TOP SECRET photo shoot at Square Daisy HQ today.

by Jovan Marić

I remember when I was about 8 years old I was politely asked by my parents not to bring toys to the dinner table as it was inappropriate.  I remember at 18 years old being asked to turn the kitchen television off during meals so we could have an actual conversation instead of all sat with heads at right angles watching either Eastenders or Coronation Street.  I remember at 28 being asked not to bring my phone to the table as it was considered very rude.  

Never did I think that at 31 I would be using a giant computer screen masquerading as my table to order my lunch. 

This is what I love about technology, the infinite applications it has in every day life, sometimes to make things easier, sometimes to make things safer, sometimes to make things quicker……but sometimes just to make them fun!  I thought therefore, as Square Daisy is a media and technology company I would tell you about a great restaurant I went to last weekend.  It’s called Inamo and there are two restaurants in London; one at St James’ Park and one in Soho.  I learned about these places through a video feature in the iGizmo magazine on the iPad, have been banging on about going for ages and my wonderful girlfriend got us a table as a treat.  The food is oriental fusion and is really very good.  The real pull though is the interactivity and control that you can have throughout your meal.

Above every table there is a silent projector that projects imagery down onto your table, in the right hand corner of your table is essentially a track pad which allows you to move a cursor around an area of the table.  When you arrive you are swiftly shown how to operate the system and then you’re left to your own devices.  Choose the drinks menu, pick a drink, place your order and hey presto a few seconds later a member of staff appears with your drink.  When ordering your food, decide through a simple menu system whether it is a small dish, big dish or side dish you want, and then scan through the options.  Each time when you choose to look at an option, an image of it appears on your plate so you’re not disappointed when it comes and looks nothing like you imagined it to in your head. Order one thing at a time, two things at a time, it really is up to you.  You’re in control.  And through the whole process you can change your table cloth, alter the pattern or have it on random shuffle - why would you do this you might ask, well……because you can.  Digitally.  Which is a novelty in itself. 

 Aside form the ability to order food and drink, call for your bill or indeed just call the waiter over, there are a whole bunch of other features available through the table which although so simple, someone has really thought about.

There is a ‘chef cam’ which following a cute little animation allows you to look into the kitchen and watch the chefs cooking your food, always helpful for those who wonder about the hygiene in a restaurant kitchen!  There are maps to show where you are and what is nearby if you’re stuck for ideas of what to do next or where to get a late drink.  A travel section allows you to check bus and tube routes and there is even a facility that lets you book a cab directly from the table - just be careful you don’t choose this option by accident!

Arguably the most fun part however is the ‘play’ section.  This has three games that you can play on your own (if your date is going really badly) or against each other.  A simple memory game, a shuffle game and battleships are all available, the first two with an oriental cuisine angle, and battleships with a….well, military angle.  If you’re really brave, you can play to see who gets the tab.  I did that, and lost.

So why go here?  The food is good, i’d give a strong 8/10 (the miso soup is a comfortable 10/10 though).  The surroundings are nice, clean and modern.  The ambience and service are excellent.  But you wouldn’t make a special trip for this reason, it’s purely because you can do cool stuff on your table!  This place is an excellent choice of venue if you are shy or on a first date, there are enough things to keep the other occupied to avoid conversation.  If you’re on the verge of divorce, an equally excellent venue - you can amuse yourself without having to speak to your partner and as a bonus you can get really competitive with the games afterwards.

So if, like me, you have a great relationship why would you go.  Because you can do cool stuff with the table and it isn’t classed as poor table manners when you do it.

www.inamo-restaurant.com

After a question posed on Facebook by my best friend, business partner and colleague Andy Pickles earlier today, it provoked me to reply a few times, which quickly made me realise I do have strong opinions about the process of creativity, particularly in business.

