We’ve blogged before about how the internet is putting our clients more in touch with the magic and wizardry that goes on behind the scenes here at Oakslade, but we’ve now put it to use as a virtual music researcher. Anyone who has visited our rather swanky, hi-tech office will have seen the mountainous pile of CDs that made up our music library tucked away in our sound studio. However, with new releases arriving every other day and finding that one special track becoming ever more difficult, we’ve taken drastic action and sent the lot for recycling. But don’t panic! With the majority of production music studios falling under the umbrella of just a handful of large companies, they’ve all got speedy web sites that allow us to search, preview and download thousands of tracks in seconds, as well as save playlists that we can send to our clients so they can pick their favourites before we drop them in to the edit.We’re obviously very excited by this - not only does it now take us minutes to find the perfect piece of music rather than hours, but we’re also not being sent lots of nasty, environmentally unsound plastic cases each week.

And, with the CD shelves lying empty, Steve now has somewhere to display his vintage Star Wars figures (once he’s made the alarmed perspex doors to keep our grubby hands off them)!

Lots of people in the production industry are complaining about the rise of UGC (user-generated content) when they should in fact be welcoming it as the biggest catalyst for the increased use of video since the birth of the world wide web. There’s also plenty of room for creative companies to add value to user-generated content itself.

Our new friends at American Express wanted to reinforce the company’s “win” philosophy for a big conference. They wanted to capture “live” the successes of its sales team as they occurred but the problem was no sensible budget could afford to send camera teams to each of 14 markets for three months to wait for the golden moments.

American Express worked with Fullrange Media to develop a “diary room” approach where team members could self-record entries as and when they had achieved a sales success. Low-cost standard-definition Sony miniDV cameras were sent out across Europe and a web-based instruction video was produced to help people record the best possible entries. Point 1 where our expertise was able to add value to the production of user-generated content: helping explain how to use the kit properly, as well as some of the fundamentals of how to record a good clear video diary entry (there’s a wealth of this sort of thing on the Guardian website from their supplement on Making Video).

The completed tapes were then collated, formated and edited at Oakslade Studios: point two where we were able to really enhance the work the teams had done. By taking the teams’ fantastically raw, natural responses and weaving them together to tell a consistent story we were able to create a powerful and engaging end film which gave American Express a bigger bang for their buck than anything we could have shot entirely ourselves. Audiences who are used to online video are happy to overlook even the most dire technical barriers - so the standard definition source footage wasn’t a problem, especially once a consistent look and feel was added by motion graphics and idents.

And the conference delegates applauded every entry - why wouldn’t they, after all it was their peers who they were applauding (albeit whose efforts we’d enhanced and shaped into being ‘on-message’). Peer-group learning using film - 1. Shiny indulgence of a production company that wishes it was making TV ads - 0.

Following the extensive equipment upgrade over the past six months, topped off with our recent purchase of Episode Pro software that allows us to encode commercials for broadcast, we found ourselves in a recent edition of Broadcast magazine. Getting recognition from the industry magazine, particularly when our industry is so London-centric. is always extremely valuable. And of course it validates our own reasons for running a facility away from the noise and haste. Soho’s not the only game in town.