If you’ve been to the movies lately or clocked a respectable number of Netflix hours, chances are you’ve seen a production that uses shot sequences. That’s because shot sequences make a production look more polished. They help producers add visual interest and illustrate the beginning, middle, and end of their narrative.

So, what is sequence shooting and how do you do it? Simply put, this technique is a way to construct a visual story by stringing together a series of different shots. There is no magic here, it’s about planning to get a variety of shots so that when you get to editing you’ll have more options to tell your story in the most compelling way possible.

Check out the video to see the three types of shots we always plan for and give it a try, the more you do it the better you’ll get at it.

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Video creation and production can be a little intimidating, but it’s crucial to your marketing strategy to use video to promote your company, product, and services. Just like booking a vacation or hitting your quarterly goals, everything becomes easier with planning and preparation. The same goes for videos. They become easier to shoot and produce when you start the process with a well thought out video script. Putting your ideas and words to paper will help you explain your vision for the video and execute it when the camera starts rolling. Plus, you’ll avoid headaches during production and endless rounds of revisions.

You don’t need to feel the pressure to write a script like Sorkin or Scorsese. Instead, just focus on these three elements. Here’s my process for writing a killer video script every time:  
 

Develop a Clear Plan and Story

Before you jump into writing your video script, host a brainstorm session with your team. This is when and where your creativity should start churning. First, identify the goal of your video. Then follow the six pillars of video storytelling to identify the plot, purpose, people, place, audience, and distribution of your video. You and your team should ask the following questions during your brainstorm:

• What is the goal of the video? What story do we want to tell?

• Why are we telling this story? What do we want people to do when they watch it?

• Who are the people in the video?

• Who is the intended audience for the video?

• Where will we shoot the video? What visuals do we want to use? 
   

Show Don’t Tell

After creating the plan, story, and setting for your video, it’s time to sit down in the writer’s room and get to work. As you are writing your video script, you’ll want to think visually. Ask yourself — which images and shots will accompany the audio of this video? 
 

The Two-Up Script

The best way to write visually is by creating a two-up script. The two-up script has one column for the audio in the video and another column detailing the visuals to accompany each line of audio. This approach, which I regularly use when script writing, allows you to envision what is going to happen in the video alongside the words.

The Storyboard

Your two-up script can be easily transformed into a storyboard. Storyboards are not always necessary but can be very useful when you have to explain the video concept to multiple stakeholders involved in the video production process. Visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text , which means you can describe your vision much easier with actual images. So use a storyboard to your advantage when you are collaborating with many people in your company.

 
The Shot List

On shoot days, I always use a shot list. The shot list is a document that maps out exactly what will occur and what will be used in that particular shot, or scene, of the video. It helps me stay organized and on task while recording so I capture everything as outlined by the script. I literally could not live without this. 

If you don’t already use this crucial tool, download my video script shot list template here . 
 

Be Bold Early On  

Through your brainstorming and planning process, you’ll identify the audience of your video. With this targeting, you also need to identify the action you want them to take after watching your video. It’s a common approach to place your call-to-action at the end of the video, like a big finale on the silver screen, but I don’t recommend this.

Instead, you should be bold at the beginning of your videos. This can be in the form of a question or with a clear statement within the first 5-10 seconds of the video. After you make that initial impact, you can transition your script to entertain and educate the viewer. Finally, you can reinforce the action of your video at the end of the video. Write your scripts with this strategy in mind and always ask: What do you want the viewer to learn if they only watch the first 10 seconds of the video? Which action do you want them to take before they decide to keep scrolling on their feed?   
 
Next time you sit down to write a killer video script, remember to make a plan before you put pen to paper, show what you want to say, and be bold in your delivery. Who knows — maybe you will become the next Scorsese.

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For many organizations, content plans are expanding and marketers are leading the charge to build and execute on them. But as content needs grow, budgets continue to shrink or stay the same. Many marketers are stuck at a video production process crossroads between low budgets and high expectations. To help navigate these challenges, I sat down with Chad Lakin, Vice President of North America at Shootsta , to explore the ways in which marketers can tackle basic video production regardless of their video budgets. Here are 5 key takeaways from our conversation and webinar with Chad Lakin of Shootsta.

