The Hello Girls Documentary (2018)

About “The Hello Girls”

This documentary features rare 100-year old film footage of America’s first female soldiers courtesy of the National Archives and never-before-seen photos from family archives.

In 1918, the U.S. Army Signal Corps sent 223 women to France as telephone operators to help win the Great War. They swore Army oaths, wore uniforms, held rank, and were subject to military justice. By war’s end, they had connected over 26 million calls and were recognized by General John J. Pershing for their service. When they returned home, the U.S. government told them they were never soldiers. For 60 years, they fought their own government for recognition. In 1977, with the help of Sen. Barry Goldwater and Congresswoman Lindy Boggs, they won. Unfortunately, only a handful were still alive.

Awards to Include:

Best Picture

Best Documentary

Best Documentary Feature

Click the picture above to see an excerpt

Thoughts on the Film

In the Summer of 2018, I was contacted by a local Producer, Jim Theres, he stated that he was interested in doing a documentary on World War 1 and that he was looking for a production house. Honestly, at the time, I hadn’t filmed a Hollywood level documentary completely, I had shot parts of two films called Innovative Technologies (1 & 2) that aired on HBO, but he was looking for the complete film production of a feature.

When it comes to telling a story, I have my own particular style of filming and camera movement, and i remember during the production of this film, I not only learned a lot but also my style of filming and camera production was vindicated with the 30 or so awards this film took home.

One final thought; the meeting and learning of history through people that lived that history. If you have never noticed when a person tells a story they lived and one that was so profound, they lose themselves in the story as if they are back in that time and space. Watching this story unfold through the families that lived it was an honor as this film, I believe, does them justice and tells their story to future generations. I can’t thank the participants enough to allow us to tell this amazing story


The six triple eight documentary. the sixtripleeight movie. mjrvisuals and Lincoln penny films

The Feature Trailer of "the SixTripleEight" movie

In February 1945, the U.S. Army sent 855 black women from the Women’s Army Corps (WACs) to England and France to clear the backlog of mail in the European Theater of Operations. The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, known as the SixTripleEight, was the only all-black female battalion to serve in Europe during WWII. Confronted with racism and sexism from their own leadership and troops, they served with honor and distinction completing their mission in six months. By war’s end, the SixTripleEight had cleared over 17 million pieces of backlogged mail ensuring the troops stayed in touch with their loved ones back home. The last of the women returned home in March 1946. They were never fully recognized…until now.


6 Traffic Generation Habits You Should Stop

6 Traffic Generation Habits You Should Stop

Traffic generation is the holy grail of online marketing. Website traffic has been cited as the most effective content marketing metric, which is why brands must understand how to drive traffic without compromising quality of content. Unfortunately, as traffic generation and SEO have changed over the years, many mistakes continue to be made. As a result, many seemingly well-established SEO practices can greatly damage your brand’s credibility and harm your website traffic.

Here are six traffic generation practices you should avoid at all costs:

1. Stuffing content with keywords

Stuffing your content with keywords can drastically hurt your website traffic. Whether it is adding high volume of keywords or irrelevant phrases and words, these are harmful SEO practices that can cause irreparable damage to your traffic generation efforts. Doing so will attract Google penalties like marking your site as spam or lower your page ranking. It will also hurt your brand image because customers will feel betrayed by your use of misleading information.

Rather than stuff your content with many or irrelevant keywords, writing high quality content should be your goal. Remember, people don’t just come to your site just for the sake of it; they are looking for valuable resources and answers to their problems. One way to find out what your readers are looking for is to think about the questions your readers type into Google search and use those questions to create powerful content that will provide the answers. You can also visit platforms like Reddit and Quora to find out what people are discussing. This will help you determine the right keywords to use. Whatever the case, concentrate on writing high quality content.

2. Building as many backlinks as possible

When it comes to backlinks, it’s all about quality over quantity. Many people think that having thousands of links pointing to their website is the smartest traffic generation tactic. However, this practice can actually be detrimental to your SEO. It is better to have a dozen of quality backlinks instead of having thousands of spam links. Use tools like Buzzsumo to determine which backlinks are top quality in your industry. For instance, if you own a blog about entrepreneurship, your best bet for backlinks should come from sites like Entrepreneur, Fortune, Bizify, Quora and Inc, among others. By all means, avoid buying backlinks if you don’t want to land in trouble with Google.

