Last week, I shared the first of our Creating Video Content series. I shared all about the equipment we use to produce basic videos for our blog. Today, I’m sharing with you some insight on how to choose a topic and plan accordingly to execute your video in a timely manner.
Video takes a lot of time to not only create, but to edit. In order to maximize your time you must start with a good plan.
Choose a topic.
Ask yourself, what is your objective? What do you want your readers to get from your video? Do you want to teach them how to cut a piece of wood? Or how to build a piece of furniture? You’ll want to keep your video tutorials to a minimum of 3-5 minutes long. Think about it and figure out if you can break up the video into a series of shorter videos. Maybe you start by filming a video on how to cut wood, then film another video on who to Kreg jig furniture together, and the third video in the series you recap on what you taught in the last two videos and then put together your piece of furniture. This is a great way to split up the video instead of having a 15 minute long video show how to do all these different ideas.
You want your video to have a clear and concise beginning, middle, and end.
Make a plan.
Now that you’ve chosen your topic(s) you want to plan out exactly how you envision your video shoot to go.
Making an outline is very helpful! It doesn’t have to be beautiful pictures—I don’t draw I just write down what we want to shoot. Sometimes if we are really lazy we just talk about it; however, we then have to talk about it scene by scene. Which typically tends to eat up more time.
When you make a plan it will…
- Reduce your time when creating your video
- What you’ll want to focus on when making an outline
- Do you have a provided intro and outro from the brand. Include those in your outline.
- Talk about the sequence of filming. Sometimes when we film we don’t always film in sequence. If we have 2 shots in the garage and 4 in the bathroom. Instead of moving equipment back and forth from the garage to the bathroom we will film both scenes in the garage and then film the rest in the bathroom. Of course that only works depending on the project.
You also want to think about what you need to say on camera.
- Try and keep it conversational like your talking with a friend!
- Be cautious of saying too many “umms”
- We’ve found that when you memorize a script it takes way longer. We try to steer away from this unless a brand has something that they want us to say. In the case of our homes.com videos we have a scripted intro and outro. At first it took us a long time to say the intros and outros. Now we are pros and can do it with our eyes closed and in our sleep!
I hope you found these tips helpful. Next week, we will share different video styles to get you prepared and ready to film!
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