Assess Business Critical Video

Before you start shooting and producing your videos, Chad stressed how important it is for marketers and creative teams to assess and identify the business videos that are critical in their overall strategy and marketing campaigns. Chad recommends taking a proactive approach by thinking long-term when creating campaigns. Marketers can divide their annual budgets into campaigns and then identify the priority videos that need to be created for each campaign. Starting with a 35,000 foot view allows you to plan, prioritize, and execute without blowing your budget within the first few months of the year.

Think Big and Start Small

Even with a small budget, you can have big ideas. You don’t want to stuff your ideas into a folder on your desktop just because you think they will be out of scope. By thinking big and starting small with your plan and costs, you give yourself the opportunity to test and tweak your ideas. This gives you wiggle room to figure out which videos resonate best with your audience and then allows you to allocate more money and resources to more video production in the future. Check out this example of a story we told without words and very little budget.

Review Basic Video Production Budgets

In the webinar, Chad and I discussed common video budget ranges and how companies are spending these budgets. Here’s a recap of our findings (these are strictly production cost estimates):

• $1 – $5K

  • Simple, pure execution videos

• $5 – $10K

  • More detailed and consultative videos

• $10K +

  • Serious production, locations, and actors

In addition to production costs, attendees on the webinar said their biggest roadblocks were production equipment , management buy-in, content planning, and production talent. To breakdown these roadblocks, you need to align their video production plans to your budget.

By having a clear view of your goals and even constraints, you can make decisions in the production planning process to stay within your video. Are these videos being used for social media? If yes, then do you really need to shoot with an expensive, 4K camera? Do you need to hire outside resources to shoot the video? Or can you gather an internal team to shoot and produce your video? Ask yourself questions before you start rolling so you can maximize your video budget.

Consider a Hybrid Hiring Model

You may grapple with the decision to hire talent in-house or to outsource and hire external resources to run your video production process. In-house talent is a great choice when you need subject matter experts on your product or service, need consistent delivery, and have a wide variety of content topics you want to cover in the videos. External talent is valuable when your video content or planning requires an outside perspective, need specialists to deal with complexity, and need to fill skills gaps.

Instead of choosing one or the other, Chad explained how Shootsta provides a valuable solution. Shootsta discovered that many internal teams were stretched thin to produce great video content. Shootsta provides a hybrid model to video production by bringing in a team of experts to work with a company’s internal team to make monthly video content. Bottom line — you don’t need to choose one option and only stick with that. Hybrid models can help you maximize your time and resources.

Success Starts with Pre-Production

If there is one thing we hope you take away from the webinar is that pre-production is your best friend.

40% of attendees said they produce more than 30 videos per year. Now that’s a lot of video! Pre-production can save you tons of time and money on shoot day. Before you say action, you want to write everything down and have a clear plan for which types of videos you want to shoot, when you have the resources and talent available. You never want to assume you are going to shoot the video and just figure it out along the way.

By plotting out your content roadmap, you can also identify the ways in which you can leverage the shoot day to record additional videos. The more organized you are in pre-production, the more opportunities you will have to be adaptable.  

Many thanks to Chad Lakin for joining this webinar and sharing valuable insights and information. If you joined us as well, thank you! If you couldn’t make it, no worries. You can watch the full webinar here .

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2017 was a huge year for video, and for Brightcove. In the last 12 months we have seen some great video projects across Australia and New Zealand alone.

Overall, Brightcove delivered 1.3 billion hours of video across 34 billion streams, and there’s no signs of it slowing down in 2018. With billions of hours of video being produced and consumed everyday, it’s never been more crucial for brands to use innovations in video to cut through the noise.

With a new year upon us, here are the trends set to define video marketing in 2018.

Not all heroes wear capes

Hero videos, the large header videos on a website, make for a much more immersive, in-depth visual experience for website visitors. When combined with autoplay functionality, hero videos offer brands an unrivalled way to immediately draw in and engage users. Brands such as Sydney Festival and the Sydney Opera House  are using hero video integrations across their homepages and event pages to act as a ‘visual teaser’ to attract audiences.

Whether a company seeks to educate its audience, showcase latest products or promote an upcoming event, hero videos will play a pivotal role in keeping web visitors engaged in 2018.

Brands as publishers

In a world where engagement is everything, brands have begun to realise that the way they connect with customers is undergoing a major facelift. In 2018 we will see more brands becoming media companies to meet new audience needs, with a focus on audience-centricity and targeted content.

Xero TV , the online video hub of New Zealand based cloud accounting platform Xero, is a great example of this trend. The content hub provides a one stop shop for a range of audience-centric videos, from small business tips and advice to how-to-videos and case studies, creating an engaging video-based learning tool that’s easy to access.