3. Focusing only on page rankings

Page ranking is an important factor when it comes to making it to the top of Google’s search results. However, one should not put all eggs in one basket. Many elements contribute to page ranking. According to a 2015 study by Moz, 88% of marketers believe mobile-friendliness will influence page rankings. 81% believe that the perceived value of the website by the visitors also plays a critical role. Other factors that influence page rankings are speed of website and the quality and quantity of instant answers provided in SERPs. Therefore, instead of worrying about whether your website is ranked at the top, you need to look at different strategies that can drive results for your brand. For instance, you can produce more mobile optimized landing pages and produce quality content that provide instant answers in the SERPs. By taking care of these individual strategies, you will be able to tweak your website so that it appears in top results.

4. Writing low-value content

Gone are the days when quantity of content was the determining factor in driving traffic. Today, marketers are more concerned about producing quality content that provide value to the users. In fact, Google introduced an algorithm that penalizes sites that produce low-quality content. In that regards, any content you produce should provide value to the readers. That is to say quality content should be your most valuable SEO tactic. There are a number of elements you need to take into consideration when implementing your content creation strategy. The first element is your audience. Understanding your audience is crucial. Are your visitors male or female? What is their geographical locations? What is their age group? Do your visitors come to amuse themselves or to learn serious stuff? Understanding your audience will help you to structure your content according to their needs.

5. Duplicating content on different websites

Writing content and then duplicating it to different sites as guest post is definitely going to hurt your ranking. Although Google can differentiate between the first publisher of content and republished content, content duplications brings more harm than good. It might succeed in increase in the number of back links but it can also become difficult to know monitor the changes to your content. Your brand’s image also suffers in the process. So the only solution is to write original content and share it is social media. If you want to publish guest posts or syndicate your content, please write fresh content for every website you want to publish your content.

6. Including complex coding on your website and installing too many widgets

Widgets, tools, analytic software, surveys, forms etc can be great tools for any website; however, too much of something is bad. Having too many widgets and tools coupled with complex coding can slow down your website yet people expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds. This is likely to be the reason you are performing poorly in traffic generation department. The average user has no patience for a page that takes ages to load. Slow speeds in websites results to high bounce rates, a factor used by Google to rank websites.


4 Clever Advertising Techniques You Should Be Using Today

4 Clever Advertising Techniques You Should Be Using Today

Companies are spending thousands upon thousands of dollars every year on advertising. The big boys even spend hundreds of thousands or millions in print and paid click advertisements. Unfortunately, that also means we get to be bombarded with endless amount of ads, that are lazily designed or misplaced.

So how do you stay clear of producing poor, boring and ineffective advertising?

Here are some techniques you can use to create amazing ads that will resonate with people.

Design Clever ads

There is a whole lot of difference between funny advertisements and effective ads that accomplish their jobs. When designing your ad, make sure that it is able to clearly deliver its message and make people enjoy it at the same time. It should not just be funny for the sake of it. In fact, you do not design an ad so that it is funny. You design an ad that people will be able to connect with.

Insightful

Your ad’s potential impact will be determined by how insightful it is. Does it make the audience think about their beliefs and actions? Does it result in that Eureka Moment? If you achieve this, you will do much better than your competition.

Feeling

Try to connect with your audience emotionally. As Maya Angelou once said, people will forget what you did or said, but they will never forget how you made them feel. You may spend a lot of time convincing your prospects to buy from you; you may even offer very competitive prices, but if you are not connecting with them emotionally, you are not going to create much impact. The fact of the matter is that people are not always rational when making buying decisions. Their emotions usually get the better of them.

Trustworthiness

People buy from companies they like. People will like you if they also trust in you. You see, it is impossible for people to like you if they don’t trust you. Every character you select to appear in your ad should sound and look trustworthy. Every message you deliver should be factual.

Whatever your advertisement goal is, whichever industry you are and now matter your size, it is important to advertise wisely. If you need help, seek the advice or services of a professional advertising agency.