Editor’s Note: Today at Appy Place we are delighted to welcome guest blogger Michael Mayhew, a pivotal member of the Appy team, who is responsible for the product videos you’ve seen here and on our YouTube channel.

Michael Mayhew directs the Appy Newz video shoot

So. I’m the guy who directs and edits the video ads that Appy releases whenever they have a new app. A while back Chris (“The Ulm”) asked me to write a blog about the process. Specifically, he was hoping I could explain “What’s it like for a normal person to have to deal with the Appy guys?”

(It tells you a lot about the mindset at Appy that they would think a guy who has never once held a regular salaried job, who has spent his entire adult life in the world of movies — who essentially has joined the circus — would qualify as “normal.”)

Here’s what I noticed about Appy:

Upstairs at Appy’s Secret Worldwide Headquarters (let’s just call it ASWHQ – which I guess is pronounced “ass-whack”) is a cramped, sweaty attic space, where the Appy guys plot and scheme their deviously brilliant apps. Running along one wall is a continuous whiteboard, covered in notes, sketches, brainstorms, graffiti, flow charts, mad ideas, Venn diagrams, and what appear to be incantations in a lost language.

Sarge writes “incantations in a lost language” on the upstairs whiteboard

What struck me about the whiteboard were two things: first, there is one spot on the far end which is never erased, because it contains the business plan, which spells out exactly what is and is not an Appy app. It’s their founding document, their Magna Carta, their Declaration of Independence. It says:

An Appy app is:

Easy – Easy to try, easy to buy, easy to share

Fun – Fun to play, Fun to watch

5/500 – you can play it in five minutes, and enjoy
500 replays

Innovative, Integrated, Inexpensive – “The 3 I’s”

Social – the user brings part of the content, they
help make the fun.

Mischievous – Appy apps are funny and sly.

The second thing I noticed was that the whiteboards aren’t actually whiteboards. They’re sheet vinyl, of the sort that you buy at Home Depot to line a shower stall, bought for something like ten bucks a sheet and grommeted onto the wall.

The first thing told me that these guys are serious about their work, they have a plan, and I could use that plan to help them make ads.

The second thing told me that these guys are both inventive and cheap. And by “cheap” I do not mean any kind of insult. When your entire product line sells for a buck a throw, you learn to have a keen appreciation for every dollar you spend.

APPY NEWZ

The first ad we made was for Appy Newz. Keeping in mind the idea that an Appy product is both mischievous and highly social, we came up with a collection of revenge scenarios for when someone might want to turn somebody else into an Appy Newz front page, and then share it. At the same time we decided to have a little fun with Apple’s iPhone commercials – take that basic iPhone ad format and then make it as nuts as possible.

We wanted to emphasize that Appy Newz worked well with the iPhone’s mail and photo applications, so each spot begins with an arriving email with a photo attached. The photo is quickly turned into a funny headline with Appy Newz, and is then emailed back out again.

The choice to riff on the iPhone ads was partly us being a bit naughty, but mostly about saving money — which leads us to “The Bob Fosse Principle.”

Bob Fosse, director and choreographer of Cabaret, All That Jazz and Sweet Charity is rather famous in theatre circles for taking his weaknesses as a dancer and turning them into a celebrated style. Fosse the dancer wasn’t particularly good at giant leaps and tossing ballerinas into the air, so as a choreographer he created a style all about very tiny, very controlled movements — a finger snaps, a hat is lifted a certain way, and so on.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0NX-ZINtqw]

It’s a very useful mindset when you’re making things on a micro-budget — don’t fret about what you don’t have, find a way to celebrate what you do have. Which is different then just being low budget. So many videos for apps boil down to either 1) a really fast montage of game-play, which is meant to convey that the game is terribly exciting, but which almost always looks just like every other really fast game montage, or 2) just pointing a camera at an iPhone while some poor game designer, in a voice that sounds like he’s hasn’t slept in three weeks, mumbles his way through an explanation of what may very well be a cool app — but who can tell? So cheap, yes, but not much more then that.

