Scorch London is looking for a senior video editor to join our team in Central London.

The right candidate:

• 4yrs+ solid editing experience in a production company or similar.

• Highly skilled, creative and fast editor.

• Experience using Avid systems preferable.

• Broad portfolio of work including short form and long form broadcast and corporate productions.

• Strong technical skills including deep working knowledge of all major formats, codecs and deliverables.

• Experience of client-attended edit sessions with a personable and friendly manner.

We work on just about everything, from short promo videos for iPhone apps, to TV commercials, to website landing page videos, to games trailers, to 3 minute long corporate presentations. The right candidate will be happy to take on whatever we throw at them with the same level of enthusiasm for each and every project.

Please apply via email with a link to your showreel and your 3 favourite pieces of work to: steve@scorchlondon.com

No phone calls or agencies please

Hours of work: 9.30am-6pm Mon-Fri

Location: Central London

Salary: £30k + Uncapped commission.

Main duties to include:

• To be responsible for developing an on-going outbound sales strategy.

• Presenting Scorch London to potential clients through direct communication in face-to-face meetings, telephone calls and emails.

• Responsible for your own lead generation and appointment setting.

• Actively manage the sales process including lead generation, credentials pitching, and handover to the pre-production team.

• Have the drive and motivation to ensure all sales opportunities are explored.

• Experienced in the video production and television advertising industries, with a deep understanding of how such a business works, what makes clients tick, and what goes into the productions Scorch London makes.

• You will have individual responsibility for new business, and are expected to self-manage, however, support is available from the managing partners and senior producer for complex or large pitches and strategies.

Please apply via email to:  tristan@scorchlondon.com

No phone calls or agencies please.

Scorch London

Scorch is a highly entrepreneurial company, with a strong work ethic, an established client list and a clear strategy for growth. The right candidate will be excited about the challenges that lie ahead and being part of a motivated, passionate and ever growing team.

The right candidate:

• Highly skilled and fast user of After Effects. Keyboard shortcuts are burnt into your brain!
• Design trained to understand typography, movement and layout.
• Quick to understand a brief.
• Experience in working to very tight deadlines.
• Enjoys the creative challenge of working on several projects in the same week.
• Some experience in Cinema 4D is a bonus but not essential.

We work on just about everything, from short promo videos for iPhone apps, to TV commercials, to website landing page videos, to games trailers, to 3 minute long corporate presentations. The right candidate will be happy to take on whatever we throw at them with the same level of enthusiasm for each and every project.

Please apply via email with a link to your showreel to: tristan@scorchlondon.com
No phone calls or agencies please

1. Colour.

Learn as much as you can about colour theory, and understand how colours affect perception, emotion and why certain colours are used in certain situations. Also learn which colours work together in harmony and which ones never will.

2. Layout.

Learn the basics of composition, in a similar way as with photography, learning to spot what looks right and what doesn’t when many different elements are put together.

3. Typography.

Learn all there is to know about fonts, including which fonts are out there, the difference between serif and sans-serif, and when to use which fonts, in which weights to make the right level of impact.

4. Storytelling.

Learn the basics of how to tell a story to communicate an idea or a vision. This applies whether animating a simple logo, or developing a full-on short film.

5. Problem Solving.

Learn how to interpret a brief that has clear design problems to be solved, and having a process for solving those problems. Designing motion graphics without a problem to solve is like driving without a steering wheel – whilst being free and exciting, nothing of much use will ultimately be achieved.

6. Footage.

Learn about how to use and interpret footage, including a broad understanding of the technology involved and techicalities like aspect ratio, fields, and broadcast safe areas.

7. Rotoscoping.

Learn the basics of rotoscoping including masking, painting, and simple tricks like sectioning of elements to make rotoscoping people quicker and easier.

8. Tracking.

Learn how to track graphics and effects onto live action footage. After effects has some great in-built tracking software such as Mocha to help with this process. Matching grain, colour and grade is also important when incorporating graphics into footage.

9. Grading.

Learn how to add or remove colour, tone, grain and contrast from footage to fit with the brand that is being worked on, and the tone of the entire film.

10. Software.

Learn how to use the main pieces of software that make up a motion designer’s armoury, After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator and some knowledge of Cinema 4D, Maya or 3D Studio Max.

2. Keep it short. If your video is 10 minutes long, think again. Only the most committed online video obsessive will stick with one thing for that long.

