(This part 2 in a three-part series giving a career retrospective. Click here for part 1)
My First Videographer Job
Learning the Ropes at VIVO
My first job in my career of content creation was in the beginning of 2017 with an office supply company called VIVO. They have (and continue to have) the bestselling monitor stand on Amazon.com; and when I was there, they had the world’s largest Goldfish in the pond outside their warehouse (unverified, but they always said they’ll get the Guinness judges out there eventually).
They were a relatively small (but quickly growing) company, and they weren’t too worried about my lack of credentials or real work experience – I had gotten my foot in the door with a video reel I had created (mostly from More Coffee TV projects) and had impressed in the job interview enough (mostly using magic tricks) for them to start me on a trial basis.
I was hired as a Product Photographer and Videographer, but video very quickly became the bulk of my work. The gear provided to me consisted of a low-end Nikon DSLR, a photography tripod, a manual focus 16-35mm zoom lens, a slider that was, let’s say, less than smooth, a turntable for product shots, and three or four Amazon Basics florescent soft box lights.
But I was used to working with even less gear than that, and I was eager to please and impress.
My first video for them, I pulled out every stop I could. I did screen replacements, special effects, as cinematic shots as I could manage.
Looking back at it, it’s laughably over the top in many ways. The tracking and rotoscoping are just terrible. But it was my best work up to that point, and they were very impressed, especially since they were comparing it to the videos that they had been producing before that:
They were hooked, they kept me on, and I continued upping the stakes as I went.
I made this job my personal film school: I mastered screen replacements and tracking; I worked on my composition, lighting, and editing skills; I wanted to break outside the somewhat boring backdrops we had in the studio, so I tried stuff with green screen keying; I tried different kinds of product videos, anything to try to make mounting a screen at all interesting or engaging:
The company grew, and our budget went up a little. We traded in Nikon DSLRs for a Canon C100, cheap used lenses for Rokinon cinema, and a photography tripod and barely usable slider for Manfrotto mounts and Kessler motion control system. I helped build out and design a new studio area, and slowly and surely, our production value went up (along with our video output).
We brought on a second videographer, who I trained in Premiere and After Effects from scratch. I continued to use every opportunity to stretch my skillset and try new things. Some of my favorite projects I did there include a video for a PC case (which I can’t find on YouTube, but is still on this Amazon page) and this video for an LED gaming desk:
Then there were some weird ones like this ghillie suit video:
And this beehive smoker video:
I worked for VIVO for three years, and I learned and applied everything over this time as I possibly could. I came out the other side with a very large body of work, real life work experience, and money in savings instead of college debt. They gave me an incredible opportunity and took a chance on a young kid with no experience, and I like to think I took advantage of this shot to its absolute fullest.
The company had grown quite a bit by the end of my time there too: I was the third hire in the entire marketing department on the way in, and there were about a dozen people on the team when I left.
When I left, I left an impact: I had created processes and templates that brought production up to 10+ videos a week, I had an extensive competitor analysis to make sure our output and quality was ahead of all the companies that sold similar products to us on Amazon, and I had taken what little analytics Amazon gave us and had done testing to optimize our videos to how shoppers interacted with the platform. Our Amazon representative told us that our competitors were asking around to see who made our videos – they didn’t understand how we could make so many and still maintain the quality we did.
Why did I leave? Well, I can point to a lot of reasons, but ultimately it came down to business model- this company did most of its business on Amazon, which provides its sellers with almost no conversion metrics. No matter how high-quality videos I was able to make, there was no way to know whether they had any impact at all on sales. So despite our constant increase in quality and quantity of videos over the months and years, there was no way to prove I was providing any real value to validate expansion. At one point my manager said point blank in salary negotiations:
“How many videos you make doesn’t necessarily impact how much money you make.”
Unfortunately, video output was the only KPI they measured for my position.
So after three years, I had effectively exhausted any new growth potential for me within the company. No way to be promoted, no way to increase the production budget, no way to pitch new kinds of videos for me to learn from. It was time to move on. Little did I know what was in store…
Coming soon … Part 3: What it’s like doing video for a growing tech startup
Tobias Lansberry 