Half the interview is out of focus. Yikes.
I noticed this on the first pass and I just sat there looking at it, all the while trying to work out how I was going to tell Tracey, but then I kept watching and more importantly kept listening. There was a story here and a bloody good one too.
Tracey runs Empower Assistance Dogs and she rang me on a Monday. One video, for a sponsor conference. They'd given her some money to train a dog and she wanted to show them what they did and the impact it had and hopefully convince them to give a little. More dogs for more families. Pretty simple really.
She sent me a Dropbox link. It wasn't a shoot. It was years of footage all thrown into the mix.
Days of a bloke named Mike learning to handle a dog named Sunny and an interview in the training room with no lights, no kit and nobody fussing about the background. If I'm honest, nobody fussing about the focus either.
We had years of content from the family's archives. Phone clips and photos. Sunny in the cabin of a plane to Melbourne. A wedding. A hotel room (with absolutely nothing happening in it). None of it was shot to be a sponsor video. All of it ended up in one.
Brief Monday, Tracey got us the footage Wednesday and the first cut was sent Friday. Her notes came back Sunday night and cut two went out Monday morning. Deadline was the 21st for the conference and we were a week early.
So here's where it got to. Tracey loves it, the family have signed off and it goes in front of a room full of people who fund this stuff. The thing here is the story is so compelling no one cares about the focus issue.
I say this all the time. The story is king and the pretty pictures are secondary. Look, if I could have both I would but I'd pick a rip snorting story over something beautifully shot with no purpose. My bet. Not one of the suits will mention the focus. Tracey trains dogs. She's not a camera op.
Everyone tells me their footage isn't good enough. It's shaky. It's on a phone. Someone's mum shot it in a hotel room. So it sits on a drive going nowhere while a meeting happens about whether there's budget for a proper shoot.
Meanwhile the big end of town is pumping out perfectly lit, perfectly sharp, perfectly fake content and getting absolutely cooked for it in the comments. Soft and true beats sharp and hollow. It's not close.
Half of it's out of focus mate. Send it anyway.