What are the stages of the video production process?
The stages of the video production process for any successful marketing campaign are more than just editing footage, putting it on YouTube and hoping for it to go viral.
Video production is a complex process with three critical stages: pre-production, production, and post-production. But that’s not all there is to it—It’s an artistic endeavour involving many steps, from developing ideas to shooting footage, designing elements, and skillfully editing everything together with motion graphics to stand out from the crowd. Depending on the project’s complexity, the process can take anything from few hours to months. Nevertheless, it’s an important process thats essential to the success of any video marketing campaign.
- Remember
Proper prior planning prevents piss poor performance!
"Every 10% of the time spent planning and organising will save as much as 90% of the time in getting the job done once you get started.” — ‘Eat That Frog’ Brian Tracy
Clarify
Moving you forwards by working backward — Knowing what you want to achieve is the first step in creating successful video content.
By having a clear idea of what you want your audience and customers to get out of watching your video means starting with your objective, or goal, not just by talking but also by writing down as many ways that can achieve the best outcome and avoid any missed opportunities.
Strategise
Knowing your target audience, what they like, and how they think, is the essence of developing a mindful strategy for them.
We use strategies in the same way that sports teams use their best moves time and time again without changing their style too much. It gets us closer to winning each game with tactics we know work, as opposed to using trial-and-error methods. Understanding what your target audience likes, and how they think, is the essence of developing a mindful strategy that appeals directly to them.
Concept
The ‘big idea’ behind your video — We develop a creative approach connects your audience with your objective.
Concept development is the innovation and invention phase where all of our thoughts and high-level requirements are worked out, questions are opened to help plan the project, such as how much budget is needed? How long should the finished product be? What will our technology roadmap look like? Who should we partner with, etc.? Concept development sets the stage for development by defining what problems we’re trying to solve and exactly how they’ll be solved.
Visualise
We write scripts, make storyboards, and design style-frames to help visualise how the video will look and feel.
In the same way that top athletes use visualisation to improve their performance by picturing the end result, we try to visualise and represent the success of your project in the form of sketches, storyboards, scripts and style-frames so you can imagine them coming to fruition with clarity – allowing every detail of what you are imagining to fully expand in your head and imagine the outcome before production begins.
Create
Everything it’s made of is captured, created, and designed. Ensuring that it doesn’t just look good, but delivers the goods too.
By this stage, we have a rock-solid roadmap for compelling video production, so it’s time to make sure that everything it’s made of is captured, created, and crafted to perfection, ensuring that it doesn’t just look good, but delivers the goods too because you want something that can deliver on its promises with style.
Move
This is where the real magic happens; all of the moving parts are put into motion and your idea is brought to life.
Live action video footage is edited, colour corrected, graded and enhanced. A rough draft is produced and shared with you via a private link where you can view, add comments, suggest edits, and provide any necessary feedback. You have the opportunity to request amendments to the video at this stage which will be implemented and approved before progressing to the refinement stage. The rough draft will be refined into a more polished finished piece. At this stage you can request one more round of minor amendments or tweaks to the video before approval and delivery of the finished product.
Distribute
Once your video content is delivered and hosted, you can begin to distribute and promote it according to your video strategy.
Video distribution is a process or technique for distributing video content. There are many different ways to distribute video online, but the major ones include broadcasting live via your website, uploading your videos onto a streaming site such as YouTube or Ustream, posting pre-recorded videos on the social media platform of your choice (such as Facebook or Twitter), and then sharing those uploaded videos. Other alternatives include direct interactions with customers for an online eCommerce format, sending texts from your personal cellular phone to customers from yours and their phones. There are also other techniques that sometimes rely on custom apps — some companies will develop new apps built specifically for showcasing their content to users at certain events; these apps may be promoted before they’re released into the market place Once your video content is delivered and hosted, you can begin to distribute and promote it according to your video strategy.
Engage
Watch the views, likes, shares, and sales roll in, connect with your viewers and show them some love.
Video engagement is the opposite of abandonment. The key element in generating video view duration is the “hook” you use to capture your viewer’s attention at some point during their viewing session – typically around 20-30% through your video length. This hook may be one of many things including telling a story or giving helpful information or even just presenting something funny or shocking which will generate spontaneous laughter from viewers.
Analyse
We shouldn’t stop there — Understand how your audience interacts with your video and use it to your advantage.
Video analytics is a tool for visualizing and interpreting motion in photos and videos. With the recent upsurge in digital video, video analytics has taken on new importance. Video analytics can also be used with real-time video to detect people and vehicles in a scene and set off notifications if one is detected. We shouldn’t stop there — Get to know how your audience interacts with your video using analytics and use it to your advantage.
