If a picture is worth a thousand words, what’s the value of a video?
For Diamond View, a Tampa Bay-based video production company, the fee falls somewhere between $30,000 and $100,000, and the value is incalculable.
Founded in 2007 by Tim Moore, who, fresh out of high school, knew next to nothing about shooting video (he didn’t even own a camera at the time), Diamond View has grown into a three-time Emmy Award-winning company that’s produced video content and advertisements for organizations like the Atlanta Braves and the University of Florida.
“We create content that you can feel,” said Jonathan Davila, Diamond View's vice president. “Technology is getting really good, especially on the video side. Anyone can pick up a video camera and create a video but, at the end of the day, does that video tell a story and create a feeling?”
In order to build that tangible quality into their productions, Davila said the company “reverse engineers” its creative content, spending time with clients to understand and translate their vision into short but impactful clips.
“A lot of it starts on the front end with the research and collaboration with our clients,” Davila said. “Our clients know they want a video, but sometimes they're not sure how they want people to feel when they watch it.”
When Diamond View was approached to create a video for Art International, a non-profit that develops treatments for trauma, the company realized they could take a conventional route or experiment a little.
“Their goal was to raise awareness for post-traumatic stress disorder,” Davila said. “The traditional way to do this would be to have experts discuss the treatment on camera. But what if we could, if even for a few hours, sort of have people feel what it’s like to have PTSD, to live with that condition day-to-day?”
So, Diamond View rented out a local cafe, filled it with actors and hid a large speaker behind the walls. After an unsuspecting customer entered and ordered a drink, the sound of a car crash, explosion or barking dogs would blast through the speaker. The actors—including the phony barista—pretended like nothing happened, as the customers struggled to make sense of the situation.
“Everyone was normal and unreactive except for the one individual,” Davila said. “The goal was that, after you watched the video, you could kind of relate to how people out there suffer from PTSD in silence.”
The hope was that PTSD patients would feel better understood and be encouraged to discuss their condition and potential treatment options with others.
The commercial earned Diamond View an Emmy in a category called societal concerns.
Bootstrapped from the beginning, the company now has 24 full-time employees with offices in Lutz, Miami and one on the way in Atlanta. Its competition includes professional production companies in the Tampa Bay area, such as Mosaic Media and ES Creative.
Not ones to rest on their laurels, Diamond View has plans to partner with Marin Andujar, a computer science at the University of South Florida, to study the emotional impact of video content. Subjects in the study will watch various videos while their brains are scanned using an EEG. Through the study they hope to uncover ways in which videos resonate with viewers.
