Dischromatics and Breaking Barriers Team up to produce Personalised DVD for Children.

Breaking Barriers Community Arts specialise in producing Digital Storytelling across all spectrum's of society and is a not for profit social enterprise based in Llanilleth, Blaina Gwent. With grants and other funding becoming more difficult to obtain, they decided to create their saleable original children’s Personalised digital stories on DVD.

Chairman of Dischromatics Ltd, Stewart Spencer sits on the board of BBCA as a business adviser through an arrangement with Arts and Business Cymru, Stewart explains “The board of Breaking Barriers have a duty of care towards the social enterprise and decided to approve the production of the personalised DVD project in order to make up for any shortfall in funding and to allow the staff to continue producing high quality digital storytelling to the benefit of the local community and beyond”.

With all things Breaking Barriers produce, the essential characteristic of the final product was that of quality in every aspect, from the original story and graphics to the unique packaging. The project has been professionally managed and controlled by Natasha James who has had to work to extremely tight time-scales in parallel with many other projects in production at the company. Nevertheless there has been no compromising the quality of the final product and anyone purchasing these DVD’s will be extremely satisfied with the result.

Customers will be able to add the name and upload photographs of their child, choosing from different animal outfits within the story. The story itself is based on the well-known nursery rhyme “Hickory Dickory Dock and is about the clocks losing their “Dock”.

It is envisaged that the latest personalised DVD will not be the last and the theme of producing in both English and Welsh languages will continue and fill a void in the market for such unique products. Anyone interested in reading more about the story can visit the Breaking Barriers or for more information about BBCA email natasha@breakingbarriers.org.uk

Dischro Creative Explains the Different Types of Films and Videos Available for Advertising and Marketing.

With the advent of short films being used for company marketing and advertising purposes, there is confusion about what some of the standard terms actually means. In this article you will find a short explanation to help you decide on what is best for your business. 

Teaser:

A Video Teaser is for an advertising campaign, which typically consists of a series of short, cryptic snippets, which anticipate a larger campaign for a product or event launch etc. Teasers are usually used in the build-up to a product or event launch.

Teasers usually last between 20 and 60 seconds, largely depending on what the product or event is and what the client is hoping to achieve from their campaign. These can also be placed on the specific company page of Facebook or YouTube. 

Trailer or Promotional Video:

A trailer or promotional video is used in a more traditional advertising campaign for a product or event. This usually anticipates some feature or reflects on the quality and success of an occasion. It is ordinarily a more straightforward and to-the-point account of what a product or event is hoping to achieve or what it has achieved. 

Trailers typically last between 90 – 210 seconds; again depending on what the product or event is and what the client is hoping to achieve from the campaign.  Once again, these are ideal for social network site business pages.

 Showreel:

A Business or Company Showreel is designed to cast a spotlight on the best items in your portfolio of services and products, through telling the story of how the results are achieved in a polished and engaging video-format.  A Showreel typically lasts anywhere between 3 and 6 minutes depending upon the amount of footage available which could include archive shots or newly filmed imagery and interviews.  This type of video can also be useful in gaining potential customers trust in allowing them to put names to faces and to understand your company ethos and work ethic.  It could also be used as a customer testimonial video for the website or again on Facebook and YouTube giving companies an ideal marketing tool.

Feature:

A feature is a video lasting anything from five minutes to an hour or more. It could document a recent success story surrounding a product or event.  A Video production is often published to websites or supplied on DVD duplication production as a promotional product. It provides an opportunity to include in-depth demonstrations as well as interviews and additional content that would not usually be included in shorter videos like Teasers, Trailers and Showreels. They are additionally useful to be added to tenders.

How to:

A how to video is an instructional aid used to demonstrate the functionality of a product; and/or to provide information to customers. Popular uses of this type of video are to deliver health and safety information or to create a presentation about the features of a product. This ensures that staff can continue to assist customers in the most effective manner without the pressure of performing a live demonstration. Additional benefits of this type of video include; no over-reliance on a single staff member, especially when that person is unavailable, the ability to show the same scenario from multiple angles simultaneously and the facility to play the instructions more than once - ensuring customers are able to move at their own pace.

The duration of a’ how to’ video is entirely dependent on the complexity of the topic in question.

Design Tips from Dischro Creative to Achieve the Best Results and Save Money in the Process.

In these difficult financial times, small companies and individuals in particular are trying to save money by doing their own graphic design without knowing enough to be able to present an acceptable image to their printers. Sometimes this proves to be a false economy due to changes that are necessary in order to have their job printed.

Here you will find a number of helpful tips to enable you to present your artwork which is print ready and eliminate expensive mistakes which many printers will charge for:

1.       Check the specifications before starting the artwork creation. Set up the canvas, which is simply the area you are using for the design, ensuring you are using the correct dimensions to the specification supplied. This will show the length of each edge or a ‘to scale’ template which will enable you to lay out your graphics. It is most important that you follow the exact requirements of the printer you are going to use as many use different parameters. Although some products such as CD Jewel Case Booklets vary little it is still advisable to stick to the script. Even with an A4 Poster which is unlikely to cause any confusion.

