READ THIS CASE STUDY OF HOW WE MADE THIS ONLINE MARKETING VIDEO

THEN SCROLL DOWN TO WATCH THE VIDEO

Online video is the best tool available for communicating with your customers. No matter what is going on with your business, share it by creating a video.

In order to help you produce your own video to blast out over the Internet, here’s a description of how I helped client Kent Lawrence be his own Executive Producer for his online marketing video.   Kent wanted the video to promote an upcoming tele-seminar his company is hosting.

Kent had never made a video so wasn’t sure where to begin. First, he studied lots of articles here at Video Production Tips but felt like he needed some one-on-one advice, so he set up an appointment to call me.

I am happy to help folks over the phone and think it can save you lots of time and aggravation. One of the confusing things about making video is that each video production is totally unique.  It helps to be able to describe exactly what you need to do to someone who can offer specific advice.

I made sure Kent had read this article about the video production process. His role as Executive Producer meant he needed to coordinate everything and be the project manager.

We talked about the results Kent wanted with his video.  In producing any video, I think it is best to start with the end product in mind. So I asked him these questions:

• What is the purpose of the video?
• What do you want the video to communicate?
• Who is the video communicating with?
• What do they already know?
• What do you want them to know and feel after watching the video?

Kent wanted his video to present a professional, quality image. He didn’t want it to look like your standard You Tube video with grainy, shaky footage.   To achieve that, he felt most comfortable hiring a local professional video crew to come to his office to videotape.  In his situation, this was definitely the most practical thing because Kent didn’t have the necessary camera, microphone or lights, and isn’t going to produce enough video in the future to warrant buying any.

For complete instructions on how best to hire yourself a local crew, read this article. Read this follow up article on outsourcing too.

The crew took care of most of the hard stuff.  Kent just needed to be ready with his script. I advised him to keep it brief and focused.  When writing your script, always remember what your main point is, don’t go off on tangents.  His MAIN POINT was to invite people to the tele-seminar, not to sell them anything.

Here is an article to help you on script writing.

He mailed the mini-dv tape to me for post-production editing.  Again, he didn’t think it was productive for him to actually learn video editing himself, he just wanted to get the job done as quickly as possible.  Wise move.  It can take months to become adept at video editing software so unless you really want to take it up, it can be more practical to outsource.

First, I captured the mini-dv footage into my Mac Pro computer, I edit in Final Cut. I created a short open with animated graphics over a computer animated background. I added some royalty free music to the open then let it carry on underneath his speaking.  He speaks for 5 minutes and my open was about 12 seconds.  The music ran out at the one minute mark.  From there, I let it just be his voice until I brought up the same music again toward the end.  Some people would carry the music all the way through, but I personally don’t like that technique in most situations.  Five minutes worth of the royalty free music would get on my nerves!

I spiced up the video as much as possible by adding animated graphics every time it made sense.  I covered about 90% of his talking head video with flashy graphics.  Not only does this help the viewer understand the information better, but it helps make the video more entertaining too.

I selected the colors for the animated background and fonts by matching the forest green color of the wall behind Kent’s talking head.  I chose two fonts and used them throughout in a consistent manner.

I used several different key frame animation paths for my words and graphics in order to keep the visual stimulation level high. Sometimes I adjusted the cropping and other times I adjusted the leading.

When I was satisfied with how everything looked, I converted the video to quick time movie format and uploaded it to Veeple.com Veeple is a fascinating service that hosts your video and allows you to put clickable links onto the video itself.  This is a marvelous new monetization tool that you can read more about here and here.

On Veeple, I used their editor to add the flash overlays which turn into clickable links.  I made these links appear as a “Click Here” button.  I added a link to Kent’s website as well as a link to the website of the firm he is doing the teleseminar with.

Veeple creates embed code and I used that to embed the video on this blog.  Here it is for your approval!

If you’d like help producing your own video, drop me an email and we’ll see how I can help.

Thanks for reading Video Production Tips

Lorraine Grula

Internet Video Gal