Forget about the price tag  

There was a time where companies would need to fork out tens of thousands of dollars to produce their own video content. This is no longer the case, with a range of companies offering scalable and cost-effective ways to shoot, edit, and produce video content. There has never been a better time for brands of all sizes to get on board with video using these offerings.

Video across the board

No longer restricted to the marketing department, video is starting to be used as a tool to educate, communicate and engage a variety of stakeholders across entire organisations.

Companies like Mazda Australia , AMP , and Dunkin Donuts are using video for internal communications with company-wide video hubs, live and on-demand town hall meetings, and video training. From corporate training to human resources, internal communications, and customer support, 2018 is the time to take advantage of video beyond the marketing function.

The winning formula

With billions of hours of video being consumed each day, brands need to think strategically around the kind of content they produce and channels they use to draw in audiences. As well as being an effective way of facilitating interaction and engagement from online audiences, video also has the potential to drive ROI (return-on-investment) and produce real business results. Those with their finger on the pulse use video as a key tool to keep up with audiences and drive their bottom line.

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A few weeks ago, we hosted a video webinar outlining areas of focus to keep in mind when building an in-house video production capability. When we first created the presentation, we wanted to keep the technical elements simple.  In order to do that, the team decided on the following:

• Only have two people on camera.
• Use one static camera, so we didn’t have to hire additional help or rent gear.
• Utilize Jason Oliveira, our video producer,  as our technical operator, so he could switch between camera and images.
• Shoot the webinar in our own studio space.
• Use the gear and furniture we had available to show viewers how they can do something similar.

The Presentation

With this decided upon, we refined our presentation and went through internal reviews. After these rounds we realized the presentation would drag on. Cuts needed to be made. We decided on a 30-minute rundown of information aligned to the three major phases of video production.

1. Pre Production
2. Production
3. Post Production

Using Brightcove Solutions to Execute

We leveraged Brightcove Gallery to house the event, for two reasons:

1. We could use Brightcove Live to integrate the broadcast directly into the gallery page. This made it incredibly easy to facilitate and troubleshoot any issues that may have occurred.
2. Using the live template, we could design the three main sections of the event webinar: a pre, during, and post event state. This ensured that at any time someone went to the link – the visual presentation would be at a high quality.

What it looks like before. We had a quick promo photo shoot done to cover any promotion that was going out.

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Here at Brightcove we have a variety of video equipment in our toolbox . But for those who don’t have access to video equipment like this, or want to supplement their studio shoots with quick, on-the-go content creation, there’s a video production tool that is likely already at your disposal: your iPhone.

The Brightcove Video Team is here to give you some helpful tips when shooting with your smartphone.

Location, Location, Location

First things first – locate the most ideal spot you have on hand for your shoot. There are key things you should look for when scouting your location:

1. Find a somewhat quiet space, and preferably carpeted to further minimize noise.

2. Position yourself in front of a window to use as much natural sunlight as possible. You know, so we can see you!

3. Try keeping the background somewhat simple, and limit foot traffic/clutter behind the person speaking.

Camera Setup

You’ve identified the ideal spot to shoot. Next, it’s time to set up you shot. Here’s what you should focus on for camera setup:

1. Attach the camera to a tripod or support on a table, to keep things steady.

2. Move the camera closer if needed. Don’t just try to zoom in.

3. Keep a medium frame of the person in the shot, cutting them off at the middle part of their torso.

4. Use exposure lock. Hold your finger down on your subject until the yellow box says “AE Lock.” Your camera will focus and expose your subject for you. Drag up or down on the screen to increase/decrease the exposure level.

5. Keep the microphone close. Either position your phone as close to the as possible, or use another phone’s voice memo feature to record audio separately. Then, combine the two files in editing.

On-Screen Tips

It’s time to shoot! Here are a few key tips for the on-screen talent:

1. Always shoot a few takes, even if you think you got it on the first try.

2. Practice reading what you are going to say out loud a few times to get comfortable.

3. Talk with a smile. Being excited about what you are trying to convey is the best way to capture the audience.

And that’s a wrap! With these tips and tricks in mind you’re set to create some great video content with your iPhone. These tips are also handy to share as a guide if you are looking to activate your workforce to create more employee generated content throughout your organization.

Interested in taking your in-house video production to the next level? Check out our guide to the 6 things you need to build an in-house video studio .

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