When you imagine an in-house video producer, you might think of someone working in a cubicle with fluorescent lights glaring off their screen while editing the latest talking head video from the CEO.
But not all corporate jobs are created equal.
Blaise Douros has a corporate gig as an in-house video producer for KUIU, where he gets to film in helicopters, tell great stories, and travel to some of the most remote areas in the US.
Listen to Blaise share the upside of working at a corporate gig that doesn’t suck.
Show Link
KUIU
Syrp
Auto Edit 3
Helios 44 Lens
Yashica Lens
KUIU YouTube
Portfolio
Key Points:
1:15 – How He Got Started
Skip to: 7:23 Shooting from a Helicopter10:50 – Creative Freedom
14:21 – Working with a Team
16:04 – Creating a Product Video
30:06 – Favorite Old Reliable
35:42 – Best Skills for B2C Video Marketing
39:15 – How Do You Measure Success
31:16 – Working with George Lucas
34:36 – Favorite Project
36:11 – Current Project
Full Transcript:
Blaise Douros: We have the ability to with words, or in our medium we can do it without words, right? Is to shape the way that somebody else is thinking. That’s a superpower. You can reach into somebody’s brain and make them feel a certain way, depending on what choices we make. Like hunters are kind of a crusty bunch, right? They’re stoic. And so if I can make those guys feel something, I really feel like I’ve succeeded. If I get a reaction out of these guys, I go, ” [00:00:30] All right, I must’ve done something right,” because this is a bunch of Spartans, right?
Tanya Musgrave: Welcome to The Practical Filmmaker, an educational podcast brought to you by the Filmmaker Institute and Sunscreen Film Festival, where industry professionals talk nuts and bolts, and the steps they took to find their success today. On today’s show, Blaise Douros talks producing in house business to consumer content for an outdoor gear company. Find the full transcripts at thepracticalfilmmaker.com. I’m your host, Tanya Musgrave. And today, we have documentary filmmaker [00:01:00] Blaise Douros. His work has been seen on Nat Geo, PBS, and for KUIU, an outdoor equipment company where he now works as an in house producer. Welcome to the show.
Blaise Douros: Thank you for having me, it’s a pleasure to be here.
Tanya Musgrave: Yeah. So tell me a little bit about how you got here.
Blaise Douros: Well, it’s sort of a strange, meandering path. So I started out going to school actually for music theory and composition. I wanted to be a film composer actually. I went to a school out in the Midwest that [00:01:30] had a really great music program, got out of school and started kind of sniffing around, and then I started realizing that there were like, 12 to 13 people that actually can do film scoring full-time. I’m sure there are more out there, but that’s what it seemed like to me. So I just kind of went, you know, I’ve got to pivot.
So I grew up in a production household. My dad was a producer, so he had dragged me along to sets since I was like 12, 13 years old. [00:02:00] He taught me to edit on the old VTR, reel to reel, two shuttle things. Set the in point, ca-chunk, set the outpoint, ca-chunk, then it lays in with the tape. I learned how to do that, and then he brought home Adobe Premiere version 3.0 or something. He goes, “Check this out. You can move things around on the computer, on the laptop.” And it’s like DV footage, has to render every time you play back. It was terrible at the time.
So [00:02:30] I got firsthand the chance to play with a lot of that stuff at an age when most kids would never have been able to. So coming out of college I went, “You know, I think I may just fall back on that skillset.” So I made some calls around, and I ended up making a connection through a family member who knew the head of a studio down in Monterey California that was called Sea Studios Foundation. And so I got a job there as a post-production assistant. I had [00:03:00] always worked in Premiere, and they were a Final Cut 6 house at the time. But they said, “Premiere’s pretty similar, you can learn it.” So it took me a about a week, but I got up to speed on Final Cut version 6, and switched over to version 7 while we were there.
And so I worked on a couple of hours of TV there. The first thing that I worked on was two hours for National Geographic, two episodes of a show called Strange Days on Planet Earth. And that was a show about basically unintended ecological consequences [00:03:30] from human interventions in the environment, so things like when you kill off all the predators in the environment, then herbivores surge. So you get things like the huge number of white-tailed deer that are now surging in the American south and east, that’s because we’ve killed off all the wolves and the cougars, right? Which otherwise would keep them in check. So we did a whole series on that kind of stuff. We then, we did a couple of other projects. One was an hour for PBS on salmon. [00:04:00] We did another hour on Nat Geo on viruses.
The studio was, when I got there they were kind of on the decline, right? They had done great work, and I got to work with world class people there, but the projects were just slowing down. So on that viruses show, one of the line producers had stuck around. She’d moved down from San Francisco temporarily, fallen in love, and gotten a job at an outdoor company in town called Light & Motion, which [00:04:30] made bike lights and scuba diving lights, and scuba camera housings. And so I wasn’t real happy, things at the studio were slowing down, so I called her. I was like, “Hey,” I had seen that there was a job post, they’re looking for somebody to do sales service and then do some marketing collateral, like videos and photography. And I was like, “Hey, is there a place?” And she was like, “Yes there is.”