2.       Bleeding Out is one of the most likely problems that people get wrong. All artwork for print must include an extra 3mm of the background on all outer edges. Therefore, if the total finished size is 210mm x 148mm which is the size of an A5 Booklet for instance. You need to add 3mm extra background on each edge resulting in the full dimensions of the artwork being 216mm x 154mm. Also include crop marks indicating where the actual cut line is. This always true whether using Digital Printing or any other form of printing.

3.       Keep relevant data away from the edge by ensuring it is at least 3mm away from the actual cutting line within a safety margin. So a total of at least 6mm away from the very edge of the graphic design. This is because there is always the possibility of small shifts when printing which is why the bleed area is necessary. Furthermore, this could affect both edges so you could find that some of the area inside the cut on one side will be lost as more bleed zone comes onto the finished unit. It doesn’t matter if it is design of brochures, booklets, leaflets, CD packaging or whatever always stick to these principles.

4.       If in doubt create a PDF rather than saving to JPEG to save your work as most programmes are capable of outputting files of this type. This, along with the quality aspect makes it much easier to get your crop marks added prior to production. If the whole process can be designed inside Adobe Acrobat for instance, this is most likely to save you money too. There are many software packages around that are used for graphic design but not all are truly suitable. Some will not let you add crop marks or registration marks showing the cut line but you can overcome this by ensuring you have compensated for the bleed and keeping all elements far enough away from the edge as stated earlier.

One thing to remember is that it is impossible for any printer to help you improve your images if it is presented in poor quality and using an unreliable or inadequate software package like freeware. Sometimes it is worth getting the design professionally completed, especially if there are branding issues and particularly for a logo design. In the long run, if you do not have sufficient creative design skills and are conversant with the software you are using you will finish up with more problems which will result in additional costs and time wasted.

Dischro Creative Welcomes Jobe Bruzas as Senior Creative Executive.

As the Creative arm of Dischromatics, Dischro Creative has been formed to enable the innovative elements of the business to be brought together with their forward thinking personnel to work together in one section to the benefit of our existing and potential customers.

Jobe Bruzas, who has joined Dischro Creative and is a graduate of Carmarthen University in Digital Media and the Arts, has also worked as a Journalist, Producer and Editor. Whilst still at university, he worked with an ITV current affairs programme. Since graduation he has continued working with ITV but also produced programmes for both TV and Radio for the BBC, adding S4C/Avanti to his impressive portfolio, he is a fluent Welsh speaker.

Whilst working for these major broadcasters Jobe has worked in some capacity or other on many well-known TV and Radio programmes. He has a passion for the media, enjoying trips to the theatre in between his busy schedule when he also produced news programmes, he just loves being at the sharp end expressing his artistry to the full. However, to be completely fulfilled he needed a new challenge where he could be more involved in the decision making process and  in a challenging commercial environment. As a true expert in his field, he joins a young management team of like-minded forward thinking individuals whose total commitment is to achieve absolute customer satisfaction. 

With many opportunities presenting themselves, Jobe decided to accept an offer from Dischro Creative to develop their creative business and with his already invaluable experience and skill base it was a natural step explaining “I needed more opportunities to be able to express my talents and ideas, somewhere I could build something I could be proud of which was unique and would offer companies and organisations a marketing opportunity they couldn’t get anywhere else. Dischro Creative gives me what nobody else could, a free hand to push the barriers and mould the creative business around me. ”

Dischro Creative already offers a range of creative services like Graphic Design with branding opportunities and logo design, DVD and Blu-ray Authoring and now Filming and Editing producing Company Showreels, Music Videos for groups and bands as well as promotional and event videos, even wedding videos and YouTube videos. With App Development, 3D Animations, Motion Graphics and Mobile Websites.  Their Web site design service includes SEO. They believe they are the only company around with the ability in-house to offer a complete marketing package along with printing services including direct mail variable data printing and digital and optical media duplication. 

Dischromatics the well-known CD and DVD Duplication company which was formed in 1989 and holds ISO accreditations in both quality and the environment has a vast customer base who are already starting to tap into the talents and services offered by Dischro Creative and reaping the rewards. With new state of the art camera equipment just delivered thanks to a grant from the very pro-active Caerphilly Borough Council, it is expected that more personnel of the standard of Jobe Bruzas will be needed to keep up with demand.

