Introduction to Video Production Services
This article was written by Video Production Services provider Baker Media.
These days video is all around us; we don’t just have television programmes, but also video on the web and our phones. Video can also end up as e-mailed commercials, and there are screens everywhere in shops, pubs and public areas… selling, informing, and entertaining. But before we look at the power of video as a great marketing tool, here’s a word about its use in staff training.
Using Video for Training
As an induction medium, video scores as well. Wouldn’t it be great if on an employee’s first day, when they are fresh and keen, they could have an inspirational welcoming message from the CEO, each departmental manager and have a tour of all the organisation’s branches, even overseas? You can with video! If the newcomers have to wait to have a traditional induction session weeks or even months when there is enough new staff to make it financially worthwhile, they may have picked up loads of bad habits and probably would have “picked up” the job anyway.
Seeing a video of safety procedures, a production technique or a machine in operation gets messages over effectively; it’s far better than mere words and even better than photos or diagrams in a training manual.
Another great advantage using video is that trainees can learn at their own pace. Videos played on a DVD or loaded onto a computer’s hard drive can have “interactivity”…that is, the video can stop at certain points and questions have to be answered before the trainee can move on. They therefore HAVE to be totally immersed in the training programme or else they’ll be stuck staring a menu for ages! So it becomes a much more active learning experience rather than a passive “sitting in a classroom” experience. They will learn far more; there have been many scientific studies that prove this.
You’ll also save money and hassle when using video for training. Video can replace some sessions of the hire of a classroom trainer; there isn’t the need to pay replacement staff when the trainees have to take time off the production line or whatever.
Information retention is more effective as well; the reason for this is that regular training sessions, where staff tackle a short video chapter and answer questions, will create a “drip-drip” training consciousness that will retain facts better than a mind-blowing full day of training once a year, which is often forgotten a week later!
Of course, great classroom trainers are still worth their weight in gold, so why not capture their efforts on video?
Let's say you have an expert who travels all over the country training your employees to get better results in sales or to use a certain computer system or just to motivate and inspire.
Let's say that expert has been with you for many years, and now that expert is leaving to take a position with another company. Can you download their brain and save it as a learning tool for future employees? Well yes!
Video can preserve your trainer’s amazing presentations.
We can capture his or her teaching process to allow new trainers to see the style and content and it’ll inspire future generations of staff. While they are still on contract to you, we’d record their training presentations and visualise the content to make the videos entertaining to watch.
Of course, visiting external speakers can also for an extra fee be videoed as well to help train people who couldn’t make it to their first presentations or to remind people who did. The video can be edited down, cut into chapters, added to…the medium is so flexible!
Using Video Production Services in Marketing and Advertising
We’re all used to TV and cinema commercials; promotional or marketing videos are in essence longer versions of these.
They should “sell” and promote but in an attractive and entertaining way.
Often the script will have a traditional structure of:
- There’s a problem to be solved.
- Here’s a product and/or a service that solves the problem!
- Here’s what you have to do now!
This last section is called a “CTA” or Call To Action, and is often a phone number to call or a website to look up.
Of course, you don’t have to follow this structure at all, that’s where creativity, or as we say in media “thinking outside the box” scores.
We do know however, that case studies work particularly well on video. It’s fine to read the words of a customer who is pleased with your service or products, but to actually see the positive expressions and body language of people in case study clips, is very powerful.
Promotional videos are often duplicated on DVD, but quite often video files are encoded for streaming on clients’ websites or if “squeezed” small enough, to be e-mailed to potential customers.
TV Commercials
If you haven’t used TV advertising before, it’s important that you understand that there are strict rules about what you can and cannot say and show on TV. All scripts have to be cleared by a London-based compliance panel before it can be cleared for transmission. Sometimes “small print” has to appear on screen especially for finance adverts or where a scientific claim is made.
Also on UK network channels, there has to be a one second audio gap between TV commercials, so a 30 second advert only gives 29 seconds to say your message.
The great thing with TV commercials these days is that the campaign isn’t dead once the airtime budget is used up.
You can easily get the video loaded up onto You Tube and other similar sites and wacky or unusual ads in particular can get picked up by fans that’ll send the links to their mates. A 30 second commercial can be “squeezed” down to about 2 Mb at decent quality so that’s fine for e-mailing potential customers as well.
Advertorials
These are mini-shows with similar restrictions to commercials. Quite often they are disguised as real TV programmes, but it’s soon obvious as a viewer that they’re selling. The rules on most channels say that the caption “Commercial Presentation” has to pop up every few minutes so the poor public can’t be fooled!
Conference Videos
These fall into two sections. First, video production companies like us make videos as play-in VT’s or Video Tapes for conferences. They can have themes ranging from a description of a major new IT package the company is buying to a report from overseas branches or news about a takeover deal.
Maybe a chairman or CEO can’t be present at a conference due to a clash in the diary, so we would pre-record their speech for play-in on the day itself, which saves cash and hassle all round.
The second type of project is the filming and recording of the actual conference itself. The advantage of this is that the speakers’ presentations are put on record for reference later and can be distributed to staff that couldn’t be present or weren’t invited, again to save costs on time away from work, travel and accommodation.
An extra bonus of recording presentations at conferences is that the speakers have a superb multi-camera record of how they actually look under pressure on stage under the lights. The feedback the DVD gives them will help them improve their future performances.
The communication skills training days we hold with various executives always use video recording and playback and it’s seen as a very useful feedback tool.
Exhibition and reception area videos
We’re all drawn to moving images on video screens, it’s human nature. That’s why so many exhibition stands have a video playing on it.
The mistake so many people make is to simply play their normal corporate video on a loop on the stand. The video may have interviews and voiceover on, and after a few dozen loops, the stand holders have to turn the audio right down as it’s annoying the hell out of them…or the people from the next stand! Of course the video now makes no sense at all!
The best way to tackle exhibition videos is to re-edit them to minimise or eliminate audio and to use more striking images, animations and graphics. The same goes for “looping videos” in company reception areas or customer waiting lounges. The great selling point here is that these videos give a corporate feel to the waiting areas, they can inform customers and visitors about the latest corporate news and negates the need to have a screen showing dodgy daytime TV game shows… with commercials maybe from the company’s rivals!
Sell-through DVDs
Quite often a video production services company such as ourselves will work with a client to create a DVD which is to be sold commercially. We can advise on how to market the disks, the sort of price to put on them and if the content needs BBFC classification such as commercial DVD movies require.
Of course the packaging and labelling has to be first class for a commercially sold DVD, and a good production company can design all this material in-house, or maybe you can do this yourself. If you have image files for packaging and on-body printing, they need to be the best quality possible. Small images off your website won’t be good enough resolution.
