that is sure to leave guests with a personal and memorable experience. This chef has taken into consideration: the ingredients, the palate, the color of the items, the presentation, and the delivery of the cuisine. All of the components are there to make it extraordinary, because the chef cares.

Business is personal

We’ve all heard people say: “It’s not personal, it’s business,” but at Image + Sound we believe business is personal. Doing good business requires a willingness and desire to invest time and energy in developing and maintaining good relationships. Good companies – good people – get to know others (their customers, their team members, people in their creative communities, even their competitors) and care about them as human beings. They may not always be able to give others what they want, but they care enough to keep their relationships intact.

Caring is a core value

Caring is one of our company core values. We define it as continuously demonstrating passion for the work we do and compassion for the people we work with and serve. However large or small a project is, we –and the people we work with – have an opportunity to do work that changes things for people on some scale. We choose work we believe will leave people better off than they were when they met us. We want them to succeed in their vision and in business.

Working for artistic placefullness

Many people are artistically malnourished, even artists. As a culture, we are widely experiencing artistic placelessness. Often we are faced with the choice between continuously self-financing authentic work – but being forced to treat it as a glorified hobby – or having to conform to the powers that be (molding our work and image however we are told). There is little room for invention within those options. Image + Sound exists to be part of the solution, to help remedy this problem. This is our struggle, too. It’s why we are so passionate about it. Our work is about inspiring and giving control back to the artists and other innovators.

A soulful, human approach

In the studio, or when we work on a video project, we might not be making The Godfather, but we could be.  Great work is the result of having a great attitude.  We feel that every opportunity to build something offers us a chance to create something unique and compelling. We like to work with clients who are willing to take risks and color outside the lines. When we collaborate on a project in this way, those discoveries can be moments of personal transformation – opportunities to care more, develop stronger passion, and put something more meaningful into the hands of your audience and into the world.  

Whether you hire us to tell your story or not, we want to talk to people who share our values about caring. We would like to be Good Samaritans in the world, people who are willing to risk being more authentic in our own work while also being eager to go above and beyond to help others. Get in touch. 

Make an Emotional Connection through Storytelling

I really enjoy storytelling around the campfire, and I’m interested in the historical impact of such practices on human cognition and culture and on early societal learning. I’m also intrigued with figuring out ways to mimic this campfire type engagement within the online storytelling context.

At Troubadour Image + Sound, we tell stories through video that connect with people’s emotions on a human level, because we know the message has to be about more than just the storyteller. It must be meaningful and memorable to the audience. We enjoy working on great backstories, especially if tribute is given to the important people and experiences that have shaped an artist’s or an entrepreneur’s work or life. We are passionate about keeping inspiration active in the hearts and minds of those who engage with the stories.

Hook people through emotional connection

If you are an independent artist or entrepreneur, you are pouring your energy, love, and dreams into your work and on some level your work has the potential to shift the way people are in the world. But for more people to experience your work, you have to break through the white noise. The environment around a campfire gives people reason and opportunity to pause and give a story their full attention. This type of spark or shared energy is created through online story telling as well, when the story connects with people on an emotional level.

Remember, bragging is boring

It is one thing to tell people about what is exciting about your work or product, but another to detail a long list of your accomplishments or superiorities. The latter is not what we are recommending. If your testimony is self-centered – such as all about how great you are now, compared to how bad you used to be before you saw the light – just buy a diary. You won’t reach or move a wider audience that way. 

Share your passion

Think about when a person is very authentically and enthusiastically telling you about something, or someone, s/he is wholeheartedly into. It is easy to get caught up in a shared energy. Or think about how when you meet someone who you just click with, and like them immediately. People connect with passion. Great storytelling is about more than just getting people to buy from you. Hopefully your work is about more than this, too. Good stories are intriguing. They can cause people to look around, and be less self-focused. They help people see the world in new ways and can prompt them to progress.

Want people to gather around your story? At Troubadour Image + Sound, we are visual storytellers. We make sure the production of your story accurately reflects who you are and how you want to be known. Let’s work together to move people to engage with you and your work.