3. Make it funny. The test of whether something is funny is not just that you find it funny, it needs to appeal to the mainstream if you have any hope of making it viral. Test it on friends by all means, and if they aren’t laughing out loud at the pay-off then it probably isn’t that funny after all.

4. Include something risqué/sexy. Perhaps an obvious one, but throwing in some sort of nudity, ideally funny and clever nudity, can often be enough to make things spread far and wide so to speak. But don’t go too far, no one’s going to send their friends out and out porn.

5. Include something controversial. You don’t need to offend people, but being brave enough to make some sort of comment on society, or showing something that will stimulate some debate on the internet is sure to make your video go viral. This is a tried and tested method for some charities and causes on the web.

6. Include a very clever technique. If you can’t think of anything funny, and you don’t like being controversial, then spending some time creating something that looks particularly difficult, time-consuming and above all interesting to watch, can help your video to spread. This is how some big brand commercials end up becoming virals as people try to work out how something was done, or just watch it and think ‘wow, that’s really clever, I wish I’d thought of that’.

7. Make it relevant to a recent news item, especially celebrity news. A sure fire way to help push your video into the stratosphere is to jump on a recent news item that has already spread around the web, and create something that picks fun at a celebrity, or a politician, or takes a sideways look at something in the news, like an election or a sports event.

8. Don’t just make an advert. There is something people don’t like about videos that simply promote a product, unless of course it fulfils most of the above in some way. With some notable exceptions, most ads on TV aren’t particularly clever or funny, but often more informational. No one will send their friends a video explaining the benefits of a product.

9. If at first you don’t succeed, try again. Many people give up trying to make viral videos because they think that their video deserves to go viral but for some reason doesn’t catch on. Don’t give up. If the above criteria are fulfilled in some measure then eventually something will stick. And remember, just because you think it’s great, other people might not. Test it out on people who will give you honest feedback on whether they would actually send it on. And always ask yourself the question ‘would I send this on to other people if I was sent it by a stranger?’

10. Seed the video well. This could actually be it’s own list of ten ways to seed a video, but that’s for another day. If you don’t know what seeding is then you have to be extremely lucky for your video to go viral in any kind of scale. The very fact that companies exist who do nothing but seeding should tell you that it is a strategy often employed to make videos go viral.

Widespread broadband, and even wider-spread enthusiasm from a new generation of people who have never known a world without the internet, and you have a recipe for the death of TV. But all this online stuff is still just getting going. Among the fog of videos of cats, kids, puppies and *insert cute/clumsy/dangerous/fast/slow/big animal/human here* a new dawn of web video is peeping over the horizon.

Brands are now beginning to jump head first into the web video world, even going as far as making big-budget commercials that never actually make it to TV. Recent campaigns for Old Spice and Nike demonstrate that video on the web has grown up.

Agencies are also finally taking all this very seriously, with words like ‘digital’ and ‘social’ being mentioned earlier in the creative meetings than ‘tv spots’. The question that has been on everyone’s minds in agencies across the land is how long before web (or digital as it has now been labelled) sits atop the advertising tree.

Digital spend on advertising now exceeds television spend in most developed economies, with 23.5% of all advertising money in the UK spent on digital compared with just 21.9% on TV. This must lead to the inevitable conclusion that television will eventually die out as a form of entertainment as advertisers abandon it in favour of digital. This shift in money can only render TV broadcasters the penniless poor relation of Google, Facebook et al, and completely unable to spend money on actually producing the TV shows – you know, the bits between the adverts.

This may well turn out to be some sort of abstract doomsday scenario for the future of television, but major commercial TV broadcasters should be clamouring to push their digital credentials towards the big brands who currently still advertise on TV. Attracting major digital commercial deals with big brands must be the new aim, as it is these brands who will eventually find the concept of TV advertising clumsy and expensive compared to the relatively inexpensive, efficient and interactive world of youtube, Facebook and Twitter.

Maybe television in it’s current form will die out and be forced to merge with the internet somehow. It has certainly been a long-held prediction of many a forward thinker in this industry, but yet still television continues, and most of us still go home and switch on the TV in the evening.

What will be the tipping point that means we all throw our televisions in the trash and all gather round the computer instead? Which of the major players will be the first to launch a truly revolutionary device that completely replaces television altogether? The strange thing is that all of the likely candidates for developing such a product are all from different areas of the marketplace. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Samsung, Nokia… they all have the potential to takeover TV, but it somehow seems unlikely that it will be an actual TV broadcaster who takes the initiative.