Episode 86 - Dugan Bridges

Erik Martinez: Hello, and welcome to today's episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. I'm Erik and today we have Dugan Bridges on the show to talk about how you can leverage filmmaking as part of your digital strategy. Dugan is the founder and chief creative director of F7 Film Distillery, a boutique production agency dedicated to crafting cinematic video and film content that elevates brand storytelling.

Dugan, welcome to the show.

Dugan Bridges: Erik, thanks for having me, man. It's rare that I get to do a podcast, so I'm excited to be a part of it.

Erik Martinez: I am excited to have this conversation. we talked a few weeks ago and learned a little bit [00:01:00] more about what you do in your business, and I think it's absolutely fascinating and, an untapped, opportunity our listening audience, but before we dive in, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself?

Dugan Bridges: Sure. I grew up in Georgia in a small college town, and when I graduated school. I moved to New York City where I really cut my teeth. I was able to get my foot the door at a large marketing firm and I was their in-house video guy. So I would shoot and edit and do everything for them, all the while I'd be making short films with my friends on the side.

I eventually moved to Los Angeles, where I lived for a few years pursuing screenwriting and picking up directing for narrative film and documentary. And then I ended up having a few kids and was able to get a career going finally and moved back to Georgia to raise them.

So a lot of my work comes exterior clients outside of Georgia, flying to different places and then coming [00:02:00] home afterwards.

Erik Martinez: Now, are you a Georgia Bulldogs fan or are you a Georgia Tech?

Dugan Bridges: For the Bulldogs. Absolutely, man.

Absolutely. I love the bulldogs. So I was living in New York City. When in 2017, we finally played in the national championship again. Lost to Saban in heartbreaking fashion. I drove with my 2-year-old all the way down to Atlanta from New York and back for that event to have my heart broken.

So to live in Georgia, when we went back to back national champions recently was a dream come true.

Erik Martinez: Wow. That's very, cool. I knew the answer long before I asked it, but, we gotta talk a little bit of sports here. That's awesome. So, let's dive into our topic. You know, I was doing a little bit of research and prep for our, call and I found this e-marketer research in a study also published by Team eTech that says that US adults spend just shy of three hours a day consuming digital [00:03:00] video, and they spend three hours a day on average consuming traditional video. So my question to you is, from your perspective with video being so ubiquitous and so dominant, why don't more businesses adopt video as part of their advertising mix?

Dugan Bridges: That is a great question that I wish I knew the answer to. As a marketing director I'm constantly trying to convince people to use video. And so I can kind of share some of the things that I come against that I think are reasons that people kind of like you talk to them once and then they fall away and they don't come back.

Because I've been thinking about this photography and videography as professions have had very different arcs. Especially with the people who are still kind of in power as chief creative officers who hire their marketing directors and come from a traditional model. Where photography - you pay for [00:04:00] these photographs and you can use them in a magazine, you can use them on a website. You can easily use them in a bunch of different ways.

It's also with the advent of digital photography. Raw photographs have been around a lot longer than raw video and even still, the capacity to produce a video with raw video is a little more expensive than even regular video. And so for someone like me, it's kinda like, "Well if I'm just doing a corporate gig - am I gonna go to the all the expense to upgrade this, to raw? Just to do something corporate." Probably not. It needs to be like a high-end commercial or above.

But with photos. Your wedding photographer is shooting in raw photographs, and because of the color editing that you can do on a photo looks way more higher value. One person doing their own photography gig could watch enough YouTube videos to manipulate a raw photography image to make it [00:05:00] look really high end. Where in the videography space, you still need like a team of three to five people to kind of take advantage of raw videography material.

So I think that with photos, with JPEG and everything, it's very small sizes, so it works well for web. In the nineties with the web coming up, it was like a ton of space to host video versus your website being easy to upload with photos on it. I think all those kind of mixtures of stuff. When I talk to marketing directors, it's like, "We have to do photography- we have no choice to take a still image." But, videography is the add-on, is the extra, much like weddings today.

And it's funny 'cause I look at what photographers get paid versus like what a team is being paid to do video. And it just kind of amazes me. I was a little shocked at how much still photography gets paid just because they see it as [00:06:00] a need. And it's way less effort. Way, way less time to produce photographs.

Erik Martinez: Do you think? I mean, it's funny, I was listening to you talk and I was going back to a year and a half ago, my old company, we put on an annual summit. And over the last couple of years we had hired photographers to come and take a lot of shots. We've hired videographers to come in at least shoot from a couple of different angles so we could get some footage.