And so I started working at this place that manufactured underwater [00:05:00] video housings, which was really cool. So I got some really neat experience in shooting underwater, understanding the physics of light underwater and what it does to the angle of view, what it does to color. And this was in the days before you could just shoot raw and just color correct it all. This was like, the 5D Mark II had just come out. It was all super compressed. So yeah, I spent a few years there.
And then after a couple years there, [00:05:30] we… so my wife got pregnant with our first, and so we were starting to kind of think well, it might be nice to get closer to home. So I was looking for opportunities that were a little closer to my family. So we’re home for New Year’s Eve. My dad goes, “Hey, I need a second camera for a shoot I’m going on tomorrow. You want to come?” “Yeah, sure. That’d be great, yeah.” He’s like, “Yeah, this is this cool client. It’s this hunting company.” And he goes, “They’re the one client [00:06:00] that’s ever found me just from my website, just cold called me,” right? So we go to a photo studio. They’re doing a behind the scenes on a product photo shoot, and I get to meet the founder and CEO of the company, a guy named Jason Hairston, who started KUIU.
And we get to talking, and he’s worked with my dad on and off for eight months. And we got to talking, and it turned out that he was kind of overwhelming Dad. He had more stuff to do than Dad could give him time, and [00:06:30] so Dad was like, “Look Jason, I’ve got other clients. I can’t do 50 videos for you in the next few months,” right? So Jason turns to me, he goes, “How happy are you?”
Tanya Musgrave: Valid question.
Blaise Douros: And I was like, “You know, we’ve been thinking about trying to get closer to home.” He’s like, “Great. Email me your resume,” and I’ve been at KUIU ever since. KUIU has been a wild [00:07:00] ride. There’s been a lot of stuff that I’ve gotten to do that I never thought that I would get to do in my life. Hanging off the bottom of a fish and wildlife helicopter with a camera in my hands.
Tanya Musgrave: What?
Blaise Douros: Going to Alaska and living out of a tent for 10 days way north of the Arctic Circle, that kind of thing. And I never thought I’d be working at a hunting company, but here I am.
Tanya Musgrave: Okay, okay. All right, all right. You can’t just drop some sort of thing like that of hanging out of a helicopter. I want to hear that [00:07:30] story, please.
Blaise Douros: The best part about this is that it was for a project that has never really seen the light of day, although I do have it on my portfolio, but it never actually got publicly released really. We were working on, at the time, a tactical line of products, and working with this tactical team that works here in northern California called the Marijuana Enforcement Team. They’re a Fish and Wildlife team. They basically go after illegal cartel marijuana grow operations in [00:08:00] public land. So you’ll have cartels that will basically divert water supplies, and use really incredibly toxic pesticides to grow marijuana on public land, or sometimes even on private land, but never legally right? They just go in and they do it.
This team would go in and basically bust them up, and so a lot of times, these guys are heavily armed, they’ve got sometimes dogs, they’ve got… I mean, there was a photo of a pile of AK- [00:08:30] 47s. One of the guys on the team had been shot with an AK-47 at one point. And so they’re basically a wilderness SWAT team, right? So I did a whole piece on the Marijuana Enforcement Team, and their training and what they do and all of that, with the intent that we would use it along with this tactical line release. Well, it was like a week after I’d finished the piece and they were like, “We’re canning the tactical line. The fabrics aren’t right,” there was something, there was some issue with it. [00:09:00] And so I was like…
Tanya Musgrave: I mean, is there a way that you could still release it? Kind of not promoting a tactical line, but just the story aspect?
Blaise Douros: If we’re not doing a tactical line, it doesn’t tie in that well.
Tanya Musgrave: Yeah. But even just on a story aspect, I mean, or was it just kind of an aspect of, we’re going to get a really, really awesome sizzle reel of people [00:09:30] using this tactical gear? By the way, they’re going after illegal marijuana growers?
Blaise Douros: At the time, we hadn’t even really built the line, but it was just going, “We’re going to tell you this story about these guys that we know, and we think that they’re really cool.” And in those, especially in those early days of KUIU, we did a lot of that stuff where it was like… so Jason had this, he just really had this incredible vision for what you could do with video and how you could build a brand with video. [00:10:00] So he thought the stories that you tell, tell people who you are, right? And so if we tell this cool story about these cool guys that are friends with us, and yeah they use our gear, but we’re not even going to talk about that. Like we’re just going to show you what they do, then that elevates KUIU the brand, just by the fact that we’re associated with those guys.
So that was such a cool and different philosophy to anybody that I’d ever dealt with, really in almost [00:10:30] any part of the outdoor industry. Really there’s only a couple other companies that I can think of that have that mindset, and the other one of them is Red Bull, right? And so when I saw that in Jason I was like, okay, yeah. I can co-work at a hunting company if this is going to be what I can do.
Tanya Musgrave: Sounds like you have a lot of creative leeway for your projects.