His question was: why do most jobs in the Creative & Media industry go to people from a particular social class and education background? and Does this matter? My first reply was this…

Some of the most uncreative people in the world are fortunate enough to have had a situation to propel themselves to be in a position to make creative decisions. I have witnessed some shocking creative business moves in my life by untalented uncreative dullards, you only have to look at your local council print literature, or watch some big companies TV adverts. The real shame is I believe 80% of the worlds real creative people who are passionate never reach the correct position in life or make the most money. If you can manage or manipulate other people’s creative work you have more chance of being both successful and wealthy. Historically, some of the worlds greatest composers, artists, and scientific discoverers never went to their grave rich or fulfilled, yet their publisher or manager did. Being talented and passionate about anything doesn’t guarantee anything, it helps but it has to be mixed with luck and social skills as well as some help from others.

You can be as talented as Johnathan Ives, chief designer at Apple who created the iMac, iPod , iPhone and iPad but unless you are lucky enough to have the fortune of getting to a position where your work will be shown or valued it’s very hard to get both wealth and accolade for your work. The best football players don’t all get to play for Manchester United, the most creative music singles and albums don’t all get to number one in the charts.  To return to my earlier point on what frustrates me is the fact that high paid, high powered individuals make terrible creative decisions based on their position within a company, as they climb the ranks of a business they assume they have the rights and skills to make artist and creative decisions - how many shit adverts on TV have you seen over the years? How did Last Of The Summer Wine run so long, who designed the Olympics 2012 logo, who the hell designed the Fiat Multipla?

You only have to look online these days to see some fantastic creative work, video production, music, design, arts and literature, yet almost all of these great works of arts from really really creative people supply no major income or support their passion of creativity. Yet the top level companies and businesses still employ or commission shite, but why do they do this - because the people at the top can’t spot a good font from a bad one, they can’t spot good software from crap and usually have as much design flare as a goat. So how do creatives climb that step ladder to get to the top, do they have to mix within a different circle of social class, do they have to be more aggressive in business, or do they have to have a very very lucky break?

I do believe that a mixture of passion, belief and determination does help most of us reach our goals in life, but we do have to accept that this has no guarantees. Some modern tech companies like Google and Apple now try to breed creativity, they try and put the creative thinkers at the top of the ladder, giving space and freedom for workers to open up without the constraints of 9 to 5 timelines or stupid Excel spreadsheet targets and deadlines, and just look at the success of these two companies and others like them.

This will be my longest ever post, if you’re not an editor you might want to look away now as it gets pretty technical.  I wanted to do justice to the biggest thing to hit my world since the 5DmkII.  Apple have reinvented editing from the ground up, wahooo.

Having edited on all the versions of FCP for eleven years I was so excited by this year’s great leap forward and bought my download on release day.  Sneak previews looked amazing, and the promise of new tools and easier ingest for solid state cameras had me chucking my cash towards Cupertino with the faith that it would unquestionably be an advance in video post.

This is no meagre upgrade, Apple are trying to develop the practices of editing.  They’ve hidden away confusing stuff to prevent you from making dumb user errors like moving audio out of sync. And there’s new stuff, lots of original features to make our workflow simpler.

The interface is superb.  Entirely redesigned, working well on either single or dual-monitor workstations.  I’m running last year’s 17” MBP and 23” Cinema Display and the various palettes and windows fit together very naturally.  Stuff like the Property Inspector moves out of the way neatly when you don’t need it, and feels just right when it’s open.  Video scopes and audio meters look awesome and have great detail.  There’s just the one video display which soon feels natural.  This really surprised me as Viewer/Canvas is one of those core concepts that all video editing is based around.

Features added to FCPx include the tagging of keywords familiar from iPhoto.  It works effortlessly and makes your initial edit prep more powerful, with the ability to make smart collections from keywords, so for example all your exteriors would be easy to find, or all your graphics.  Media can be rated as ‘good’ or ‘reject’, then a filter toggled on/off to show you only what you’ve decided is worth editing.  This is great and something I’ve done manually for years, cutting my rushes and lifting the good stuff to V2.  Anything that’s left on V1 I know I’ve decided to reject.  I’d say this is evidence that Apple have worked with editors to introduce tools that aid workflow.