I remember one year where the photographer came in and, they shot, I mean, over the course of a day and a half, they probably shot, 2,500 shots. And when they edited it down, I mean we got a few hundred shots and it was really interesting 'cause we still weren't super excited about it. We didn't get everything we wanted.

I feel like video, one of the things that it has over still photography is that it has some staying power, right? You may not remember that one image, but [00:07:00] you may remember a commercial.

So I think that cost factor you're right that people are concerned about costs. I think you're also right that people consider photography a need. And by the way, I wouldn't disagree with that, but I'm sitting here looking at these numbers and watching what all the platforms are doing. Even the short form platforms like TikTok, it's all video. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world after Google.

If more and more people produced video, you'd see a lot more video content on search results. They show it when it's available, when it's not available then it's heavily still photography. But we are a visual world, and the consumption rates on video are astounding. It's, absolutely crazy.

But I do think that there is more effort, more planning involved and therefore perceived harder to do. And I'm not sure it's necessarily harder to do because I think a really good professional in any industry, does a [00:08:00] lot of planning and organization to figure out what it is that they need to do and what they need to get out of that project.

And you know, if you took five hours of video today, Dugan. How much of that ends up on the cutting room floor? So to speak. How much do you actually end up using? You're probably using less than 10%? Is that? I'm guessing.

Dugan Bridges: Oh yeah, less than 10%. That's easy. And you gotta store that, but you gotta store a hundred percent. And that's where I was talking about like the cost of raw, which every photographer can do. It is not cost inhibitive at all.

For videography, you need bigger, hard drives and you need to be able to store that. You need faster computers that can edit with that stuff and then be able to export it in the end. But with video, I think that there's a couple things that are more intimidating about it.

For a previous job, I had to write a white paper that was convincing marketing directors to use more video. And so it had [00:09:00] several research studies in it, and a couple of them pointed to this. You mentioned that people remember the emotion and not necessarily the image. And that's because our memory is tied to emotion. Like the greater, the emotional impact something has on you, the easier it is to remember.

It's your brain's filing system to categorize stuff. I think that's why, like in the movie Rainman, where he remembers everything. Our brains are meant to filter out and delete information, but for him it's like everything has the same emotional impact. This is kind of my theory. And so he remembers everything like photographic memory, but that's harmful to you just psychologically.

Point is that emotion and how much you feel is tied to how well you remember something. And so you will remember the way a movie makes you feel more so than every scene in the movie. And you watch Lord of the Rings again and you're like, " Oh, I forgot "about that scene. But I love this movie."

Another thing I think that's intimidating about video is that it's so much [00:10:00] harder to execute. If you have a client and you're taking a photo and you got everything set up, you can say, " Yeah, that's what I want or no, we need to adjust something." And it's done and you're taking the photo, but like a video, you now have audio involved. I think that's a huge difference because you have people who are speaking and are engaging and do they sound the way you want them to sound? And are you telling a good story that people are gonna continue to listen to? Does it all make sense?

It's just way more complicated. And so, as the marketing director it's on you that you're telling a good story and executing on something that people want to watch. That's probably a lot if you're not really a producer or whatever, that's a lot more risk for you to take on. And also more trust you're gonna have to have with the producer that you hire on to execute on that vision.

So there just feels like there's more things that could go wrong. You're interviewing someone and now your location is a place where firetruck go by all the [00:11:00] time and it is just like there's a hundred things that can go wrong in making a video. So it is more intimidating and a lot more risk. And I would guess people are risk averse, right? In wanting to do the safe thing.

Erik Martinez: Sure. Right. Their budgets, their jobs, everything's on the line when they do these things. But, you know, I'm gonna throw a counterpoint in there and say, I used to work for a company that designed women's clothing. And if you know anything about designing women's clothing, it is one of the hardest jobs I think in the world.

Like, it looks like really fun and glamorous. But there's two aspects to designing. There's the creation of the piece, which is what the, primary designers do. And then there's a technical component where tech designers take the piece that the designer created and they have to turn that into specifications for manufacturing.

Well, if you know anything about women's bodies and we're not gonna go any further on that topic. But if you know anything about women's bodies, [00:12:00] even us men, we're all shaped differently. And women's bodies tend to be a little bit curvier and sometimes you got narrow tops and wider hips, or wider tops and narrow hips or you know, classic hourglass figures.