Blaise Douros: Yeah. It’s getting to be a little bit more buttoned up these days, but especially [00:11:00] in those early days… I mean, so KUIU’s a young company. It’s only, we’re having our 10th year anniversary this year, right? I came on in year three, so it was still really early days. It was like 15, 18 people in the whole company when I came onboard. So there again, it speaks to Jason’s vision that that early in the company he’s like, “I need somebody to do video.”
Tanya Musgrave: Absolutely.
Blaise Douros: That doesn’t happen. It’s just not something that happens in almost [00:11:30] any industry. When I get to do pieces like that, I pretty much have carte blanche. I’ll pitch a thing and I’ll go, “Look, I think this is a story that we should tell.” They’ll go, “Okay, is there an angle that it ties into products to a certain extent?” “Well yeah, it elevates us in this area.” And if I can make the case for it, I pretty much have the ability to go out and do it the way that I want to.
Tanya Musgrave: What made it button up? Was it social media, or having consistent brand, [00:12:00] or…
Blaise Douros: Yeah, it’s just sort of a general change of like, there’s more of us now. And frankly, that my responsibilities as the producer have grown too. Where before I could spend eight weeks editing a 12 minute film, not doing that the entire time, but spending that amount of time on a piece like that that was kind of my vision, all that, that’s a little bit over. I now also manage the product photography [00:12:30] creation, some of the lifestyle photography. I shoot a little bit of that myself. I’m certainly managing all the assets now, so my responsibility set has grown. And it’s just a little bit different direction.
The other side of it is that a few years ago, Jason passed away tragically. It’s not to say that other people don’t have that vision, but he had such a unique drive. He would really, really push for that stuff. [00:13:00] And so now, I just have to, if I really have something that I want to do like that, I have to really advocate for it. Whereas before, I could go to Jason, “Hey, I have a cool idea. Here’s what it is,” and he’d be like, “Yeah, go get it.” So yeah. So I mean, it’s not to say that that kind of thing isn’t valued anymore, it’s just that it’s a matter of where to fit it into a more concrete, organized marketing schedule.
Tanya Musgrave: I mean, is there a [00:13:30] brand package that you kind of have to stay with? I mean like your deliverables, you’re just like, “Okay yeah, we have…” I don’t know, do you guys have magazine spreads, or is it mainly just kind of online? Where are your outlets?
Blaise Douros: We’re running ads in a lot of sporting type publications, things like Eastmans’ Hunting Journal, and the Western Hunter. So if-
Tanya Musgrave: A lot of the traditional [crosstalk 00:13:54].
Blaise Douros: Yeah, more of the traditional hunting, yeah. We do that. And then strong digital ads, [00:14:00] and then we have a really engaged social presence. One of the things about the way that Jason built our brand in the beginning is that he got customers involved kind of in the development of the products, so we have a really tight tribe that just really loves the product and loves us. And so we put stuff out on social, and people pay attention.
Tanya Musgrave: Yeah. So are you kind of one man banding it, or do you have a team? How big is your team?
Blaise Douros: So it’s changed [00:14:30] a little bit for a number of reasons over the last couple years. At the very beginning, I was one man banding it, and then I had one and a half more people. I had a full-time editor, and then one summer I had an intern who came on part-time for a while too. For a variety of reasons, the guy who was interning, he left to pursue other opportunities. And then the other person is now gone as well. And so [00:15:00] with kind of the COVID thing, everybody’s belts have been tightening, and so it was kind of like okay, well I just have to kind of make do with what I’ve got. There are some other people who can do some of this stuff, who can shoot photos and who can shoot video. That’s just been kind of a recent development, but it’s just a little different now.
Tanya Musgrave: Yeah, interesting. Do you, I mean, you guys do gear videos and stuff like that? I don’t know. I do so much research. Whenever I buy anything, I don’t care if it’s a backpack or a jacket, I love it when they have videos [00:15:30] because I will totally… I mean, even just seeing how something moves, seeing how something… like, “Oh yeah, there’s a pocket there,” or what have you. I don’t know. And maybe it’s because I’m super impatient to get my product, and I watch the videos while I’m waiting to get the product that I already bought. I don’t know, it’s ridiculous. But yeah, I mean how is your particular approach for stuff like that? Do you do it for specifically, “All right, now this has to go on a website,” or do you kind of still have that [00:16:00] wild west feel of, “I think this would, if we can kind of get this in there…”
Blaise Douros: I sort of just have to pick up the most important things, right? And so I’m not going to make a big involved video for a sock. So if we’re going to do a video on a pack for example, then what I’m going to do is I’m going to sit down with the lead designer of the pack, and I’m going to go, “Okay, what are the key thing we need to hit?” We’ll decide on the format, whether it’s going to be kind of an interview style, or realistically sometimes a fake interview, right? With bullet points written out, [00:16:30] and looking off camera like this, and acting as though you’re getting questions. We’ll shoot that, and then I’ll go in.