The Bob Fosse principle means doing your best to take your limitations and give them enough personality that they actually have style. You can’t afford actors? You can only afford to shoot an iPhone and a pair of hands? Well, grab a piece of white foam core for the background and riff on iPhone ads, and while you’re at it, how about putting an Appy-branded band-aid on one of the fingers? And then, once you’ve homaged the iPhone style, smash it with as many whack zooms, jump cuts, effects and distortions as you can think of.

(And at this point someone in the crowd is saying, “Hey, Mayhew, did you just compare your cheap-ass app ad to the work of Bob Fosse?” Ah, no. Please keep in mind that I’m talking about the Bob Fosse principle here, not the Bob Fosse equivalency.)

So that was the approach on the first ads. And as we worked we kept asking: is it clear how the app works, and is the ad funny? Anything else was gravy.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE-lngjAQrc]

FACEFIGHTER

By the time that FaceFighter was ready for the app store, we’d learned a few things. Namely, that pricing on apps is a race to the bottom, where volume is everything. To paraphrase S.J. Perelman, apps are a tough buck. In practical terms, that meant we had even less money to make commercials then we’d had before — so even a minimal camera crew was not in the cards. The question became, what kind of video can we make with only the things we already have on hand? And underlying that question was, once again, how do we turn our limitations into a style? It became like the scene in The Princess Bride where the three heroes are about to storm the heavily guarded castle: “What are our assets?” “Your brains, Fezzik’s strength, my steel.” “That’s it?!” But in the end of course they storm the castle.

So what were our assets with FaceFighter? Well, of course there was the app itself (which almost perfectly fit the definition of an Appy game written on the upstairs white board). We had some screen-captured game play, the original artwork that was created to build the game, and some sound effects. There was enough money to buy some stock pictures to demonstrate how the game can turn any face into an opponent, and a drop of money for music. Everything else had to be done with editing.

Fortunately these days you can do a lot in post. You can resize images, add camera moves, use filters to create effects, and you can even composite in a pair of fingers (with an Appy band aid, natch’) to demonstrate how the app works.

But the thing that helped the most was actually the simplest, something that we’d done almost inadvertently on the Appy Newz ads, which was adding simple title cards — just white text on a black screen — short, wry posts to “talk” the viewer through the game. These cards became a sort of branding device, and they were the essential tool for clearly communicating what the game was about.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLSlnMGEWK4]

ZOMBIE PIZZA

By the time we were making ads for Zombie Pizza, there was actually a distinct feeling to an Appy ad: simple title cards, a mischievous attitude, clarity about how the app works, and a willingness to break an app’s visual frame to get more interesting compositions. And the guiding principles remained: think like Fosse, turn limits into assets, and always ask ourselves is it clear how the app works, and is the ad funny?

Of course there are probably limits to this approach. At some point sticking to a style can be an awful lot like being in a rut. Sooner or later we’ll have to get a bit more ambitious. But in the mean time Appy can grow and better establish itself as a first-class maker of games. By the time we really need to make fancier ads, we’ll be in a position to afford them.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiu0FIEFyxI]

You might wonder how important I think these videos are in the larger context of Appy’s sales. My instinct is that the videos matter to sales like a good resume matters in a job interview. In my experience a resume is basically supporting evidence which is secondary to recommendations, the quality of work that you can show, and whether or not you look shifty-eyed in a face to face conversation. These videos play a similar support role. People buy apps because their friend had it and it looked fun, or because they saw it recommended on the App Store, or even because it got a got a good review. If someone is already interested, the video might seal the deal.

But deal sealing is a great business to be in. As long as the Appy guys are interested, I am happy to lend a hand.

(And we are fortunate to have you, Michael! Thanks for your tireless effort and insight!)

This entry was posted on Friday, October 16th, 2009 at 3:26 pm and is filed under product development. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.