In talking to the tech designers, they're like, "Yeah, and then you have to factor in the stretch of the material and all that stuff." And then they have to go shoot this on a model. And they're telling you that, in order to shoot this on a model. A lot of times you're using clothes pins and other techniques to get it to look right, so just the setup of that shot is a fairly big expense it's not that much different than doing a high quality video in this case. My opinion.

So I think we can overcome the hurdles if you're willing. You know, I came out of the direct mail industry working with catalog companies and they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on photo shoots.

Dugan Bridges: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: They still do. I mean, some still do, right? You can do a lot with Photoshop these days. [00:13:00] But, there is still the need to generate quality photography on location, like there is to do quality video on location. And I remember in a conversation you and I had a couple weeks ago we were talking about, "Hey, what does it cost to produce a high quality brand, one minute to two minute brand video today?", And I remember you were like, "Hey there's a lot of factors, but I could probably get a good one for"- what's that number, Dugan?

Dugan Bridges: In my opinion I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I mean, I think you could get professional grade commercial type video for 30- $35,000. And it can go up to, of course 150 or 300 K, depending on what you're doing.

I mean, when you tell me a hundred thousand dollars budget for photography that just like, blows my mind, because I know that still only includes like a couple of people on onset to execute on that. Where [00:14:00] $150,000 commercial is gonna have 20 people involved.

And I think people maybe, don't think about that or realize that as well. When you start adding up on the front end and back end in terms of production and editing, all the different positions that are getting paid to do a video for you. It's really not that expensive, when you start breaking it down like that.

Erik Martinez: Sure,

Dugan Bridges: And then you can do a quality YouTube video for 13 - 15,000.

Erik Martinez: And it has staying power, .

Dugan Bridges: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: It doesn't last one minute. So we've talked about some of the challenges with video and we make it sound like, "Oh man, this is a mountain." But the reality is it's incredibly compelling and it's getting easier to produce, which as a filmmaker, I would say is probably a little bit frustrating in one way, but also, rewarding in the other way, and like people are recognizing that video is compelling.

So from a business standpoint, why do you think video is such a powerful tool for your [00:15:00] clients? Why do they choose to invest in video content?

Dugan Bridges: Because it has stronger emotional appeal, - hundred percent over photography. And I'll give an example. I had a client who created the world's first vaccine for honeybees because a lot of them have been dying in the past decade. There's a type of virus that goes around and will kill a whole nest of honeybees.

And they were having an issue that the people who grow honeybees and cultivate them didn't trust people coming out of a lab and you know, like, "What a vaccine for bees? What are we talking about?" COVID had, just ended as well. So, vaccines weren't super popular and all that stuff, right?

So they were having an issue with that and they came to me and said, " Help us to reach our target audience with a video." And that was very smart. Because in a video you have music and you have authenticity. You have a chance to say your message and where you're from [00:16:00] and show that you're an authentic person. Which you can't do in just a line of photographs or whatever the case is.

And so what we did was we took these scientists out of a lab and we put 'em out on a farm. And we were interviewing them on the farm. We shot it really cinematic, but did it in front of a box of beehives as our background, showing that we care about nature, we care about taking care of the environment. We're not here to create anything that could harm, your livelihood. We want to help and we share the same values that you have, so therefore you can trust us.

And that is how we connect, right? Like you and I both love college football. Well, when I find someone who loves college football, it feels like, "Oh, okay, I have something in common and they're gonna be a fast friend of mine." You gain a level of trust that you wouldn't have had otherwise. And that's kind of the opportunity you have in video format.

Erik Martinez: You know, it's interesting you've mentioned audio several times and I was a dual [00:17:00] major in college. I majored in business and music. And when I ran outta money, I finished my business degree. Cause I was not talented enough to make money in music. One of the things I remember in some of my music history classes was about the power of audio.

What makes video compelling is, "Hey, you can see a person or people in a real environment talking, educating, having conversations, entertaining, whatever it is." But what also makes it incredibly compelling is the audio track. What music is going on in the background that enhances the senses.

And I think part of the reason we remember commercials or we remember movies is partially because the music also brings us back to that moment. There's, been lots of studies done on this that, you know, was it 1912 Tchaikovsky's I can't remember exactly which [00:18:00] symphony. His music was so avant garde at the time it started a riot.

Dugan Bridges: Wow.

Erik Martinez: Militaries for generations marched to the sound of drums and bugles. Why? Because that was something everybody could relate to. Why do we have national anthems?