There’s a new trim tool which incorporates all of slip / slide / ripple / roll.  It’s really intuitive to use and a well designed improvement.  Markers have also been developed with a new To Do function, which can then be ticked off as Done.  These are accessible from a Timeline Index which is searchable and has filters.  This is useful if you’re doing some editing, notice something that needs attention later, make it a To Do marker, and at some point you’d go through your To Dos and tick them off, love it.

This week I ran a test exercise re-cutting a promo that I made last week in FCPclassic.  I wanted to see how different it felt to use X, what was easier, and what if anything was harder to achieve.  When I output the result using the new Share / Apple Devices / iPad option I’m pleased to say the video looked just as good.  In fact on one fade from black shot there was noticeably less banding.  Previous FCP output settings are a locked down AppleTV preset, whereas now you can go in and configure parameters.  There’s also dedicated sharing options for Vimeo, Youtube and Facebook.  I tested the Vimeo preset and the results are decent at fullscreen HD, so the route from timeline to global distribution is simplified.  Outputing, (sorry ‘Sharing’ as Apple have renamed it) at the highest available resolution is ProRes4444 which looks great fullscreen on 23” Cinema Display and the file size I acheived was 1gb as opposed to 7gb using Animation codec from FCPclassic, so perhaps this could be considered this as a suitable mastering format?

I’m being open-minded in the leap from classic to X, and hopefully you can see above that there are improvements.  I don’t want to join the camp of naysayers who reacted straight out of the gate slagging this version off entirely.  However after one exercise of cutting with it I can see some major flaws.  One huge issue being the incompatibility between X and classic.  You simply cannot open a legacy project file, and of course an X project can’t be opened in classic.  I’ve maintained an archive of all my FCP work since day one and it all opens in FCP7.  in the future I will always need a copy of the classic and the new software on my system.  Imagine not being able to open an After Effects project from five years ago in the latest CS5 version you just bought, this is daft.

Apple are trying to change the whole video post paradigm I feel, which might be why they’re renaming things that are essentially the same (Timeline = Storyline / Nested Sequence = Compound Clip / Grading = Color Adjustment).  Your project now only contains one sequence, if you want more sequences - perhaps an alternate cut - then you make a new project altogether.  This sucks I’m afraid.  Much of my work has been on productions leading to a main edit and a series of standalone talking head packages.  These naturally work as different sequences contained within one project.  You hand back to your client the final project file containing every edit decision, neat and tidy.  Now you’ll be handing back a bunch of project files.  I guess archiving our work just got a whole lot messier.

Tracks are the basis of all editing software.  Not just video, but audio and motion graphics too.  I guess Apple think tracks are a bit daunting for the amateur home user, a bit complicated.  So they’ve done away with them in FCPx.  In my opinion this makes it hard to manually organise your timeline.  I kind of think in horizontal visual streams.  The one on the bottom that’s the main shots right?  Then above it cutaways, above that overlay graphics to composite etc.  It works, you can lock them.  No more,  it’s a primary storyline (think V1) and connected clips.  I’ll reserve judgement until I tackle a difficult assembly but from my work so far I’m not a fan.

Did you hear the one about ‘Save’?  You know, command-S, you’ve worn keyboards out over the years with that thumb and forefinger shortcut.  I can’t remember when Apple gave us the Autosave Vault, but I’m glad they did.  I could stop saving manually and keep a whole folder of versions across time to revert back to, sweet.  Never lost any work since.  FCPx also autosaves for you.  In fact it’s so automatic that there is no such thing as ‘Save‘ anymore, look in the File Menu it’s gone.  But what FCPx does not have is an Autosave Vault of versions, all you get is the very latest.  In practice - and I’ve only cut one edit so far - when I quit the app it lost my last hour of editing for some reason.  When reopened the next day loads of editing had disappeared and there’s no vault of time-staggered versions to revert to.  This is bad.  A workaround could be to save your project file to the Mac rather than an external drive and use Time Machine to dig out old copies.  Except that FCPx forces you to render files to the same drive as the project file, you cannot manually tell it where to send stuff, so if your rushes and the whole project assets are on an external drive then your renders won’t be in the same place.

