Recently, Liveclicker’s Director of Video Production and I presented the webinar: Retail Video Production A to Z. It was evident by the record number of webinar attendees that production continues to be one of the main challenges retailers and brands face with their online video programs. Below is an overview of the section of the webinar focused on pre-production planning.
Enjoy!
Importance of pre-production planning
Who are you shooting for? Thinking about who your audience is, and how they will benefit from your video program, should be the main priority in pre-production planning. Planning for product video production can be broken down into 2 categories:
1. First Shoot – Planning for the foundation for what your videos will look like.
- Goal – Set clear goals for how many videos you want to create per month, and work backwards to figure out resource allocation and budgeting.
- How – decide on the delivery on your video messaging – Will the tone be light and casual, informational, lightly scripted, heavily scripted, etc.
- Who – Decide who is delivering your video: a well-spoken customer, employee, or professional talent.
- Content – What are you actually saying about your products? Are you relying heavily on the product description?
- Where – Where can you shoot that will best resonate with your customers? Showroom, on-location, open conference room, etc.
- Look – Decide how you want your video to look. Will you do product close ups? Will you need a display table? What kind of background do you want – infinite white, or cloth background?
- Length - Do you need 120 seconds when you can say all you need to in 60? Use Liveclicker video analytics to measure drop off rates and test different lengths.
- Logistics – What products are you going to shoot, why are you shooting those products, and how are they getting to the studio?
- Notes – Taking notes will help post-production go much more smoothly.
2. Ongoing Shoots – Planning for how you can maximize video production efficiency
- Focus on maximizing the efficiency for your production process.
- Decide what products get shot.
- Find out how quickly you can get products into the studio.
- Have a process for educating talent on what they are shooting in advance of the production day.
- Find out how long it takes to get videos through post production. Consider using video production automation software like Liveclicker Studio to scale production and cut down on editing work and time required between shoots and go-live.
- Plan to test – Change up delivery, content, look and location. Use Liveclicker’s Custom Insight video analytics to compare different variables of videos against each other.
- Edit video content to address issues that come up frequently in support calls
