In this overcrowded digital world, capturing someone’s attention is not the easiest thing to do. In order to do so, you need to find a way to stand out from the competition and connect with your audience.
Here are some tips on what it takes to put together engaging footage.
Have an idea of the desired outcome you’d like to achieve
The first thing you need to do is have a clear understanding of what your business offering is. You then need to identify who your audience is and why your product or service can be of value to them. Finally, you need to identify the goals you want to achieve with the video content you’re producing, how you’ll present the information and whether that is the best approach for your audience.
Prepare everything you need
As soon as you have all the information you need for your video, write up a script and get everyone involved to know it off by heart. This makes shooting the video a lot less time-consuming, and it allows everyone involved to know where all the video footage will be shot. Having everything in place and in order also makes post-production much easier to work through. Struggling to remember your lines? A compelling voice-over on top of some b-roll can save you in the edit.
This might seem like the obvious thing to do, but so many people miss this simple step. The higher the quality of video you put into your edit, the better the video will come out. The only setting you should avoid maxing out on is your frame rate. Try and set your camera to record at 25-seconds-per-frame as this would be closer to what you see in a Hollywood movie, that is 24 frames. If shooting on a modern smartphone and there’s no 25fps in sight, opt for 30fps.
Get your lighting right
This is probably one of the most important steps you need to perfect: the lighting. Too much light and your picture can come out overexposed if not blurry. Too little light and your shot won’t be clear enough to see - worse still, it will be super grainy and unattractive as a result. Try and get your own artificial light to help out with your shots. One diagonally in front of you plus a practical light behind you that you don’t mind having in your shot, such as a lamp, is a good two-light setup. If you’re using natural light, just remember that sudden cloud cover could mess with your continuity.
You might be tempted to add your favourite Kendrick Lemar or Justin Bieber track as background music, but it will be blocked in certain countries due to the music rights not being allowed there. There are plenty of legal royalty-free sites you can try for audio. Alternatively, YouTube has its own legal library of music you can use. Bonus tip: try and edit your video to the beat of the music to add a really cool look and feel to it.
As soon as you’ve recorded all the footage you’d like to add to the video, it’s time to get down to the hard work. Editing. As tempting as it can be to just read a script and shoot a video in one take, the best of them need a little more work. All the prolonged pauses need to be trimmed, along with all the excessive “uhm” usage. Bonus tip: shooting multiple takes of each scene will allow you to gather all the best parts in the video, so be sure to take your time with it.
Once you’ve done all the editing and you’re happy with the final version of the video, go ahead and upload it to the web! Don’t forget to track its performance by checking the number of views, click-throughs and social media engagements it gets.
