LessFilms Blog

Company culture videos or recruitment videos give potential job applicants a glimpse into what it's like working for your company. Companies are using these hiring videos to give a brief overview about the company, the type of people who work there, and the overall vibe of the office. Here's some of our favorites Wooga

Shopify

Square

Smartling

Twitter

Retirement planning is serious business, and we're serious about making awesome videos. Greenspring needed us to create an animated video that explains their (k)larity Quotient product. The (k)Q system pinpoints specific areas of your retirement plan that needs improvement and tells you how to fix them.

Beautifully shot by @timelapsegroup

In the United States we have our fair share of PSA's about drunk driving and speeding. These commercials from New Zealand and the UK are extremely powerful and emotional.

Speeding Commercial from New Zealand

Seatbelt Commercial from the UK

2013 was a special year for LessFilms. We went international, traveled all across the USA, and worked with some fantastic companies. Check out our reel below to see some of what we did in 2013.

Some of our BFF's in 2013 were:

Signal Noise

BrowserStack

Pinball HOF

Engine Yard

Dashlane

Arkadium

Seth Godin

La Conf

Sponsr

Thuzio

ThunderBolt Labs

Weblinc

Andy D

Customer IO

Madison Ruby

Make Shit (Design Madison)

Smartling

ProdThink

We wanted to share and give shout-outs to are favorite apps and tools that help us get our job done.

Yesware - Email for salespeople.

Yesware is a free plugin for gmail that tells us if someone opens our emails. It also lets us set email reminders and use email templates.

Basecamp - Project Management Software.

There are lots of project management apps out there but we think Jason Fried is cute, so we're sticking with Basecamp. It makes keeping our clients and creative teams synced up is easy.

Uberconference - Conference Calls.

There are a ton of free conference call tools. Uberconference is far and away the best we have found. It allows us to quickly start a call, or schedule one for the future. Participants can dial-in through the phone or through the browser using your computer's built-in microphone.

Wistia - Video Hosting for Businesses.

To make viewing a proof simple for our clients we used to use Youtube. Now we exclusively use Wistia. Our clients are able to easily view the proof on any device, leave feedback, and Wistia gives us a gazillion sharing and privacy options.

Dropbox - Large File Sharing.

Dropbox makes the final delivery of a completed video project seamless. We put all of the final videos in a folder, share it with the client, and high five each other.

2013 has been a great year for LessFilms. Our projects took us around the country and we even had our first international trip to Paris, France! Besides making great videos and telling stories, our favorite thing to do is EAT. Here's a list of our favorite restaurants of 2013.

Madison, WI

Tipsy Cow - Good food and drinks. Cheap!

Eric says, "Great pub! You could have punched me in the face and I would have been ok with it."

AJ Bombers - Burgers and cheese curds.

Danny says, "They serve you peanuts by filling a bomb and sending it crashing to your table. Enough said."

New York City

The Churchill - English style food with a great selection of drinks. They play Churchill speeches in the bathrooms.

Eric says, “Never, never, never give up.”

Hill Country Chicken - You don't expect food like this in the big city.

Danny says, "Fried chicken, mac-n-cheese, and country music. It's like I've died and gone to heaven."

Las Vegas, NV

Holstein's - Gourmet burgers and alcoholic milkshakes.

Eric says, "Everything in Vegas is fake but this burger is fo real."

Paris, France

Crepes. All-day, everyday.

San Francisco, CA

Sweet Maple - Great breakfast just blocks away from "The Full House house"! Home of the world-famous Millionaire Bacon.

Eric says, "This bacon is the answer to most of life's mysteries."

We love games, so when Arkadium wanted to team up with us to make their new product video we had to hold back the girly squeals. They wanted to let the world know about their Game Arena. It's super easy to set up a casual game room that works with any website or mobile device. The Arena is a lot like a fresh apple pie cooling on the window sill. Its aroma wafting through the inter-webs beckoning current and would-be users to come to your site, sit down, and eat some pie. In this case the pie is content and ad clicks.

We wanted the star of the video to be the games so we kept all of the illustrations flat and not too flashy. This approach put the gameplay and game art at center stage. Showing the viewer just how yummy the Arena looked. Mmmm…pie. It was also important to Arkadium that we show how the Arena fits seamlessly into a website without having to redesign anything. So we used some flipping and scaling animation to replace the content area on the mock website with a shiny new game arena.

Working on this project was an EGGZ BLAST. However we did spend more time than we should have playing MAHJONGG, and TRIZZLE.

Right now there isn’t a simple way to embed the new instagram videos. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to embed any instagram video using html.

Step 1: View video on instagram.

Step 2: Right click > Inspect Element

Step 3: Find the video URL. It should look something like this: http://distilleryvesper10-14.ak.instagram.com/17319014d9cd11e2aa0912313817975d_101.mp4

For the first time LessConf had it's own theme song. The magical Andy D put together this masterpiece that is guaranteed to get stuck in your head.

Cameos:

LessFilms at Microconf

We had a great time at MicroConf this year. MicroConf is the conference for self-funded startups and single founders.