My trusty 5D Mark ii has traveled with me all across America and all over the world helping me capture interviews with world leaders, creating short documentaries raising millions for families who live in trash dumps and shooting a feature film. (Which will be released this fall) As amazing as this camera is, it did have it’s limitations. It recorded in a delivery format (h.264), didn’t have professional audio inputs, had a 12 minute record limit and has a bit of aliasing in the image.

At Barrett Creative, we not only want to stay on the cutting edge, we know we’re only as good as our last project. Last year, we invested in the Sony FS100 Cinema camera. It was an interesting transition going to that camera from a DSLR but once we got used to it, it’s simply an amazing picture. Shooting with it over the past year, it kept getting better with each shoot. Then Sony released the FS700.

With the ability to shoot super slow motion speeds up to 240 frames per second at full high definition quality, Sony simply changed the game again. This is a camera that I have been watching but I learned to never buy a camera before the National Association of Broadcasters convention in early April each year. That’s when companies make their big announcements and release all their new gear. Well, this year, no camera beat the Sony FS700 but some companies released external recorders that allow this camera to record at 4K quality. After hours of research, we made the purchase.

Now, we have a lineup of two of the best cinema cameras on the market in the FS100 and the new FS700. This pushes our already superior quality to a completely higher level. We’re excited to start creating amazing stories for businesses and organizations with this new addition.

If you are interested in a vision video, commercial or fundraising video, give us a call at 863-648-2725 or fill out our contact form. If you’ve never seen our work, visit our video production portfolio here.

Think again about that. Yes, many website design companies use templates, change the colors, throw up your logo and send you an invoice. You see your website up and running but it might not get the results you desire. We deal with a stream of clients each year who come to us with an existing website that’s not working for them.

Here’s some issues that can arise with using a template:

1. Dirty Code – We know by experience that the code included with template sites aren’t always clean. This means it might look satisfactory in your browser but it can cause a lot of grief when trying to rank in search engines. Why? It’s all about search engine spiders and the more junk the need to crawl through to find your content, the less likely they will rank you. Also, for the sites we design, we create a site map file we submit to Google that lets them know where your content is. Templates don’t come with this.

2. Design Matters – When using a template, you’re pretty much boxed in (literally) to replacing their images and text with that of yours. This doesn’t always work out great and if you don’t have the right content for areas, it pretty much blows your cover of a website designed for your business or organization. If you have this problem, just tell people you really know how to make great use of “white space”.

3. User Experience – At Barrett Creative, we’re really big on creating websites with great user experiences. We want people to be able to find what they’re looking for on your site and contact you easily. That’s why we start with a blank canvas and create a site map before we design the first element. We want to make sure we think your content, pages and calls to action without reservation. Using templates requires you to mold your content to the available boxes they have available. As we say around here, “That’s not cool at all.”

4. Unique Pages – A client recently came to us with a template site another website company threw up for him. He has over 20 products he offers but on his old site they were all on one page. We put an end to that. When we created his new custom website, we created a unique page for each service. It doesn’t take a whole lot more effort and the search results he’s now getting are night and day better. By creating a unique page for each product, we’re able to add better detailed content as well as header, url and title tags. That might sound greek to you but Google understands it and they’re fans.

In the end, a template site is cheap and some website design companies can get away with “customizing” them, making quick money and moving on. At Barrett Creative, we don’t do business that way. Our goal is to create a relationship with each of our clients through results. We take the time to create websites the right way that stand the test of time.

Template sites are more expensive because they cost you higher search engine rankings, cost you website traffic and the cost of re-designing your site the right way. If you have a template site, don’t let this post scare you. there’s hope. If you are in the market for a website, now you know what to look out for.

If you have a template site you’d like us to review for you, let us know. We’ll be happy to give you a fairly detailed report for no charge.

Contact us today at: info@barrettcreative.com

Last week, we shot the newest video for AFI entitled, “Just Like You”. This video follows three clients from AFI and gives a closer look at their dreams, ambitions and challenges they face living in a world of disabilities.

Every time I step on the campus of AFI I learn to get back to the basics and enjoy the little things in life. The clients at AFI are so amazing. They get so excited about a camera being around. They learn my name and never miss an opportunity to say hi. They value hard work and take tremendous pride in every thing they set out to do. They learn to live through their labels and unrecognized ability and push to become more than anyone expected them to be.

Tonight at the Lakeland Center, AFI will hold it’s annual fundraiser and the video “Just Like You” will make it’s premiere. We certainly hope the video will be as powerful to the audience as it was to us who made it. We invite you to watch the video “Just Like You” below:

We also invite you to watch the vision video we created for AFI last year that helped raise a tremendous amount of money to help the program continue operating.

Michael G. Barrett

We decided to create a feature rich website that describes the film, shows the trailer and gives a bio and description about the cast and crew that did a fabulous job helping to make this short film.

Barrett Creative was the video production company brought in by another marketing firm to shoot and direct this commercial for a Miami hospital. For a project this size, we brought in a 3 ton grip truck with a gaffer and 2 key grips. We also used the Fisher 10 dolly along with a variety of other grip equipment. The commercial was shot in high definition on two Cannon 5D Mark ii DSLR cameras.

We’re now wrapping up the editing process and will head to color correction and audio equalization before we master for television.

Trust me, I’ve been in the “bad experience” camp as well and we developed a mission to make sure our clients have a seamless journey. Building your dream website should be one of the most rewarding and fun experiences of your business. A new website gives you the opportunity to connect, generate commerce, and show off your work to a whole new audience. The possibilities are endless and at Barrett Creative, we will never just build a site and push it out the door. We feel we’re part of your company. We have a vested interest in the success of your web site.

Since 2001, we’ve not spent $1 in advertising. The best salespeople for us have been our clients who are raving fans. We do three things and three things really well. We’re leading the way in video production, graphic design and web design. The reason top level companies choose Barrett Creative is the creative advantage of coming to one company who can keep your look, image identity and message consistent across multiple mediums. We understand the power of video embedded in your website. We understand the social and search engine advantage video can bring. We leverage every advantage for our clients so their site looks great and performs to the top level.

A Barrett Creative, we are a full service Lakeland web design company but rest assured, we are so much more than that. We create a fun and memorable experience for you through every step of the way. We take the process seriously, meet deadlines and deliver results.

Call Barrett Creative today at 863-648-2725 and discover a better way to the web.

For the high definition video production shoot, we wrote a script based on an interview with Steve and shot the segment in a house they bought and remodeled. Other shooting locations were at several homes the Easy Homes team have fixed up as well as the office of a Lakeland realtor.

At Barrett Creative, we shot everything on the Canon 5D Mark ii, recorded audio with the Marantz CF audio recorder, an Arri 5 light fresnel kit, RedRock Micro Cinema rig and teleprompter.

We had some amazing fun on the shoot “Legacy – Growing a Greener tomorrow”. The day started before the sun came up as we prepped our gear and the boats for the day of high definition video production. The location was Lake Toho in Kissimmee, Florida and we found a beautiful canal to shoot the boat shots. We used two cameras…the Sony-Z7U and the Canon 5D Mark ii. After a series of runs shooting from boats, we went back to the

We had some amazing fun on the shoot “Legacy – Growing a Greener tomorrow”. The day started before the sun came up as we prepped our gear and the boats for the day of high definition video production. The location was Lake Toho in Kissimmee, Florida and we found a beautiful canal to shoot the boat shots. We used two cameras…the Sony-Z7U and the Canon 5D Mark ii. After a series of runs shooting from boats, we went back to the