The Respower trade show video had a hard challenge to meet. According to information contained in the captions of their video, Respower is the largest 3D film laboratory, serving Hollywood and the film and video industry.. Their list of clients, including such television and film greats as Star Trek, is impressive. At the same time, the company, which services predominantly professional videographers and filmmakers, is almost unknown to the public.
In an industry, such as 3D production, it is not enough to produce a trade show video which describes what the company does, it has to show what the company does. Also, as we conclude from the watching the video, and its captions, Respower felt a need to present a certain amount of verbal information about the company’s accomplishments, capabilities and clients.
How does a trade show video accomplish all these goals? Respower opted for a collage style video. The compact, two minute video is in what I would call a video collage format. That is scenes of some of their successful 3D effects, are presented in a temporal and artistic collage. In the second half of the video, captions present names of famous clients the company has worked for, as well as other pertinent facts about the company, such as their computer set-up, which is the largest in the industry.
I don’t think it is possible to draw any one conclusion about this video. Certain scenes are very effective, others are, in my opinion, a bit busy, especially when you have a list of famous clients competing with as many as four simultaneous segments of famous 3D effects the company has produced for television, video and the theatre.
Impressive scenes, include the start, a traditional 10, 9, 8, second countdown, scene frequently seen in the theatre. This style tells us immediately that the company is active in big Hollywood style movie productions. Other impressive scenes include a rocket taking off from a boat, a dinosaur peddling a bicycle, a plane stuck in a storm. In the middle of the video the company presents a rapid sequence of multi-video collage, which in my opinion was too short and too busy to follow. Subsequently, the video presented a captivating 3D scene of a fantasy stairway entrance to a magical wizard’s palace. However, the powerful scene was now competing with a wealth of captions as the company attempted to present names of its famous clients.
The video closes with an effective, extended motion graphic. A caption tells us that the company has the largest battery of computers of any 3D lab. Simultaneously, the screen displays 100 computers lining up in a formation that appears to float on a watery surface. The scene gives a sense of the power of the company’s technological capabilities.
Portraying this rather unknown giant before the pubic must be frustrating. While carefully limiting the length of the video, the company still tried to pack lots of images and text into a short storyline The result, in my opinion does injustice to the individual 3D segments within the video.
I do not in any way mean to be critical of this video, it is certainly not a bad video. The overall effect, amplified by action style background music is impressive. But I believe, that other viewers, like myself are a bit frustrated by some of the interesting scenes that came and went too quickly, or else we were distracted a bit by competing scenes.
So what are my conclusions? My overall conclusion is that the video is a branding video, in that it is attempting to present images of the company and leave a powerful impression with the viewer, which is does. However, branding videos have no need to present all the information or all the imagery about the company. In fact, by leaving out some images and lingering longer on others a branding video is bound to make an even greater impression.
As a viewer of the video, I would also have preferred it if they had varied the pace of the film a bit. Both the music and the pace run from start to finish. But life isn’t like that. Having a slower segment in the middle might have added temporal texture to the video, and made it more believable.