 

Dischromatics Releases its new Company Showreel

With Dischromatics new Showreel available on their web site, showing on YouTube and elsewhere on the web, it will give people an insight into the opportunities available in a relatively short video for company promotion and other uses. It’s an ideal way to display a company’s products and services along with interaction from customers providing testimonials and positive statements to enhance reputations and act as an enticement to prospective customers. Every company is unique and this professional marketing tool will enable anyone to make the most of these attractive and unique aspects of the business. 

When an organisation creates a marketing budget, rarely does it include a Company Showreel; in fact much of the cost related to marketing is still spent on advertising and sending out literature by post. However, as most people are aware, one of the most important areas to find new business is the use of the internet and therefore websites. Unfortunately most companies paying for a website and consequently paying someone to do the SEO, expect to be found on the top pages of the search engines without knowing enough about the process themselves, moreover there is far more to getting to the first page than applying certain SEO techniques. This is critical for successful ROI.  

Companies should be wary of adopting black hat techniques for SEO as it is possible that your site could be downgraded or even sandboxed. A Showreel will not only help your marketing drive and add to the interest of a website it will actually help the SEO as search engines favour sites with video and graphics displayed on the site. There are other advantages for the Showreel, it can also be burnt to CD or DVD and sent as part of an introduction to prospective clients or for a tender process. This is much more likely to be viewed and get the message across to the recipient and is clearly more impressive than great amounts of literature which is unlikely to be fully appraised.

The process of producing a Showreel for companies and other organisations is relatively simple and there are many offering this service but the execution of filming, interviews, voice overs, background music and so on along with the final editing and authoring needs to be carried out by a professional outfit. Dischromatics was established in 1989 and has been in the digital media and creative industries sector for many of those years. They are able to work to a critical path in order to achieve all the goals and can provide all the expertise needed from their own resources. Their own Showreel lasts for just over five minutes but for most companies a length of three to four minutes will be sufficient.

The production and resulting company Showreel needn’t be overly expensive, this will depend on the length of the video and as indicated above, what inclusions there are, whether professional voice over or music is required and so on.  Some websites already feature a Showreel but unfortunately these are a real turn off and effectively detrimental, they create the exact opposite impression to what was anticipated. Typically, you see Business Owner doing it on the cheap; they themselves are featured throughout and the video is taken with a static camera with the same background and with him talking about his own company, going on in a boring manner which interests no-one but himself. Bizarrely, the video is often placed on the home page and starts automatically every time you visit the site.

Clearly Showreels produced professionally with the right balance of positive features and interesting topics along with various inputs from different and staff and customers will give any business an enormous boost. For all enquiries about Showreel video production services why not give a no obligations telephone call to 01495 243222, email sales@dischromatics.co.uk  or simply visit the site where you can request a call back.

Dischromatics offers web design with free SEO

Search Engine Optimisation of a company’s website is most important if you want to achieve a top ranking for your keywords. We at Dischromatics used to rely on and pay others for this service until we found most of these SEO companies simply use third party software without having any real specialist knowledge themselves.

We no longer use a third party services for Optimisation, or third party software for that matter, apart from Google analytics and others like Alexa to ascertain where we sit in the rankings. There is a great deal of useful information in Google tools but this is not always so easy to interpret for the uninitiated. We have tried to follow the Google guidelines and have seen our keywords improve over time.

It is not an overnight response that you should expect. Ensuring the Meta title and description has the correct amount of characters will help and although Meta keywords are no longer important to Google search they are still used by other search engines. When adding content to your site, one has to avoid keyword stuffing when just adding lots of these keywords to your text seems unnatural and over emphasised will result in being penalised. Proper use of HI, H2 etc tags is critical.

Dischromatics will not only provide their customers with a professional looking web site design, they are offering web site SEO free of charge. They can provide advice on writing and submitting articles and press releases which will help to get back links to your site and is also essential to have your web site ranked higher. So if you want a site that will impress your customers and will be correctly optimised call Dischromatics on 01495 243222, email: Gareth Thomas on g.thomas@dischromatics.co.uk

Beware When Buying CD and DVD Duplication, the Quality May Not be What You Expect.

It could be an expensive mistake buying cheaper product as it could cost you much more in the long run. You could suffer Data loss on certain CD and DVD manufactured discs.

Today there are a multitude of companies selling CD and DVD duplication through their web sites on the internet. Many of these companies purport to be the best in some way or another. In many cases the companies that make the biggest claims are small back room enterprises.

Whilst it is natural for companies and individuals to want to get the best possible deal for their money, it is not always a good idea to buy the cheapest. In some cases, companies do offer good deals on good quality product but in the main the old adage, you get what you pay for still reigns supreme. It’s worth doing a financial check on companies prior to placing your order.

If you were to put CD Duplication into Google, one of the companies that come first in the rankings states that “We are the UK's leading CD/DVD/Blu-ray duplicator providing exceptional quality at the lowest UK prices” but if you were to run a credit check on this company, you would find that they are particularly small with an advised credit limit of £Nil and a working capital of minus £85,505, effectively insolvent. Additionally, not only are they not the leading duplicator in the UK but they do not offer the lowest prices either. Other top ranked sites which are equally as small and in trading difficulty don’t even display a company address and the phone number is a 0800 number. They all use one superlative or another, none of which are likely to be true.