And however I need to get the B roll, whether that is a studio setup, something like that. Sometimes we have field testing video from the last season of people that were out on hunts, and we’ve sent a camera person out in the field with them. If I’ve got that, then so much the better. And so just trying to find the best way to showcase how these products work [00:17:00] in the field, really. And that’s really key for our audience, because these are people, if the products don’t work, it’s not like you get to just wave off and come back again next week. Hunting season is when hunting season is. In particular, hunters tend to be the type of people that just have to stay out there and get it done. It’s like a climber can go, “Eh, weather’s bad. I’ll come back next week.” Hunters don’t get to do that, and so we have to show that our gear can hold up to that, [00:17:30] so anytime that we can show it in the field, we do.
Tanya Musgrave: Kind of going back to that Arctic Circle, that sounds like a pretty involved project, and I’m just kind of wondering if there has been a pinch I guess since working on projects like that, what are some of your present pinches that you have to deal with now? Or are there any compared to what you did before?
Blaise Douros: Yeah, I mean I think my main pinch is just being able to allocate the time to each type [00:18:00] of asset. Because, so like I said, I’m now running a lot of photography stuff, and those are responsibilities… so I can put it, we can get a product up on the website with just a photo, but we can’t do it with just a video right? So a lot of the times, I have to prioritize getting a product photo done versus having a product video done. And so I have some resources to be able to help me with that stuff, but by and large it becomes a little bit of a triage operation. [00:18:30] And so someday, yeah, would I love to have five people in the department and go, “Okay, here’s the parallel work streams. You guys are going to shoot this while these two are editing that,” yeah, that would be great. But we’re not quite there yet. If we ever were, then I think you’d see the quantity certainly go up.
And so that’s the other side of what I do, is that I’ve had to become a little bit of a jack of all trades. In addition to just the video production work, I’m shooting lifestyle photography, [00:19:00] I’m shooting a certain amount of product photography in studio. You’ll hear my voice as the voiceover on a lot of the videos. So if you have pronouncing the name of the brand, then…
Tanya Musgrave: This is true, this is true. I had to confirm. I was like, KUIU? KUIU?
Blaise Douros: Yeah, we have a lot of, “K-U-I-U? KUIU?” Yeah.
Tanya Musgrave: Nice, nice. So I’m going to start asking you some of the gear and the gadgets, specifically [00:19:30] for film obviously, what are some of your new revolutionary, the way that it revolutionizes the way that you work, what are some of your favorite new gadgets?
Blaise Douros: There’s a couple of things that have been really important. I have two different new things that I’ll share in particular, and one is a thing that makes for flashy cool stuff, and another is a thing that makes for like… it’s just a great administrative kind of tool. So the first thing is a motion control time lapse setup, [00:20:00] and the one that I use is the Syrp Genie. So I don’t know if you’re familiar, or have you ever seen these products around?
Tanya Musgrave: Okay, the one that I remember seeing was particularly on a… what is his name? It was on a slider, and you could put a timer on the end of it, and it would just essentially pull the camera while it did a time lapse. That kind of thing.
Blaise Douros: Right. Those kinds of products have come a super long way from putting an egg timer at the end of the slider, right? [00:20:30] And so there’s all kinds of them. And to be honest with you, the Syrp is kind of like the… it’s a little bit of the cowboy solution. It’s not the most precise one on the market, but it lets you set up in a million different ways, right? So they have like a cable dolly that you can set up. You can string a cable 50 feet between two trees, hang a dolly from it, and it has a little winder on it. And so it uses a piece of nylon paracord as the [00:21:00] conveyor, as the belt essentially. And so it winds, and so over time you can do these motion time lapses that are 50 feet long. And actually, I did something similar for a product release. I built a dolly where we pushed in… it was, I think it was 25 feet from the back all the way into this mannequin that was in the warehouse. And over the course of an hour, we would dress and undress the mannequin in all kinds of different stuff.
Tanya Musgrave: I saw that, I saw that.
Blaise Douros: Oh did you?
Tanya Musgrave: Yeah.
Blaise Douros: Yeah. Yeah, so that’s how we [00:21:30] did it is that we built… it was a motion controlled time lapse.
Tanya Musgrave: I was curious. I was curious what you set that up on.
Blaise Douros: Yeah. So the actual, the dolly was very punk rock. I mean, it was a PVC pipe dolly, and then I had these… kind of like those old skateboard type dolly wheels where it’s set in a V configuration, and then I just, I cut a chunk of wood out and then put the tripod on top of it. And so the Syrp has a detachable part, where [00:22:00] you have the cable winder on one part, and then there’s a pan tilt head as well. It’s all controlled through either a tablet or a phone app, or you can set key frames and timings. It’s calculate the shutter interval for you, it’s awesome.
Tanya Musgrave: [crosstalk 00:22:15].
Blaise Douros: So I calculated how long I wanted the final thing to be. I wanted it to be a minute long, right? And then said, okay, this is how many frames we have to take. So then it calculates how far it has to move for each frame to get the desired type of motion. [00:22:30] It turned out great. I think it did anyway, you know?
