Video Tips

The Brief

When we were going in and briefing the different companies, a lot of them were just interested in: “yes we can record that, that’s fine”. With Ridge Films it was more about: “Forget the medium, what’s the message you’re trying to get across?” It’s all about the communication and from that, the video is going to come and that came out very, very early in the relationship with them, from the very first meeting with Brendan. The end result is you get a product back at the end, for us it was five videos that needed no work because Ridge Films had taken that time to partner with us and really understand what we wanted to achieve and we ended up with five fabulous videos.

Scripting

We do lots of presentations. We looked at the scripting as something that we as a company would be able to knock over very quickly. We were very confident when Chris came in to meet with us and handed across the first script and said: “we don’t think this will take very long, we think this one’s in the bag”. Chris actually took the time to read through it as if he was presenting the piece to camera and … it wasn’t. It was much, much longer and Chris brought that level of expertise and said: “this would be fabulous if you’re standing in a room doing one of your seminars to a group of people, but it’s just not going to work on video.” We ended up having Chris come back in to work a couple of extra days with us on it. It was time and money so well spent and the value that he brought to that… we just couldn’t have done it without Chris’s help on the scripts.

Less Is More

We were quite specific in what we wanted. We wanted a 2 to 3-minute video. Chris said: “we’re focusing on the wrong thing, it’s not the length of the video, it’s how long we’ll have the audience’s attention for”. We worked with Chris over a few days to really nut it down to what was the essence of the message that somebody without a financial background would actually understand and would communicate and would be something that they would actually want to keep watching. So the length of the video really was irrelevant, you can have a 3-minute video and nobody’s going to watch it because they’re bored so Chris’s guidance in that was absolutely spot-on. Less is more when you’re shooting video.

Rehearsals

We decided to do a mock-rehearsal for a couple of reasons: the first one was so that our presenter would feel very comfortable, he’d understand what was happening and it would speed up the production process. All of our executives do seminars and are very seasoned presenters but doing a piece to camera is a completely different skill set. Our presenter knew what was expected, the different breathing techniques, the different tones, the different inflections. All the things that you don’t think you need as a presenter because you’re doing it day in and day out are all the things that you absolutely do need when you’re doing videos so I would certainly take that time again to do the rehearsal.

Filming

It’s surprising when you look at the video, they do look like a very simple video shoot. It was a very technical shoot. We had two auto-cues, we had two cameras. It was a good decision to go with the auto-cue, you get the consistency through the actual product. And for us as well, we have those legal compliances which just made it so much easier to know that we’d ticked all of those off by sticking to what the script was. Once you’ve done the hard work and the important parts are getting the messaging right, getting the scripting right and that’s where you’re spending the biggest chunk of your time, the actual video shoot is a very natural progression out of that and it was the fastest part of the entire production. All the work was spent upfront, getting that right for when we were ready to go into the recording studio.

The Proof

We were expecting a lot of backwards and forwards and we actually got the first video through and had to make absolutely no changes to it which was amazing. And then the other four videos arrived and they were just perfect and I think that was a combination of not just all the elements coming together on the day but also from Chris taking the time to understand what we were trying to achieve. We had the five videos in a week with no changes to be made to them at all which was for us fabulous. Absolutely fabulous.