This is the problem with Google searches, people have found a method to get to the top which would not be termed ethical and unfortunately Google have been unable to filter these insignificant sites out of the searches. So they are left to supply sub-standard product and services to their customers, giving the whole industry a bad name. Because of their need to survive, they drive prices down whilst they are trading but when they disappear, many of their old customers expect to keep paying a low price but for substantially better quality product.

To come back to CD and DVD Discs, there are a number of grades of these products on the market and there are suppliers who are on the look out for the low grade cheap product to make a fast buck! However, many of these discs lose data over time, whether its CD Duplication or DVD Duplication, it could be more costly to buy these cheaper discs than spend a few pence more in getting quality product which will last the course.

There are a number of instances of poor quality discs which can be cited, they are usually thinner and you can see through them when holding them up to the light. The lacquering fades, especially when left in sunlight, which often happens to discs people leave on their desk and they sit next to or close to a window, these two instances alone will account for a large proportion of losses but there are other problems including the depth of the groove being insufficient.

The only solution for all of these problems is to build a relationship with a quality supplier, one that has traded for many years and only supplies quality product such as Taiyo Yuden and in particular Sony DADC who have an excellent reputation for quality of CDR and DVDR products. They do not suffer the problems of fade and retain the data where the others fail.

For more information and advice on all quality issues and pricing for CD, DVD and Blu-ray products, call 01495 243222 or visit Dischromatics website.

Dischromatics was established in 1989 and is accredited to Quality standard ISO9001:2008 and Environmental Standard ISO 14001:2004.

Post written by Johnio Muccles

Direct Mail Marketing is now Available to Companies of all Sizes using Digital Printing

A Marketing tool used by large companies and corporates for decades is now accessible to Small to Medium Sized Enterprises at an attractive cost thanks to the new Software available.

Over the years Direct Mail Marketing or 1:1 Marketing has been one of the main marketing tools used by large business to target prospective customers. The problem with this process is the cost largely outweighs the potential returns, The Return on Investment or ROI.

The fact is that when these brochures, leaflets, flyers, catalogues or whatever other literature were sent out (and of course this is still the case) to their target audience they were or are really exactly the same, the only difference between each is an address label stuck on the outside, looking rather unprofessional, the rest of the information is utterly and completely the same! The reason for this is that the printing is done by lithographic offset printing on huge presses which cost enormous sums of money. Therefore, in order to be cost effective, many thousands had to be printed in one print run to bring the unit cost down to an acceptable figure. That’s why it has always been too expensive for smaller companies to introduce this method of marketing with any success.

With the litho process, each colour requires a separate plate which itself is expensive and takes a large amount of labour time to set up, furthermore there is an amount of wasted prints early in the run whilst the printer attempts to get the colours to match, the alignment correct and so on. Naturally if these costs were amortised over a small amount of copies the unit cost would be horrendous.

The biggest problem with this type of mass mail marketing is the ROI is about 1% to 2% and unless those turn into substantial business, the question has to be “is it worth it?”

Fortunately, with the advent of better quality Digital Printers and speciality software, it is now possible for companies to have small runs and sample runs prior to a full-scale roll out and to individually target by business type, authority or area. Variable Data Printing Software in conjunction with Digital Printing increases the potential ROI to a very desirable 10% to 15%. Personalisation is the key. Not only can the sticky address labels be eliminated by printing names and addresses directly onto each printed item, but each can also have a different bar code, individually personalised message and even a change of graphics and the colours can now be different on each printed part.

Companies simply provide a database of names and addresses to the print company, the individual graphics are designed in the Graphic Design department and uploaded to the Rip Drive. Rip stands for Raster Image Processor and is like a print driver but more sophisticated with many enhanced features. Once all the data is uploaded, the print job is ready to go and unlike the litho process there is no need to stop to change plates or waste many copies getting the print correct, all the changes are effected on ‘the fly’ by the rip, in other words whilst the job is running.

The advantages are obvious, by targeting prospective clients with the inclusion of more relevant data and with a more professional image it is more likely the recipient will read the information they receive rather than put it straight in the bin, also the labour costs are reduced as the printer runs the job non-stop and there is no need to set up individual plates or print large volumes which are not required. This type of marketing also means that it’s trackable and the success is measurable. It allows the marketer to get the message across more directly.

This process can even be combined with sending out data on CD and DVD or other types of media by printing and personalising the card wallets, Digipaks or the paper parts in a CD Jewel case for instance.

For more information on Direct Mail Marketing using Variable Data Printing, please call 01495 243222 or visit Dischromatics website.