Final Cut was never a single solution to video post.  I have always spent my time flitting between it and After Effects and Soundtrack Pro.  Sending little bits of media to other apps for working on, then importing a rendered result to go into the FCP timeline.  Not no more.  FCPx has one output (sorry ‘Share’) and that is THE WHOLE TIMELINE.  It is impossible to render out individual assets or between a range defined by In/Out.  This one is pretty much a deal-breaker as so much of my work goes through AE at some point.  You can make a framegrabbed still from the timeline, although it’s time for a cup of tea as this takes ages to render out.

My whole blog came about because of the DSLR revolution in shooting video.  Final Cut was never built for these new cameras, so the promise of background transcoding upon ingest while you edit really attracted me to FCPx.  The feature does work, but performance is rubbish.  The keyboard and mouse become unresponsive as you see your processors being sucked into transcoding duties.  Next time I cut DSLR footage on FCPx I’d ingest the day before the edit, let it transcode overnight and get to cutting when all background processes are complete.  I’m running last year’s MBP with core i7 and 8gb of ram, so would expect the hardware to be able to handle the task.  In fact the old way of transcoding in MPEGstreamclip could be done while cutting in FCPclassic so I’m afraid this is a step backwards.  Also worth noting is that three of a batch of 120 clips failed to ingest in FCPx so I had to do them in MPEGstreamclip, which had no problem.

As with many DSLR shooters I’ve been working dual-system, recording audio to a separate device.  I was syncing manually using clapper slates for reference until I came across Pluraleyes which takes all the pain away and does it for you.  At the time of writing Singular Software have not released Pluraleyes for FCPx, so it’s back to manual.  There is a Synchronize Clips function within FCPx but it’s based on markers or in-points as opposed to being automatically calculated from the waveforms.

Doing simple audio tasks like a fade is now easier in the FCPx storyline, there’s a handle always present to be dragged making an auto curve.  This takes a couple of clicks away from the old toolset which is good.  However one simple audio task which an editor does frequently of course is to add a cross fade transition between two adjoining clips.  For example a series of vox pops, if you don’t cross fade there’s a horrible little digital click on the cut.  To cross fade in FCPx you have got to detach the audio and video which are seen as one asset in the timeline.  Then select the two audio clips and make them into a compound clip, open that then add your cross dissolve.  This is so convoluted for something an editor’s doing all the time, hopefully it can be fixed in future updates.

FCPx does not communicate with the other pro apps from Final Cut Studio.  When it comes to grading you’re now limited to the internal toolset, you cannot send to Color.  So Apple have reinvented the wheel yet again, this time the colour wheel.  An industry standard has been done away with.  The new tool feels ok to use though I’d say there’s no room for precision as everything is done by dragging dots around a graph.  This results in numerical values, but you can’t edit those numbers for fine control.  There’s no buttons to nudge values in small increments either.  For example I’ll often crush greys ever so slightly using the FCPclassic colour wheel sliders which have a triangle for 1% increments.  Now it’s a bit like finger painting, there’s no granularity to your control.

The white balance pipette has gone too which is a real shame as that often gives a good starting point for a primary grade.  What we do have are a load of pre-baked looks to chose from though.  Every cat-playing-a-piano video can now have one of the FCPx pre-defined grades at a click.  Wether they’ll be white balanced is another matter.  

The Match Color tool looks interesting - make one shot have the same chrominance and luminance characteristic as another.  However having tried to use it I’d say the results are universally rubbish and I wouldn’t bother.  If you want to try it you can’t miss it, the icon is a multicoloured wand complete with sparkles!  I’m a pro, I’ve got pro gear, I charge for my services, this is my career.  Don’t make me use a multicoloured wand, it’s one small step away from dancing paperclips.

Exporting the finished edit is limited to a handful of the common codecs, but crucially Animation isn’t one of them.  I’m not an animator but have been mastering to that codec for years as it has always given the greatest visual quality.  Yes the file is massive but from that one perfect master you can happily compress all the versions your client demands.  Crucially it’s a cross platform codec so I can give the Quicktime to Mr.PC who can use it too.  I doubt he’ll be able to open AppleProRes4444 anytime soon.  I find that exporting really bogs down all the cores on my processor and trying to use the Mac for other tasks simultaneously causes spinning beachballs and another cup of tea.

