An 8-step process to produce the perfect video for your brand

We live in a time when it takes one idea to create a brand and one plan to make it go viral. To this end, video remains the dominant force-field for most brands to reach out to the wider public. Consumers prefer watching online content to reading. They find videos more engaging and tend to retain information better when it is presented in a visual format.

According to a report by ‘comScore’, the market for online videos was a good 45.4 per cent. 10 crore internet users watch online videos everywhere, and 90 percent of online shoppers at a major retailer’s website said that they found videos helpful in making shopping and buying decisions. Additionally, 50 percent would watch business-related videos on YouTube and 65 percent would visit the marketer’s website after viewing these videos. These numbers go to show that the market for digital video content is ever-expansive and thus, immensely effective.

These figures also show that there are a million players in the market who use the same medium to showcase and sell their brand. Hence, the need to create unique and emphatic videos becomes a necessity for all new-age brands, so that their content can stand out from the millions of similar videos across the globe.

To help you with this, we present you with an 8-step process to produce the perfect video for your brand

Define your audience

Noting down your target audience is necessary to narrow down your video viewers to a specified buying persona rather than keeping it generic. This can help you develop a strategy keeping this particular group in mind and produce the kind of video that can grab eyeballs.

Define your budget

Once you have defined your target audience, it is mandatory to define a fixed budget at the preliminary stages of production itself. This will enable you to plan out everything from the equipment you need to rent or purchase, to booking a set location, to hiring the actors and so forth. Once you have a number in mind, you can save yourself the burden of ‘over-promising’ and ‘under-delivering’.

Make smart investments

If you are an amateur brand aiming at wider markets, chances are you don’t have gold sprouting from your pocket and prefer to spend as little as possible on the entire production process. However, it is prudent to make some smart investments, such as a good quality audio-device and a camera that provides HD quality at the least. In a vastly competitive digital space, these are imperative to keep up with the production quality that is being engineered into the web-space.

Determine your script and ideal video length

Any producer will tell you that it is imperative to decide on a particular script for the video and take a call on its length from the very beginning. The script needs to be finalised at an earlier stage, even if it is still a draft. This way, your content can be created around it with an end-game in place. Human beings are notorious for their short attention spans, especially in this age of the internet. Hence, the longer your video, the higher chance you have of losing your viewers.

Self-train with your camera

Even if you didn’t have a DSLR growing up and didn’t attend a course on professional photography, you can still be a stellar producer because, again, you have the internet at your disposal. You can YouTube self-tutorials on the exact camera model you possess and pick up on its features. With time, you will learn the different kinds of apertures and shutter speeds that are congruous with different kinds of lighting and background.

Perfect the lighting and background

To produce a better quality branded video, you have to make sure that you’ve got your lighting right. Nothing looks shabbier than having orbs around the character’s head or missing out on a couple of seconds of the video because the shot was too dark. You want to keep your viewers engaged, and to that end, you need to make sure that the content is properly visible to them from the beginning to the very end.

Perfect the contrast and framing

Keeping to your theme, you must ensure that your colour balance is perfect, so that there aren’t any red-eyed characters in too-yellowed skins in the shots. To this end, you have to make sure you white balance according to the light you are using and even use various instruments to keep to the correct shade. It is equally important to ensure correct framing for your video, so that it looks neat and clean and keeps the audience’s eyes rooted to the centre of the screen.

Edit masterfully

This here is the trickiest and most important part of the process. You could be taking the most ordinary footage for your video and turn into a Cannes masterpiece, simply by using powerful editing software and applying stellar editing skills. You’ll need an updated operating system (Windows XP won't cut it); fast ram (at least 16 gigs, preferably 1600mHz at 10 or less CAS latency); a solid dedicated graphics card, a monitor with high pixel density and clean colours, a non-compromising CPU and a high-handed vision.

So what are you waiting for? Get ready for some serious – Lights! Camera! Action!