10 Years of Video Production

The cameras are getting smaller, but the quality improves every year

What were you doing 10 years ago? For some, a decade is a long time and for others it seems to pass in the blink of an eye. In the 10 years since Dynomite was founded a lot has happened.

In 2006 the 100ml restriction on liquids was introduced in airports. Barack Obama was yet to announce his candidacy for the US presidential election. Facebook was locked in a popularity battle with Bebo. Twitter was hatched and YouTube was in its infancy.

Since then, five different UK governments have held power. Prime Ministers have come and gone. Obama is nearing completion of his second term in office. And remembering to drink up before going through airport security today mostly regarded as a necessary, if inconvenient, task.

Meanwhile the popularity of and appetite for social media, and its hunger for video content, has grown exponentially.

We are visual creatures, more so than ever (the irony of addressing that in a written piece hasn’t passed me by), with an insatiable appetite for video. We look for the informative, the entertaining, but also the bizarre. Witness the popularity of vloggers like Zoella, YouTube’s most watched video being Psy’s Gangnam Style, and the ever popular Charlie Bit My Finger and the sequel Charlie Bit My Finger – Again!

In its early days 8 million YouTube videos were watched each day. Fast forward 10 years and that number is nearly 5 billion. Although we upload nearly 2 billion images each day, the recent move by Twitter to pay its best video contributors a share of the ad revenue, and at a better split than YouTube, has shown how seriously the industry takes video content.

One of our showreels – keep an eye out for our brand new showreel in 2017!

In comparison, the traditional visual mediums are losing pace. ITV’s top rating of X Factor pulled a mere 6.34 million viewers for its opening show of the 2016 season, reaching a 10 year low. Set-time viewing is being replaced by on demand, with nearly two-thirds of respondents in a recent survey* saying they watch some form of on-demand video – a service which barely existed a decade ago. This, coupled with our ever shrinking attention span, down from 12 seconds to 8 in the last 15 years, indicates the need for bursts of video, available to audiences when they want it.

Any successful video production company needs to take all of this into account when creating content for its clients today. Dynomite owes its success over the last 10 years to this audience-driven boom. Our workforce has trebled. We have moved office four times, as and when our needs have changed. Our client have grown and diversified, allowing us to experience and work in new and exciting markets, and shoots have taken us across the globe to more than ten different countries.

In 2014 we moved to the incredible Giltbrook Studios. You can now find us in Nottingham city centre!

Despite it being a packed decade, the pace of development seems to indicate this isn’t even the peak for video. Drone footage has fascinated viewers and Oculus Rift and HTC Vive have aroused curiosity, with more virtual reality products ready to launch or in the pipeline. With this in mind it seems the next 10 years could be even busier for us and our clients than the last.

So here’s to the next Dynomite decade.

* Source: Nielsen 2016