Those elements. I think bring video and you can show something. You can show something with still photography. You can stitch still photography into a compelling video. Layer on music, some messaging, a voiceover, and still have a really compelling video that is made up of still photography.

Dugan Bridges: Mm-hmm.

Erik Martinez: It doesn't all have to be completely production shot stuff. You can do a lot in the editing room to make it more accessible. But if we think about our marketing channels and we think about how people are really interacting. What's more engaging?

Like my kids spend a ridiculous amount of time consuming [00:19:00] video. I mean, ridiculous. They blow those six hours a day away it, drives me a little nuts. I won't lie. But on the other hand, I probably consume a little more written material, a little bit of a generational thing, but I watch a fair amount of video content every day too. So it's so ubiquitous and accessible, and like you said, it's very, emotional as opposed to other forms of content. And it brings all the elements together.

So a small investment in video could have the impact of lots and lots of still photography. But you'd have to spend a lot of money on still photography to tell that story 'cause you still have to write words around it. There's hidden costs in doing lots of shooting no matter what you do.

What have you seen Dugan, when you shoot these commercials or these brand pieces or educational pieces for your clients. What do they [00:20:00] experience? You're talking about the bees and I know that there was a before and an after. What did those guys experience in terms of rewards from having gone through that project? What did they learn? What is the engagement? Or, have they been able to successfully measure the engagement or what other examples do you have?

Dugan Bridges: I think that the most successful people in our field are able to measure the impacts of their video. There is, unfortunately, so much of what I do that doesn't get measured, or at least I don't get access to what those measurements are. A lot of that type of stuff is like, we just need a brand video for ourselves, two to three minutes with, we call it Talking head, interviews with B roll of what we do, and we're gonna put it up on our website.

Maybe we would email it to a couple people. But we feel like we should just have it to have it. Because, every small business should kind of thing. And then with old school commercial, it's [00:21:00] Nielsen ratings and cable boxes, which it's just amazes me that they're still able to make money or charge money based off of Nielsen ratings because it's a guess at how many people are watching.

Where, YouTube and Facebook and anything digital. You a hundred percent know how many people you're getting access to. And maybe that's even scary to some marketing directors too, because it's like, well, we know this is accurate and there's not a lot of views on this.

But in the case with the bee vaccine. I focused on that one because I was able to be a part of the measurement process. And it was great because what I pitched to them was they needed photography too. And I was like, look, maybe people don't realize that almost everyone is filming in 4K and that is four times the size of hd.

And even though what you're looking at on your computer for sure, what you're looking at on your phone. Like your computer might be HD resolution. Your phone is not going to be. [00:22:00] Your television might be 4K, but the distance you sit from that tv, your eye actually doesn't pick it up. So you're witnessing something that's lower res than 4K because of how far away you're sitting. We are filming in a really high resolution. It's four times the size of hd. And you can take stills off of that and use that as photography. So they not only had their brand video, but they used all the high res video we had and took photos on it and populated their website.

It looks like completely agricultural from top to bottom. And I was able to check back in with them and this was their marketing plan and the cornerstone was the videos we were making for them. And they were a startup and they met their goal of 2 million in sales in their first year, which I think is probably a great accomplishment for a startup.

Erik Martinez: Cause they invested in content, and they invested in high quality content.

Dugan Bridges: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: I think that's the key part., Right? And, you're using a channel that [00:23:00] is so available everywhere, in every medium and every platform that we consume. Content and video is there. And audio. Over time you're seeing less and less text. Text is still there, but it's not as front and center as it used to be. It is all about visual content.

So Dugan, if a brand really wants to start utilizing video content, what would you recommend for them to do first? How do they get started?

Dugan Bridges: They do have to have some kind of vision for what they want to do and have a goal. So I don't know if for them, that would be looking at other brands that they admire and seeing how they execute on it and use video to reach people. But whoever is in charge does need a goal. Because otherwise when we do make a video, we're making it just to make it for the sake of it and we're putting ourselves on camera.

I think that it's much more effective [00:24:00] like with that past example that we talked about. Was I want to endear this specific group to me and what do I need to change about my image and the way that I'm selling myself to endear them .

And in that case, it is just such a great case study because it's like- oh, we were going scientific. We were going with lab coats and we needed to change that image and revamp that image and put us in nature in a farm. And music that goes along with that. So you're able to use video to supplement that goal. And in that case, because they were thinking ahead of time, they were like, not only is this a brand video, we are getting a how to video.

