GitHub Cofounder Tom Preston-Werner on Founder.ly
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I cannot argue with your sense of aesthetics or taste, but I will attempt to explain why we film in this manner.
We film documentary style, in a manner pioneered by legendary documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, where the interviewer is behind the camera and the subject is in front of the camera telling his story.
The reason we chose to film founder stories documentary style is that we want to focus solely on the founder, not on the interviewer.
We recognize that most interviews have an interviewer in the film, but we think this can distract from the story.
FounderLY is an open source media project. Our mission is to showcase authentic founders with no distractions. We are creating an online library of founder stories freely available to anyone.
You could think of us as a cultural repository of founder stories. Thus we want our interviews to be timeless and not associated with anyone but the founder.
Prior to launching FounderLY, we had never filmed anyone in our lives. We had to hack our way through the process and hack social networks to get access to founders.
Resource and time constraints forced us to think hard about what we were trying to capture on film. With only a $200 camera and no filming experience, we determined that filming documentary style yields the best picture and sound quality.
We hope our method of storytelling contributes a new perspective of showcasing the individuals forging this renaissance in entrepreneurship.
I hope this explains our approach to filmmaking.
We appreciate you taking the time to watch our stories.
Not trying to pick a fight here but if you don't have any filming experience at all who are you to argue that this style is the best? But anyway, I hear you, and you're right, to each his own :).
One last suggestion is you switch to youtube. It's unfortunate you can't skip directly to a sections of video due to the limitations of the vimeo player.
We never claimed that our style is best or that our sense of aesthetics is best.
We do claim that filming documentary style yields the best picture and sound quality based on our technical constraints and our goal of filming a large volume of founder stories.
When you introduce more subjects in the interview it requires a wider area view. You can achieve this by having a wider lens camera or being further away from the subjects.
In our case, we do NOT use a wide lens camera and we want to be up close and personal to the subject.
We use a low-tech microphone that comes standard with our $200 camera. You have to be very close to the subject to ensure that sound quality is sufficient.
Thus we film documentary style.
These are examples of technical constraints that can hinder quality. Prior to filming these interviews, we had no idea the breadth of variables that can affect capturing good quality footage via video camera.
Because we often film in suboptimal lighting conditions, we want to deliver the best picture quality.
We use Vimeo player because their algorithms render picture quality brighter than other video players. We distribute on Youtube, iTunes, and most video platforms.
You can find all of our videos on Youtube.
For our purposes, filming documentary style reduces variables and aligns with our mission.
At the end of the day we had to make hard and fast decisions 80/20 and produce something. We have been operational for 1.5 months and filmed 80 founder stories. We have received feedback from many founders and we have consulted a few professional filmmakers to improve our product.
Things may change in the future and we are always open to suggestions.
We hope you enjoy our founder stories : )
You raise a really good point. We want our content to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible.
We'll look into switching to Youtube as our video player.
Thank you : )
We're working on ways to improve the filming process so the final product is the highest quality.
Thanks for your suggestion. We appreciate it : )