My overall feeling is that Apple are taking away options, forcing an editor into one way to work.  You cannot decide which root folder to send your files to, only which drive.  It’s as if we’re too stupid to make that decision so Apple are protecting us from mucking things up.  It feels like being guided by an autopilot rather than having manual control, and just like using a camera we like manual control, right?

So I’m going to continue editing with FCPclassic for a while, monitoring the updates for X.  If Apple address the biggest issues which many editors are complaining about then it’s gonna be a great environment to work in.

A book we recommend for all creatives.

One of our recent video shoots was in central London for an app company based in Carnaby Street.  With a W1 postcode it’s right in the heart of the capital, making us plan the logistics of moving video kit quite differently.  Usually we’ll rock up on site with an estate car chock full of gear, more options than we’ll ever need for the scenes slated for that day.

Our client advised that traveling on the tube is their easiest access so we slimmed down equipment to an absolute minimum, squeezing it into four bags.  With a two man crew moving between trains and tube stops this was our limit as packhorses.  We used a Kata camera rucksack for the lenses and slider head, and Sachtler tripod bag with both the tripod and a dismantled slider in it.  Third bag was a classic Billingham with 5DmkII body, a few prime lenses, cleaning kit and an iPad.  Finally our Cinebags Camera Daddy bag was packed with a Redrock handheld grip.  This one proved too wide to carry through the turnstiles of the underground, and we eventually learnt that the wheelchair access gate was the one for us!

Having done a reccee at the location we knew the interior scenes have loads of big windows on two sides so I planned the lighting around what nature gave us, taking along just a single hard light source that I could sculpt when a composition needed it.  The Dedolight DLH4 is our favorite for this task: small head, focusable beam, compact barn doors, dimmable, and best of all packs down really small.  I chose to run it tungsten without colour correction gels, with the camera set to daylight white balance.  The result being a flattering golden accent light that really enhances skin tone on the shots where it was used as a rim light.

The brief for this commission didn’t require any talking heads and the edit was storyboarded to a piece of music we were making, so gladly we left our sound gear behind.  If we’d needed sound or a fuller lighting rig then a third crew member would have come along to get us there with arms the same length as when we set off.

We recorded one timelapse sequence of the exterior of the company headquarters on Carnaby Street.  The weather was kind to us with lots of small clouds against a bright blue sky and a strong wind.  The clouds whizzed past over the fifteen minutes it took to record 300 frames, and the sharp shadows are flickering on and off giving dramatic changes within the shot.  The lens used here was 18mm Nikkor prime allowing us to get the whole of the building in frame from just across the street.  The intervalometer used was Meike MKMC36, calculations of how long to shoot the correct number of frames for the edit was done using a great iPhone app called Timelapse Helper.

Many of the interior shots were planned around using subtle camera movement to add dynamics into scenes where the talent are sat at tables or computers.  The Sachtler FSB8 tripod has a great fluid head for controlling pan and tilt moves.  Our other essential tool in the motion control arsenal is Glidetrack’s HD slider.  A different aesthetic has become affordable in the last few years since DSLR cameras stormed into video production.  Previously tracking shots for shoulder mounted heavy cameras required laying tracks and running a tripod along them, or sitting on a dolly and being pushed along tracks while riding on a stool - time consuming to rig and manpower heavy.  This is why you used to see tracking shots only in high end drama or the movies.  When we shoot video on DSLR we can now achieve a short tracking shot with a lightweight slider that packs down smaller than a tripod.  It’s so important as a smoothly controlled camera motion adds production value to a scene, brings it to life, and because of parallax the image recorded gains depth.  So when packing down our kit to the bare minimum for this shoot I knew we just had to take that slider.

The client is chuffed with the rushes we achieved and we’ll put a link to the finished edit here when post has been completed.

Filming a in central London for Yuza Mobile, full details and tech spec blog coming soon.

