I have been postponing this post for several weeks, but now we have passed one month after the publication of the video and we are over 50K views... so I think it is time to give a bit of behind the scenes for our House of Cards Intro video.
It all started over a lunch with my friend Daniel in February when we talked about video making and TV series. He shamefully confessed he did not start season 3 of HoC when I was about to finish it. We agreed that it could be really cool to do the intro of HoC in Brussels by identifying some place of power where we could film some time-lapses.
We started in March at our lunch breaks. First day was not good, for the first time the sky was so bright in Brussels, there were no clouds at all! March and April were very productive, we managed to shoot some really cool night time-lapses on rue de la Loi and next to Kitty O'Shea on the St Patrick's evening!
For a good time-lapse, you need clouds or people (or cars). In Brussels when you have clouds, it is very possible that you get rain quickly... for some filming we had to bend over the camera to protect it from the rain!
We agreed that the intro will premiere at the May edition of Bucoprox, a gathering of communication professionals lead by our friend Bjorn Becker. Date was decided, it will be 12 May.
On 11 May, Daniel and I spent the full lunch-break finalising the editing, making sure that colours are matching and that there is a logic with the different shots.
On 12 May at 20:00, at the end of Bucoprox, we showed the video to participants. Everyone liked it but it was not a super crazy reactions. In the evening I uploaded the movie on the Itaka Media Facebook page... and the madness started:
The morning after (13 May), I wrote to Daniel:
Later around noon, I wrote to my friend Filip that is helping me with my social media:
in the afternoon, I am puzzled but receive an encouragement!
The day after, early afternoon:
Just some screenshots of the comments on Facebook and some reactions on Twitter:
Saturday 16 May at 13:20 : we are over 20.000 in less than 6 days!
Monday 18 May, 7:00: Jackpot! The video in on top of Politico Brussels Playbook. For those not familiar with the Playbook, it is the new 'must-read newsletter' published every morning at 7:00AM by star journalist Ryan Heath from Politico. His tone is very engaging and since its publication many people (like me) are reading it when they wake up in the morning. That day, I was jumping all over the apartment!
Monday 17:24, 28.533 views!
and we also got some haters! Filip says it is good to have some haters, that stimulate the debate :-) I tried to identify this guy, could find anything. something for sure he or she does not know how to write loser :-)
More interesting is someone that did a very cool HoC in Vienna, they had a different approach as they worked out the same camera angles as in the real intro! good job guys. Also we got a comment from a guy that conducted a interview with the creator of the real intro! that is very instructive as I learned that the biggest problem for the HoC timelapse was to get the autorisations to shoot.
Tuesday 17:58, 33.003 view!
We have published a thank you message at 30.000 view.
Below the stats for the video, something really nice is that over 4000 people came back to see the video :-). An average duration of 33 seconds is not bad even if I would have preferred people to watch till the end :-)
Monday 25 May, over 38.000 views and 420 likes. It seems that we might reach 40.000 at one point.
Tuesday 26 May, we are approaching 39.700 and we get quoted in De Morgen and Brussels Niews.
Thursday 28 May, 41.000 views and more press including a Catalonian newspaper :-) (below)
Daniel Fritz made a super interesting analysis of the Playbook newsletter and found out that over 1.800 clicks to the video came from it. As suggested, I send a box of chocolate to Ryan.
Wednesday 17 June, it is over a month the video was published and we passed 52K views. I decide to publish this blog. Thanks to all that participated and liked this video!
Alexandre