Tanya Musgrave: Nice. What’s kind of the price range of that?
Blaise Douros: The Syrp Genie is… I want to say it’s about $2,500. For somebody like a solo freelancer, that kind of hurts a little bit. But it doesn’t hurt as bad as motion control should. I’ve done stuff with it too, where there was a piece that I did where we went to the [00:23:00] testing facility that tests the quality of our down feathers. And there’s this test where they put the feathers in a bottle of water and then they shake it to see if the feathers wet out, then every few minutes they check and see if they’ve wetted out, right? So some feathers wet out after 10 minutes, and ours went for like two hours before they gave up.
So I did a whole thing, where I did two different passes. I did one pass in realtime, then an hour long time lapse of the thing going. [00:23:30] And I had the lab tech in the background buzzing around all blurred and fast for that hour. But then in the foreground, it was a more realtime view of the thing shaking the feathers. So you see, there’s a clock, and that one’s going, and the lab tech is buzzing around in the background. But in the foreground, it’s kind of going in more realtime. And then at the beginning and end, it fades in and fades out with the lab tech in realtime turning it on and off. So yeah, you shoot [00:24:00] multiple passes, and you can do cool composites, where you put different passes together in realtime, and quick time, and all that.
Tanya Musgrave: Were there any bugs in it? Like in the system, that really kind of, just like a [inaudible 00:24:14] of it.
Blaise Douros: Yeah. My least favorite feature of it is that if a software update gets pushed to your phone, like if there’s an app update, you cannot shoot unless you update the firmware of the head unit. [00:24:30] It’s super annoying.
Tanya Musgrave: [crosstalk 00:24:32].
Blaise Douros: So you can check it the night before and have it all ready to go, and then you can get onset, and in the meantime your phone has downloaded an update, and so you’re sitting there, you’re like, well…
Tanya Musgrave: Can’t do anything.
Blaise Douros: “I hope that this Bluetooth firmware update doesn’t fail.”
Tanya Musgrave: Oh my stars.
Blaise Douros: That’s my flash thing, that’s my flashy thing. The other really cool thing that I’ve discovered recently is a piece of software actually, [00:25:00] and it’s called autoEdit. It’s called autoEdit 3 actually. This was created by, I want to say it was like a vox.com guy who was doing documentary work. So what it is, is it’s an AI transcription tool. So you load your raw footage in, it takes the audio, and it’ll send it either to a web transcription service, or to… you can get it, like a transcription engine that’s by Mozilla. It’s an open source [00:25:30] thing. And it’ll get you a transcription that’s like 80% there. It’s not a human transcription at all. But then once you have that transcription, you can take it, copy and paste the words into another document, and export an EDL. And so then you have a rough cut that you’ve done, purely on paper, just looking at the words. And it’s is so fast.
Tanya Musgrave: Interesting.
Blaise Douros: So for interviews, if you’re the kind of person [00:26:00] like me that relies a lot on interviews, it is the best tool. It’s so cool. So, and it’s open source and free.
Tanya Musgrave: Wow, wow, wow. Okay, wait. All right, you’re going to have to walk me through this one more time. This is specifically for the editors out there then?
Blaise Douros: That’s right, yeah.
Tanya Musgrave: When you are talking about editing it on paper, you’re talking about… because for me, I’ve gotten stuff transcribed, and I’ll highlight the stuff that I [00:26:30] like.
Blaise Douros: So imagine doing that, and then cutting out the high-lit portions, pasting them onto another piece of paper, and then showing it to the computer and the computer goes, “Okay,” and it makes a rough cut for you.
Tanya Musgrave: No.
Blaise Douros: Yeah. It’s-
Tanya Musgrave: Stop this. You’re taking away my pen and paper.
Blaise Douros: I know. I mean, I’m with you. Back in the days I was at Sea Studios, it was my job to make a copy of all the tapes, because we were working on, [00:27:00] it was… what was it? DVCPRO HD tapes. We would make a copy of the tapes, we’d send it to the transcription house via FedEx, and then a week and a half later, they send it back to you with the little flash drive that had all… and so, but now-
Tanya Musgrave: Flash drive? It wasn’t typewritten?
Blaise Douros: Yeah. I’m not that old, God. Yeah, it’s 2008 okay?
Tanya Musgrave: Anytime you say [00:27:30] that you cut going ca-chunk, ca-chunk, I go back to classic Hollywood. Sorry.
Blaise Douros: It’s not Moviola, it was VTRs, okay? There was Digibeta. It was digital.
Tanya Musgrave: Oh, my gosh. Beta tapes, wow.
Blaise Douros: Yeah. So anyway, so autoEdit is basically that same workflow. But what it allows you to do is just copy and paste the text essentially between two different windows, and then once [00:28:00] you’re done you’ve built your paper edit of the interview. And it spits out an EDL, you load that into Premiere, and you’ve got a pretty darn close rough cut, or at least radio edit of your interviews. It saved me so much time on interviews. It’s a fantastic tool, and I’ve-
Tanya Musgrave: That sounds incredible.
