Here is a two-minute video I made for Blog Success.com, a membership site that offers tons of high quality training on how to create and market a blog.

Here is how I made the video.

First, I wrote the script.  It’s nothing fancy; it spells out the basics of what they offer.  I started the script with a few questions aimed at the target audience.   Questions I figured most of them would answer, “YES.”

Then, I opened up Final Cut,  created a new project and named it while doing a standard “save as” command.  Exact same process as creating a Word document.

I started leafing through the sound effects, stock footage  and royalty free music I keep on my Mac Pro computer.   Since I edit a lot, I have tons of that sort of thing on my computer already.

I drug what I wanted into my Final Cut project.   I keep all of these things in folder in an organized way.  I only take what I need into any individual project.

Then I videotaped and captured some video of the actual Blog Success website.    I shot this simply by pointing my video camera at my computer screen.  This is an easier, lower tech way of obtaining computer screen video than doing a screen capture with Camtasia. I can get slightly more variety and I do not have to worry about file format compatibility.    Camtasia would probably give me slight better resolution but I chose to do it the easy way!

I voiced the narration right in Final Cut using the voice over tool.  I have a cheap hand held microphone that I plug into my computer using a cable that has an XLR connection on one end and a USB connection on the other.  I LOVE this cable.

This is what an XLR audio cable looks like.

The first shot of the video was a slow-mo of a computer monitor being smashed with a hammer that I had originally bought off iStock photo.com  I added the sound of the glass breaking.  The next shot was a still image I’d gotten off iStock.  I needed something to represent a lonely bus stop in Siberia.  The image was actually an Eskimo holding a harpoon.  I turned the harpoon into a bus stop sign in Final Cut by adding a gray square with a red border and some text on top of it.  I also added the wind noise.

The next shot was a combination of two shots off iStock.  The happy business man was dancing in front of a white background.  I used a white chroma key effect to put him on top of  the computer animated money shot.  You’ll notice that the happy business man has a soft white border all around him, but that’s ok with me.  I actually think it looks better this way than if I had tweaked it and gotten rid of all the white.  For one thing, he was wearing a white shirt and I didn’t want his chest to disappear too.  Plus, getting ALL the white out leaves his edges rough looking and I think that looks terrible.  Given all that, I think the soft white outline is acceptable.

I used a crowd cheering sound effect with the happy businessman.   I flipped the happy businessman off the screen using keyframe animation and rotation.

At this point, I was transitioning from the “open” of the video to the “middle” of the video, so here I added some jazzy royalty free music that was long enough to take me to the end of the piece.  One reason I chose this particular cut was because it timed out just right!  I brought the music down to about 50% once my narration came back in.

From here, it gets a bit more simple by just using the screen shots of the Blog Success website.   I thought that was looking a bit plain and boring, so I decided to add the overlays of the freeway traffic and the binary code.  I got the fast-motion traffic shot off iStock and the binary code out of Live Type, which is a program that comes bundled with Final Cut.  I changed the color of the binary code from green and yellow to black and white by adding a tint filter and setting the tint to black.

Both the traffic shot and the binary code shot are put on top of the Blog Success video, with the opacity reduced to about 60%.  This makes them transparent so you can see both shots at once.  This is an awesome effect.

I spliced in a point-of-view shot taken from inside of a race car with some natural sound.  I also bought this off iStock, although I would have loved to take the time to go shoot that one myself!

I generated some text in Final Cut which I put on top of  the website video.   I used keyframe animation on some of it to make the words float across the screen.

When I gave the list of the five key concepts, I added a blur filter to the website video.  This helps the text stand out.

To make an “ending” to the video, I re-used the happy businessman color keyed on top of the money.  This is a technique called “coming full circle.”  By re-using this shot, plus having the narration come to a logical conclusion and having the music stop, I created an ending.  All videos should have a beginning, middle and end but it is NOT a crime if you don’t.

Next, I converted the video to a quicktime movie file.  I uploaded it to Veeple to add the clickable link.  Veeple is a great online service I talk about in detail in this post and this post.

The image in the bottom right says “Click here to join Blog Success.”   That is a flash overlay added in Veeple and is a clickable affiliate link.  Right inside the video!  Now how cool is that?

Veeple generates embed code which I add to this post.  I gave the embed code to the Blog Success folks so they could put the video where ever they want.

There you have it!   Another online marketing video in the can!  If you’d like more detailed information on how I made this video, drop me an email with specific questions.

Thanks for reading Video Production Tips

Lorraine Grula

Internet Video Gal