It’s an interesting discipline building websites, particularly from a clients’ point of view, especially if they are not aware of the nuances of building a site.  Hopefully these pointers below will help a client to get the website that not only they want, but that they need.  The list isn’t exhaustive but might help a little bit.

One. 

Decide from the outset what your maximum budget is. This is your point of reference and everything becomes relative to this.  You might want a real high end website with e commerce, content management system, animations and social media integration……but if your budget is £500 you will have to compromise on some things.  It will save you the shock and save a developer time if you’re both up front about expectations from the outs.

Two.

What do you ultimately want the website to achieve?  Is it merely an online presence so people can get your details?  Do you want to show your product range off?  Will people be able to buy your product or service through your website?  Will it be constantly changing or remain quite static?  Will it have your social media and blogging connected?  Without answering some fundamental questions, your going to run into problems further down the line - a good website is always reverse engineered.

Three.

Write a good brief.  You don’t have to be a teccy to write a decent brief which will pay off in the long run.  If you don’t, a developer will start to lead on the functionality of the site, which isn’t always a bad thing, but if you want to be ultimately happy with it, you have to take some of this responsibility.  You don’t have to understand the difference between jQuery and Flash, but you can explain what you’d like it to do, how many pages, how many tabs or icons per page, is there any imagery or video’s, etc. This will enable a developer to figure out the tools they will need to use and the time it will take them to build it, mitigating as much as possible against an ever spiraling bill and the need to sit down quickly!

Four.

Ask for a wire frame of the site first.  Before a designer even opens up Photoshop on their Mac (yes….it absolutely should be a Mac they’re working on, no question!) they should knock up a wire frame.  This isn’t complicated and is a very dull visual plan of each page and how it will work and will be incredibly useful in ensuring they have understood your functionality brief.  you can have the best looking website in history, but if it doesn’t work well or isn’t intuitive, people won’t stay there for long.  A builder wouldn’t start laying bricks until he’d seen the architects plans, think of the wireframe in the same way.  It might cost you another few quid for an additional half day, but you can be relaxed that you know exactly how it will function when it’s built.

Five.

Know how involved to become with the design.  Designing user interfaces and general design work is an art, try and resist the urge to become a designer overnight - if you were really good at it, you’d be doing for a living, but as you’re not, you probably aren’t!  Give the designer as much of your corporate material as possible so they can keep within your style guidelines, take photo’s of your premises, product or working environment so they can get a feel for the vibe of your business - this stuff all helps.  Some colour don’t go well together, sometimes less on a page is more, sometimes no white creates more impact than every shade of the rainbow.  If you have contracted a good designer they will know what works best and hopefully exceed your expectations.  This doesn’t mean to say you can’t have an opinion, far from it, just remember that you wouldn’t go for an operation and tell the surgeon what size scalpel to use!  Shape the design, don’t become a Creative Director - trust their ability and your brief and they will usually deliver.

Six.

Sometimes one head is better than two.  It is incredible how many times someone says “I have a friend who is a graphic designer who i’d like you to speak to” - at this point your website is doomed to be a catastrophic failure in every sense.  Why?  Because you have just introduced competition to the project.  Designers will always have unique styles and interpretations and like to leave their mark, this conflict in opinions and approach will slow the entire project down and be detrimental to the outcome.  You made a decision to hire someone to do it, stick with that choice and it will go far more smoothly.

Seven.

Be honest at every stage.  If you see something you really don’t like, raise it immediately.  If you wait until the end of the project and there are little bits that you don’t like, they often take an age to resolve because they have been replicated throughout the whole site.  A good company will send pages for approval at each stage so that you are happy and they can focus all their attention on the next bit. 

Eight.

Don’t get a Bentley to do the school run.  By this I mean if you need a Content Management System (CMS) to do some pretty standard things, don’t have one built from scratch, get one off the shelf like WordPress.  They will do everything you need them to do and it will be a tenth of the price - this goes for a e commerce package too like Magento.  A good developer will recommend this option to you from the outset based on your brief and will be able to factor time into tweaking it to better suit your needs.

Nine.

