Many corporate videos are shot onsite at company headquarters. That can solve a lot of location problems though, depending on how happy staff is to have their office space invaded, it can cause a few other issues! But that’s a post for another day.
If you are not staying at your usual offices, here are a few things to think about when you’re deciding where you’ll go.
Choosing your location:
Like what you wear, the location of your video is part of how you present yourself. What message are you trying to convey? If you are trying to sell expensive services, then you’ll want to have a location that says “high end” without question. Are you a life coach? You may want to choose a quiet, attractive home office. Your Yoga video may work wonderfully in a local park, or feel better in a studio. Make sure your scenery fits your story. (more…)
A question that regularly comes up in an initial consultation with a prospective client is “How much does it cost to do a two minute video?”
The answer is, what kind of video? They may have priced things by the minute way back in the old days of actual film, but today, with modern editing options, the length of the finished product doesn’t give any idea how much effort went into creating it. It isn’t about length, it’s about content.
If you have one person talking to one camera, that’s pretty easy and relatively inexpensive. Is a talking head all you need though? It might be, if there is a prepared statement to be read, or you’re presenting a personal image. If you have a lot more people, statistics, new equipment, or anything else that needs to be shown in a dynamic way, the complexity, and subsequently the cost, increases.
The function of your end product will really affect the pricing. How are you planning to use this video? Is it going to be on a huge HD monitor at a live event? Is it for broadcast or the web? Is it for internal use only? Capture Video can help you determine budget, but it is mainly based on how high end the video needs to be, how glossy.
The cost is also affected by the size of the production. How many cameras will be needed? How long is the shooting day? How many times will the crew need to set up or take down? For example, if you’d like a record of a major conference, does each room need a separate camera, camera operator, possibly even a sound mixer? Does everyone need to work the entire length of the conference day, or is the evening reception less important? If you’re shooting an advise video for your blog, you might only need one camera operator for a half day, or you might need a teleprompter with operator and a hair and makeup person, depending on how you want the end video to look.
So, when the question is, “how much for a video,” my first question back to you is going to be, “for what kind of a video?”
This was a full day HD video shoot, with one camera and operator, at multiple locations. Post production included some basic titles for opening and closing as well as lower thirds to identify interviewees.
Capture Video expresses your brand and supports your goals. Our video services cover every aspect of new media production, from concept to final cut on DVD, Blu-Ray or the Web.
We provide video productions services for Northern Virginia and the entire DC Metro area.
A word that isn’t always understood the same way between videographers and customers is ‘animation’. Animation just means graphics that move. Many people jump straight to dancing teapots.
Not that dancing teapots can’t tell a good story; using animated characters to tell a story works very well and can be a great way to simply explain a complex subject. What we think of as cartoons are often created on a low budget using 2D animation (think South Park), but have recently started being created using the more expensive 3D animation (think Coraline). Still, most companies are not going to want to present their product, service, or information using a cartoon. A 2D or 3D animation using corporate branding might serve to deliver the message more effectively.
Storytelling is an art form as old as humanity. We have always told stories and we continue to tell stories because they resonate with us as people. Every culture has stories that everyone knows and understands and even a brief reference to them evokes a certain set of feelings, or actions, or memories.
In US culture, many of the stories that everyone knows and can resonate with are taken from popular media. A character will have a specific tag line, or a way of speaking that we can emulate and anyone who hears us will understand not only what we are saying with our words, but the cultural context that we’re bringing in by referencing that character.
This can be a very effective tool for internal corporate videos. I see this often in Real Estate, banking, and other kinds of business, where the management wants to motivate a large group en masse. By referencing popular TV show or commercials in a video, you can create an immediate response, by banking on the story the audience already knows. It can be done subtly or overtly with humor, but either way, the connections are made.