All the high res, super slow motion, 240 frames per second shots we were getting, because we were having to get bees wings flapping. We're now gonna take that and we're gonna put it on our social media and that's gonna be the background. We have 20 different [00:25:00] shots. So now we have 20 different backgrounds that we can put for posts that we're gonna line up in the next month to engage on Instagram or TikTok or other visual medium we wanna reach out to.

And there's so many different sizes of video. So TikTok and Instagram and everything. That's stuff that you don't necessarily need to spend a lot of money on. A lot of ads in that space are made to look cheap like somebody took it with their phone because they're trying to reach really young people and they find that to be more authentic. And being able to work those algorithms and just put stuff online on social media all the time is not a great cost, but it is a great effort.

So, taking all that into account with, if I wanna spend more and do something high end and populate a bunch of stuff that I have and repurpose it there's a lot of ways to do that. Or am I going with the social media grassroots effort.

Erik Martinez: I think that's a great insight. I hadn't really thought about the idea that, I [00:26:00] guess I have, just not in this context. The idea that you could take a really well crafted video. Spend the money, shoot it, and then repurpose it throughout the course of a year. So you make that $150,000 investment in high-end video content. Doesn't mean that you can't do some of the other quicker shorter stuff. But have that really nice, big, compelling piece of video and then be able to repurpose it over the course of the year.

We do of the same thing. We do a, research study and we're in the final, I keep saying this - we're in the final stages of putting this thing together. By the time somebody listens to this, it's gonna be done. The idea is that, "Hey, we invested the money in doing this project." In this case, we're talking about filmmaking and video that we can leverage for a year, maybe sometimes two years, depending on, the quality. Like we talked about at the top of the show. This really has a lot of staying power.

Well, one final question for you, [00:27:00] Dugan. If, you were to leave the audience with one piece of advice.

Dugan Bridges: So my one piece of advice is that video is no longer a luxury. It's not that photography is a need. And we'll do videography if we can. I think it's the opposite way around. I would see it as like videography now is the need and photography you're gonna use as well.

I would almost say if I had a hundred thousand dollars to do something high end. I a hundred percent would put it into a videography plan and then plan on taking still shots off of the high commercial thing that I do, and then say if I need anything in addition to that, then I will pay for that photography.

But you might be able to access your goals of high-end photography with a videography based solution, commercial, whatnot, and then repurpose it. Especially with slow motion type B roll.

Like we were mentioning before I have a friend who was [00:28:00] telling me about what these kind of high-end photographers make in commercial, and it was blowing my mind. And I think it comes from the 1950s, sixties and as their industry evolved they gotta pay them for finished photographs. For high end stuff, you don't necessarily get all of their photographs. You're paying them on how many finished photographs they're gonna edit.

Erik Martinez: That's right.

Dugan Bridges: And you're like licensing it from them even at times. So they're getting paid over time. If you wanna keep using those photographs in another year, and the higher end levels you are then like relicensing with that photographer. And so they have a really advantageous kind of system that they've been grandfathered into where videography, I feel like did not have that.

And so, it's customary that if you were to ask someone who's making your commercial, can I have the raw footage? They would just give it to you without probably thinking twice. And if you wanted a group [00:29:00] of b roll in addition to the finished commercial, it would not cost you a ton and you own it forever. At least I haven't heard of someone in commercial video who's still getting licensing several years later if you want to use their stuff.

Which is definitely the direction that everyone's going. And young people are used to watching video. I mean, Instagram used to be a photography medium. Now, how much of it is video? Facebook used to be a photography medium. How much of it is video? TikTok is just straight video and might be the most successful social media platform on the planet.

So that's where it's going with the next generation. It just doesn't make any sense to focus on photography as your primary way of marketing.

Erik Martinez: Awesome. Well, Dugan. It's been a pleasure having you. If somebody wants reach out to you, what's the best way to get ahold of you?

Dugan Bridges: F7 film distillery. If you Google that, you will find me.

Erik Martinez: It's the letter F, the [00:30:00] number 7 film distillery.com. Awesome. Well, Dugan, thank you so much for sharing your insights and expertise with us today. Really enjoyed our conversation and I think video is definitely a higher lift initially, but if people really think about it, there's lots of value that can be derived from doing video projects with a primary goal in mind.

So thank you for sharing that.

Dugan Bridges: Erik, thanks for having me on the podcast. It's been a pleasure to get to know you and be on here today.

Erik Martinez: Awesome. Well, that's it for today's episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. Thank you for listening and have a fantastic day.