This document provides advice on how sides can take short videos of their side which can be reused by others, to help with your marketing and recruitment.
The Morris Federation has been making and publishing short videos which are intended to support recruitment for new dancers and musician, as well as marketing more generally – an example is illustrated.
You can see example of such videos in the Morris Federation: promoting events YouTube playlists, which includes video clips of Morris Federation sides booked for various festivals and similar events, including Bridport and Swanage Folk Festival and Morris Federation Days of Dance.
The videos all include names of the featured sides and contain a simple ‘call to action‘ for potential new dancers and musicians, as well as for those which wish to book a side.
In 2025 the Morris Federation will celebrate its 50th anniversary. We intend to publish a short video every week, which will be billed as “50 videos for our 50th anniversary“. In addition to these videos we also intend to produce a range of additional short videos – and this is where you can help!
For a short video (lasting 30-60 seconds) we intend to include 2 to 3 of the following aspects:
Entrance
The side’s entrance, ideally with a nice background – although this isn’t essential!
The screenshot of a still taken from a video of Chelmsford Morris. This provides a good example of a good background and it helps that the video was taken on a bright sunny day.
Note it can also be helpful to include an announcement from a caller or Tommy in the case of rapper sword dances.
Middle of the dance
During the dance it helps if the dancers are in the centre of the shot.
The screenshot of a still taken from a video of Poacher Morris. This provides a good example of the dancers at the centre of the clip (note you’ll need to click on the image to see the full image).
This clip also includes the musicians, which can also be useful – although note the comments about sound below.
End of dance
Dancers (and musicians) need to remember that in today’s environment when many people in the audience will be using their smart phone or digital cameras to take videos of dances, the performance is not over till the musicians stop playing!
The screenshot of a still taken from a video of Rivington Morris. This provides a good example of how many north west morris sides conclude a dance, with a signal from the caller – in this case, a whistle is blow. This is a great way of concluding a short video.
Audience reactions
It is sometimes useful to include a clip showing the audience’s reactions, such as a warm welcome when you arrive, applause when you perform a crowd-pleasing figure (such as a somersault in rapper) or the cheers as you depart the stage.
Breaking the rules!
Some suggestions are provided which can help you to make a video which can be reused as a short video by the Morris Federation. However you can, of course, break the rules! If you’d like to make use of a GoPro camera attached to a dancer or use drone footage of a dance, we’d encourage such innovation!
Problems with sound can be the biggest problem which prevents short clips from being used. Wind noise can often be a problem – and it is difficult to prevent that without using a noise baffler.
It can be useful to record your video while standing next to the musicians, so that you get the full range of instruments (if you’re far away you often just get the sound of drumming (if there are drums). However, as mentioned above, this may mean that the musicians aren’t included in the video.
Before recording a video:
Note if you can take videos at a very hight resolution that will be great – we can edit videos at 4K resolution.
You may choose to publish your video on your side’s Facebook. Instagram or YouTube (or similar). That’s great – and if you add information about you side, the dance and the location that can make it easier to find (even better if you include your side’s hashtag). If your video is public we will be able to download it if you provide the URL. However if the video is not public or is not posted online we can explore other ways of accessing the video.
We are also exploring ways to collaborate on playlists, so that you can add a video to an (unlisted) Morris Federation playlist, which we can subsequently process.
In order to make it easier for the Morris Federation to reuse your video, ideally you will provide a suitable Creative Commons copyright licence which allows reuse by others.
Alternatively you can simply agree that we can use you video. Note that we intend to use videos to support the community and encourage others to join. We will not use your videos for other purposes – unless, for example, you agree that you video can be used in an April Fool’s compilation!
Document to be published: (currently open for review)
This document is available with a Creative Commons Sharealike (CC-BY) licence. In brief, this means you can copy and make changes to this document provided you give acknowledgements to the author/publisher. A suggested wording for acknowledgements is:
This document is based on the "Making Videos (Suitable for Reuse)" document by Brian Kelly, Comms and IT volunteer with the Morris Federation.
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