Respect your own signature.  Within the contract there should be some milestones, such as contract agreement stage, wireframe, design and deployment.  If you have signed off an element of the project and then change your mind, that’s your problem, not the web company’s.  You should expect to be charged for additional amends after sign off and you should be willing to pay.  More broadly, most web companies will be happy to make reasonable adjustments, but if it changes significantly from your brief you should expect to have the original contract torn up and sign a new one.  That is why getting it right from the beginning protects all parties and manages expectations.

Ten.

The cardinal sin.  Never, ever, ever, ever commit the cardinal sin of saying “if you do this website for me for free, there will be loads of work for you afterwards” / “If you do it really cheap i’ll put a link to your website and it’ll get you a load of business” / “can you knock me up a quick website and i’ll owe you”.  A good company will give you a good proposal and behave in a very professional way.  If you are a good client you’ll offer a good brief and behave in a professional way.  If you think that the price is a bit steep, get a comparison or ask the company to break it down for you, but respect the cost.  If a company makes your new website a pleasure and works with you at every stage, odds are they’re a great business and you’ll have a great result at the end of it - and no one minds paying for that.

These are just ten pointers to think about, there will no doubt be developers and designers out there that might add to this list or disagree, so we’d invite your comments on the blog.  There’s a ton of companies out there that also sell really cheap websites because you kind of build them yourself - you chose a colour scheme, select a template, insert your text and drag & drop images and you know what……for some people these are GREAT and I would recommend that people use them (i’ll get shot for that!).  Don’t spend thousands on an all singing all dancing website if you don’t need one, but don’t do your business an injustice by having a crap one - a website is an investment not a cost, why?  Because it is now the front door to your business and the first place they’ll go to decide whether you’re the type of company they want to do business with.

I was watching a programme the other night, you might have caught it, it was called ‘Made in Britain’.  It was about Britain’s place in the world when it comes to manufacturing and how that has changed over the last few decades.  We all know that China, India, Taiwan, Russia, Mexico and many more countries can all now make stuff much cheaper than we ever could so you’d imagine that manufacturing is dead and we’re all doomed.  Wrong.

It was a genuinely interesting programme for a whole bunch of reasons but the one thing that I found really interesting was something called the ‘value chain’. I kind of new it existed but i’d never heard it being explained this way before.  Okay, so there are basically three stages in the value chain: 

1. Innovation and Invention
2. Manufacturing
3. Marketing, Branding and Advertising

The British it would seem, with all its smart people, fantastic universities and access to capital, is great at inventing stuff because, well, you have to be pretty clever to spot a need and then invent the solution.  Of course it sometimes already exists, but we’re quite good it turns out at improving products that are already on the market.  So Britain is still a market leader in the business of innovating and inventing.

 The second stage we’ve already established we’re not so competitive at - notice how I said competitive instead of good at, because I think we just can’t compete on price anymore - if we could I reckon we’d be market leaders in stage two as well.

The third stage is all about marketing, branding and advertising which we are really good at.  They cited the Rowntrees brand (and Kit Kat bars specifically) which Nestle bought for billions of pounds, because we had built such an amazing brand, but its not just Rowntrees, we’ve got some great brands in our locker and some fabulous creative agencies that help us get it out there.

But not only are we really good at the first and third elements of the value chain, they’re also quite fortunately the most lucrative!  They cited on the show (and I may have the second figure wrong but not by much) that when an Apple iPod is sold Apple get $80 and the company that makes the thing gets $5 for every unit!  That is the value of creating a product and being so good at making people queue overnight to get their hands on it!

So you may be wondering why is a guy from a creative agency rambling on about manufacturing!  Well it got me thinking about Square Daisy and where we fit into the value chain, and then it hit me - we are in all three stages!

When a company wants us to help promote their product or service we create the campaign and the means of communication.  Depending on what our clients want we then make or build the video or the app and create a strategy to help them get it out there and market what they are doing.  This is a microcosm of the actual big picture, in the grand scheme of things we’re a leader in stage three………but I’m more of a starter and main course man than dessert, so I had to find a way of getting in all three areas! 

till next time…

Square Daisy founders at their HQ, discussing the move to become one of the first UK companies to specialise in content and rich media for apps.