The Power of Video Production for Businesses: Enhancing Communication and Engagement
You are an events manager and have a high profile event that needs to be filmed. How do you go about it and how best to choose a company to do all the filming and editing? Here are a few pointers to help you from start to finish:
- Create a comprehensive brief for production companies.
Apart from the obvious details of event dates, times, what needs filming, parking etc, it’s crucial that you include in the brief how many videos you want at the end and lengths, budgets, tone and style of filming and edits and some examples of what you have seen that you would like emulated to an extent. Editing can be quite a long process so creating different cuts for social media, 3 minute promotionals of the events and longer form cuts of the e.g. talks can all add to post production time. Discuss whether you want some animations and titles as well. They do add a lot and increase engagement and watch length.
Bear all of this is with the potential audience groups in mind.
- Choose the right production company.
Don’t bother watching showreels. Ask for links to the last 2 events covered and get the details of the event managers. Ask the events managers about the production companies professional, whether they met deadlines and stuck to budgets and how professional they were generally. Lastly, assuming budgets and timescales are to your agreement, ask about amends and revisions to edits. By the time those higher in the food chain get involved, their may be multiple re-edits which can ramp up costs. Next, get the top 2 in for a recce and ask them where they will set up cameras, how they will record audio, what the footprint will be, the number of personnel and whether they will bring lights. Ask them what they will do with cables (should be taped down) and how long to set up and de-rig. These are all useful to have for the technical team at the event location as well.
- Communicate well for the best edits.
Assuming it all went well on the day and assuming that the brief was comprehensive as to what outcomes you wanted, ensure that the production company sends over some rushes for you to peruse. This will really help you and the production company if you wanted specific shots left in or left out e.g specific voxpops, talk soundbites or b-roll. Ask for early rough cuts so you can keep the production company on track. Getting a cut late into the edit which doesn’t meet expectations may require major revisions and this can eat away at timescales and budgets.
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