Blaise Douros: And there’s companies now springing up to do this that want to charge you money for it, and this guy is like, “No, I made this tool while I was working at,” I think it was Vox, and he’s like, “Yeah, I just open [00:28:30] sourced it.”
Tanya Musgrave: Wow. So where do you find this then?
Blaise Douros: Google autoEdit 3. And you have to download it from GitHub. It’s a little more complicated than the off the shelf software. So you have to download that software, and then you have to choose what transcription engine you’re using. So there’s a Mozilla, there’s one by Mozilla that’s open source that’s kind of janky, but you can download that, and you can do it all locally. And then there’s a couple of services where it actually sends it [00:29:00] up to a cloud AI service to transcribe it, and I picked one of those, because the accuracy was a little better. They let you do… this one lets you do like five hours a month free, which is plenty.
Tanya Musgrave: Which one is this one?
Blaise Douros: autoEdit is free, and then the open source Mozilla engine is free. AssemblyAI is the name of the company that I picked to do it with, and they… you can sign up for a free account with those guys, a developer account, [00:29:30] and they let you transcribe up to five hours a month for free, which for me is plenty. I’m not doing many interviews.
Tanya Musgrave: Okay. And about what is their accuracy for the transcribing?
Blaise Douros: It’s still 85, 90%. It’s still an AI transcription. If you’re going to use it for captions or something, you’re going to have to do plenty of cleanup, but that’s not what I use it for. I use it for that radio edit, and it [00:30:00] saves me so much time.
Tanya Musgrave: Yeah, yeah. That’s incredible. That is a really, really good one. What about you’re favorite old reliables?
Blaise Douros: I’m a little bit of a vintage lens nut. I can spend a lot of time going down the rabbit holes of what lens, what vintage lens does what, but there was a couple of favorites of mine. There’s this Russian lens called the Helios-44. It is not a 44 millimeter lens, it is a 58 millimeter lens. [00:30:30] I don’t know, they’re Russians. I don’t understand their naming conventions. But, so this is a lens that is, it’s a 58 millimeter lens. You’ve probably seen some of the photos out there that have the really swirly bokeh in the background. This is a lens that lets you do that, and you can get them on eBay for $30. The adapter will cost you an additional $8 to $10.
Then my other absolutely favorite vintage lenses are, I have a set of Yashica [00:31:00] MLs. They are the best. They’re so nice. And so that’s a whole set of primes, and this is a set, like the real kind of Lamborghini of the vintage lens world is the Contax Zeiss, right? So if you’re a vintage lens person, those are the gold standard. So the Yashicas were made in the same factory, by the same company in Japan. There’s no evidence that they share design elements, but they’re actually very high quality lenses. They have this really [00:31:30] nice, just saturated look. They’re a little lower on the contrast, but the saturation is really beautiful, like the oranges and the blues really start to pop on those. And so I just, especially if I’m doing… and I’m cheating here, because landscape photography, I’ll pull out the 24 millimeter Yashica lens, and there’s something magical about it. It just makes everything look kind of pretty. And it’s not super sharp, it’s not the most sharp lens [00:32:00] ever. It’s doesn’t always have to be. There’s just something about it, it’s looks really nice.
Tanya Musgrave: Something about it. Yeah, it’s like that je ne sais quoi. I haven’t gotten way down the rabbit hole of vintage lenses, but I do have a Yashica MAT-EM, and then I got a Pen FT, just because I… when you have to slow down a little bit, it’s just kind of nice, just for still photography.
Blaise Douros: Absolutely.
Tanya Musgrave: It’s nice to slow down. But the Pen FT, it’s a half frame camera. [00:32:30] So you’re not as nervous to roll off a bunch of shots, because there’s like 72 shots that will fit on a regular roll of film. But yeah, it’s always interesting to see the color. I don’t know why it never occurred to me… this was a while ago. It never had occurred to me the amount of color effects that you can get out of a lens until I really progressed in my photography, and realized that I hated, hated one of my lenses. I think it was [00:33:00] just like a 16 to 35 Canon, and I was just like, “This is cruddy color.”
Blaise Douros: Yeah, I mean it really, it makes a surprising amount of difference. And now, in the era of DaVinci Resolve, right?
Tanya Musgrave: Oh, yeah.
Blaise Douros: There’s so much that we can do, right?
Tanya Musgrave: There is.
Blaise Douros: But there is something about getting it right and going, “You know, all I have to do is bring the highlights down just a little bit…”
Tanya Musgrave: How much were those, the ones that you were…
Blaise Douros: Oh, the Yashicas. Yeah, [00:33:30] so it depends on which ones you’re looking at. Some of them are more common than others. I mean, some of them you can get for as little as $50 at the right place, and sometimes you’re at a thrift store and you’re like, “Oh, well this is actually a great lens, and they’re selling it for $20.” You know.
