Ridge Films

A one minute video used to take Lyle an hour.

iPhone on a tripod, lights, and a wait until late afternoon, because that was the only time the light was worth anything. Frame it up. Sort the audio. Make sure the mic's plugged in.

His words: it took a hell of a lot of motivation.

He's a financial planner. Discipline was never his problem. He was just a long way from the record button, every single time.

Now he flicks a switch and goes. And because there's no setup to get through first, he can take a bit more time on the delivery itself.

Which put him back on the job he's actually paid for. That was never editing. It's being in front of clients.

Count the steps between deciding to make a video and recording one. Each one is a place where it quietly doesn't happen.

The first time we met on Zoom, Mike sounded good and looked horrible.

There was a mural on the wall behind him. Busy, flat, way too much going on. He'd been running a podcast for five and a half years by then and it had only just gone up on YouTube, because the room didn't look like a business. He knew that. He'd also been enough of a perfectionist that nothing ever got the rubber stamp, so nothing got rolled out.

What fixed it wasn't a better background.

We put the lighting in, set the frame, and then looked at what was actually behind him. A white wall. "It's lit in such a way that you don't actually need anything more than that."

We'd talked about dressing it up. Never needed to. He said it made the content and the delivery the star instead of the wall.

That's the order people have backwards. You can't tell what your background is until there's light on it. The washed-out bookshelf you're embarrassed by does something completely different once the room is controlled. Same shelf.

So sort the light first. Then decide whether you still want options, and if you do, it's a backdrop change that takes a minute. Same room, nothing moves.

Everything Mike has recorded since runs on that same wall. Only thing that changes is the shirt.

In 2012 we went from a 220 square metre office to a room about twelve square metres.

A master bedroom. That was the studio.

Nothing could move around in there, so I stopped trying to move things. Lights fixed. Background fixed. Gear against the walls. Every inch of floor doing a job, nothing to trip over, nothing to touch between shots.

I stood in that room one day and thought, this room has the ability to make me a million dollars.

It has.

Not because it was a good room. Because there was nothing left to decide in it. Walk in, sit down, record.

That's what people miss when they say video takes hours. The recording isn't the slow part. The choosing is. Where to sit, which light, why does it look different to last time, who bumped the camera.

Take the choices out and it takes minutes.

Video creation is a process. Start treating it like one.

"It's not the kit itself."

Ryan said that to me after his install. He'd bought the whole setup, had high expectations of it, and told me straight up it delivered.

That still wasn't the bit that mattered to him.

Eighteen years in cybersecurity, seven of them a partner at PwC, then he rebranded himself as a coach. Knew his material cold. But his own read was that without someone alongside him, he'd still be working out how to write a script. Then how to read it. Then how to record it. Then what to edit it in.

None of that is on a spec sheet.

So we sat down and worked through it together. His line afterwards: "the tech is the enabler, not the solution."

Ninety per cent of his work runs online now, local clients and international ones. And the part he keeps coming back to is that it travels. "Even when I'm outside of this office where it's all set up and looks cool, I still know how to write a script."

Buying gear piece by piece is research, trial and error, and a lot of hoping the thing you bought this month talks to the thing you bought last month.

A room you control, installed once and supported after, is a different purchase.

You shoot quicker. You shoot more often. And you don't need to know what every part costs, you need the whole thing to work without you thinking about it.

A client turned up to his install with boxes of gear he'd never got working. A Canon in there too, no power supply for it, so he'd been running it on battery until the battery died.

None of it was cheap. It just never came together into anything he could actually use.

We built him one system instead. One switch, and the camera, the light, the sound all move together the second he flicks it on.

He was properly grateful. Not because the gear got fancier. Because it stopped being his problem to work out alone.

That's the bit people skip when they're standing in JBL Hi-Fi, so excited, card out. You're not just buying pieces, you're signing up to be the one who makes them talk to each other. First time something gets bumped, you're on your own again.

It's not about the gear. It's whether it's one system, or a pile of parts you're managing solo.

I stopped doing sales meetings in person in 2019. Not a strategy. I was burnt out. Two kids at home, endless coffees, hours of driving.

So everything moved to Zoom, overnight, kinks and all.

It gave me back an enormous amount of time. Then it handed me a new problem. I was sitting there asking people for thousands of dollars on a rubbish we**am, a bad mic, printer over my shoulder.

You can't charge like that and look like that.

So I fixed a studio to my desk. Lights, camera, mic, permanently plugged in, ready before I sat down. We built two. One for me, one for my business partner.

That's what's going into the room in this video.

Presence isn't about being good on camera. It's the room being ready before you sit down.

In 2008 a bloke walked into my office holding a box of old home videotapes. Precious stuff. Couldn't be replaced.

He looked around, big empty room, two of us in it, and asked if we were moving out. No, this is us. He said "No, I'm okay, thanks," and left. Took his tapes with him.

He never doubted we could do the job. He doubted we'd still be here when he came back. And he decided that off what he saw, before I said a word.

That's the whole game. People decide whether to trust you before you ever get to speak.

Back then the shopfront was my office.

Today it's your website. And most of them are wall to wall text, not a single video, no face, no voice, nothing that says there's a real person behind it.

Your buyers are doing exactly what that bloke did. Looking, deciding, leaving. You just don't get to see them walk out.

Video stopped being a big-corporate luxury a long time ago. It's the shopfront now. Worth asking what yours is telling people.