Tanya Musgrave: [crosstalk 00:33:49].
Blaise Douros: So the super wides tend to be more expensive. I do not yet have… there’s a 15 millimeter fisheye in that series that [00:34:00] is going for like $600 on eBay these days. The 24 is going for like, maybe $200, depending on… the 51.4 is going for maybe $100. And actually, the most underrated of that whole lens set is the 135 millimeter F/2.8. That is a gorgeous portrait lens. It has a beautiful 3D pop, that same kind of colors, and [00:34:30] people are selling that one for $60 or $70. It’s a great focal length, it’s a great lens. I really love that one.
Tanya Musgrave: What are you popping these on?
Blaise Douros: The nice thing about these lenses is that they are designed for a deeper flange depth, so you can put those any Canon DSLR, any Sony, any of the Sony mirrorless cameras. My personal camera, I have an older Canon 6D, which is actually a pretty great old camera. It’s really decent. The ones that I’m [00:35:00] using at the office are Sony Alpha Series, so like Sony a7. For video stuff, I’m shooting a Sony FS7, original, not the Mark II. But with Metabones adapters and that kind of thing, it all works fine. And these are, these lenses that we’ve been talking about are fully manual. It’s all manual aperture, manual focus. There is no motor in it.
Tanya Musgrave: Okay. So for your live focusing challenge today.
Blaise Douros: Yeah.
Tanya Musgrave: Thank you [00:35:30] so much for your gear recommendations, that was amazing. We do have a couple of listener questions. If you want to ask your questions, our Instagram is @practicalfilmmaker. This one says, “What’s the best skill that has translated to your B2C work?” So before you were kind of working for a post house, when you have to create for consumers, what’s the best skill that’s translated?
Blaise Douros: The best thing that you can have is to understand story, is [00:36:00] to understand narrative. Think about anything that you do from that framework. There are storytelling techniques that you can apply to almost anything, right? It can be a product video, it can be one of the micro docs that I produce. The order that you reveal information matters, and how you reveal that information all matters. And so if you think about things like three act structure, you plug those into your filmmaking for a brand or any [00:36:30] consumer oriented piece, I think you’re going to end up with a better piece for it.
And so that’s one of the things that I think actually was one of my strongest things that I’ve been able to really cultivate at KUIU, is that I’ve had the freedom to be able to tell stories just for story’s sake. But then we have to do those nuts and bolts kind of things, where we’ve got to sell this backpack, right? We can go, all right, so let’s think about [00:37:00] what problem does this solve for this person, and how can we present it in a way that’s really compelling, right? So let’s tell them the story of why they need this pack. Like okay, so you’re in the field, and you put on your old wooden pack, and the frame breaks. That’s a pain. That’s awful. Now here’s what you have to do to get your animal back to your truck. Now so what we did is solve that problem, right? We made a frame out of carbon fiber that’s super strong, right? So telling that story in a way that’s compelling [00:37:30] rather than just going… just pointing the camera at the guy and go, “Hi. This is our pack. It has carbon fiber in it, which is really cool.”
Tanya Musgrave: No, this sounds a lot like story brand marketing. That was something that in my previous job we went through, and they were talking about how marketing is a story. And even, I’m going to get a little philosophical on you, but I still remember one of my friends was like if something even in your life is bothering [00:38:00] you for instance, they say, “How are you going to tell this story in one sentence when you’re on an elevator somewhere?” It’s going to be reduced to a sentence, you know? They’re just going to be like, “Well, this crappy thing happened, and I got screwed over.” Or are you going to paint yourself as the hero and say, “Yeah, this crappy thing happened, and we did something about it.” It’s something so simple in your mind, but story is really, really strong. It’s compelling for people who, they don’t even realize it you know? It can really change a direction for [00:38:30] sure.
Blaise Douros: We have the ability to, with words or sometimes in our medium we can do it without words right? Is to shape the way that somebody else is thinking. That’s a superpower, right? You can reach into somebody’s brain and make them feel a certain way, depending on what choices we make. Like hunters are kind of a crusty bunch, right? They’re stoic. And so if I can make those guys feel something, I really [00:39:00] feel like I’ve succeeded. If I get a reaction out of these guys I go, “All right, I must’ve done something right,” because this is a bunch of Spartans, right?
Tanya Musgrave: Yeah. And if you can make them say, “Take my money.” Banking off of that, our next question comes from Michael. “How does your in house work measure the success of a project?”
Blaise Douros: That’s a great question, and it depends on the type of project that we do. I would look differently at the success of a product release piece, [00:39:30] kind of one of those… like a sizzle reel, a promotional video right? Is that there’s a certain amount that we look at of, okay, how many people clicked the link, right? But the way that we run our marketing is that it’s all multichannel. So we’re going to send an email that links you to the video, which links you to the page, and also we’re going to put that video on social which links you back to the page.
And so we don’t always necessarily think about the performance [00:40:00] of an individual video as a sales tool purely by, okay, what’s the metric that hit it, right? Obviously if a product sells well, then we look at it kind of as the success of a campaign as a whole. Then I look at a lot of the times not even its performance on release, but I’ll look at how it does over time right? There have been pieces that we’ve put out that started out, and they got a couple thousand views. And then I’ve come back [00:40:30] six or eight months later, and there’s 50 or 60 or 70,000 more people that have watched it. I count that as a success for a brand building piece too, because that means that people are out there connecting with it, engaging it, maybe sharing it between themselves.
One of the things that Jason used to say a lot when he was still with us, right, is that a lot of these brand building type pieces, you don’t do necessarily because it’s going to get people to click the ‘buy’ [00:41:00] button. You do it to tell them who you are. You do it to make them feel connected to the brand, and feel something about the brand, so that maybe later on when you’ve got a sales oriented thing up and it’s like, “Here’s all the features,” and all of that. What they remember is how they feel. If they go, “These guys care a lot about what they do, and they care enough that they’re…” For example, there is a guy who is a fifth generation down merchant who does our feathers for our down jackets. [00:41:30] Five generations, this guy’s family has been in down, and he figured out how to make them perform better than anybody else in the world. And so we did a piece on him, because you have to. You have to, because by showing what an amazing thing this guy has done, you elevate yourself.
And we didn’t… nowhere in that entire video does anybody say the word KUIU. Nobody says anything that had to do with, “Buy this jacket.” It’s just, “Here’s the guy that makes the stuff that [00:42:00] we put in our stuff.” And so later on, after somebody watches that video, they look at that jacket and they go, “I understand where that came from, and I know the story of the down that’s inside that jacket.” That is priceless, right? You can’t put a price tag on that. We have customers out there that will go to bat for us. They’ll die on any hill for us, right? That is how you measure the success of your brand building effort, right?
Tanya Musgrave: Yeah, yeah. So how do people find [00:42:30] you or follow your work?
Blaise Douros: If you follow the KUIU YouTube channel, you’re definitely going to see some of the stuff that I’ve worked on. K-U-I-U, yeah. I think our YouTube channel URL is KUIU ULtralight. And then I have kind of a collection of some of my favorite stuff up on Behance, behance.net/blaisedouros. If people want to get in touch with me, it’s just my first name, dot, my last name, at Gmail.com.
Tanya Musgrave: Nice. And last question that I ask everybody. What questions should I have asked you?
Blaise Douros: How [00:43:00] do you make a hunter cry?
Tanya Musgrave: Oh.
Blaise Douros: No, not really.
Tanya Musgrave: Have you?
Blaise Douros: I have.
Tanya Musgrave: All right.
Blaise Douros: I did a piece where Jason and his dad went moose hunting. It was a gift that Jason surprised his dad with, and so the whole piece was… it was not about the moose hunt. It was a piece that was about the relationship. Like they go moose hunting, but the whole thing’s about their relationship. So I guess the [00:43:30] question is, how do you get people to connect with this stuff? And my answer to that is, find the relationship and find the characters, and showcase all of those things that you would do if you were making a narrative film. All of those things are just as important in any kind of marketing content or brand building content. If you don’t have characters in your film, and you don’t take the time to let people get to know them, then they’re not going to feel connected to it.
The order in which you reveal information is important. [00:44:00] If we don’t know for example that there’s something going on with this person’s life, then later on in the film when they accomplish something that’s really important to them, in the case of a lot of the stuff that we make is that they go hunting and they successfully harvest this animal, right? Overcoming some kind of adversity. Why do we care? We have to take that time to get to know them early on, and have some empathy for that person, and understand what drives [00:44:30] them. Then even if you’re not a hunter, later on when you see what it has cost them, and what it means to them to accomplish this goal, even if you don’t like hunting elk you can connect to that person on some level, where you go, “We’re all human. We know what it’s like to fight through something to accomplish a goal.” That’s the biggest piece of advice that I have for anybody in this business. Find the characters, find the story, find [00:45:00] those narratives, and that’s the stuff that is going to elevate your content and make it something that people really connect with.
Tanya Musgrave: Amazing. Thank you so much for your time. This is a really, really good opportunity for people, particularly who are on the fence of not knowing the options that they have for full-time work versus going to Hollywood. I mean, that’s the thing everybody, if you think that you have to work in film, you actually don’t have to go to Hollywood. There are lots of opportunities. [00:45:30] So thank you so much for giving your insight.
Blaise Douros: I just want people to know, you can do cool things and you can have a cool career, even if it’s not in LA, and even if it’s not working in features. You can hang off the bottom of a helicopter like Tom Cruise, even if you’re not making a Mission Impossible movie.
Tanya Musgrave: You heard it here. There you go. If you enjoyed this interview, follow us right here, and check out more episodes at thepracticalfilmmaker.com. If you have comments or know someone who would be a great [00:46:00] guest on our show, send in your suggestions to tanya@thepracticalfilmmaker.com. Thanks for joining us, be well and God bless, we’ll see you next time on The Practical Filmmaker.