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The 3 Ingredients of Successful Video Production

Here at Envisuals, we’ve produced hundreds of videos, and our experience has shown us that there are three vital ingredients for successful video production. 

This applies to any type of commercial video production – training videos, demo videos or marketing videos. It doesn’t matter what type of video you’re producing, if you skip one of these ingredients, you won’t get the results you want.

Ingredient 1:

strategic understanding

You need to understand why you’re producing the video. What is its purpose, who will see it, and where will it be seen?

  • Who? This is the change to think through who you really want to watch your video – what is going to engage their interest? What’s their baseline understanding, and what does the video need to explain, in order for it to make sense?
  • Where? What’s the best place to show your video? Where are your target audience most likely to see and engage with it?
  • Why? What’s the purpose of the video – to train, entertain, inform, educate or persuade? What’s your call-to-action? What do you want your audience to do after they’ve watched your video?

Once you’ve figured this out, you’re in a position to decide on the best format for the video – length, resolution, frame shape, and visual format (whether it’s film, animation, etc). At this point, you may realise that you need more than one video, to cater for different audiences or platforms. 

You also need to consider how the video will fit in with other communication or marketing that are being implemented.

Ingredient 2:

creativity

To engage your audience, your video needs to feel fresh and unique. Even if you’ve got a ground-breaking message, without an injection of creativity in the way it’s communicated, it’ll feel dull.

Anybody can come up with a creative idea. But it takes skill and experience to come up with something which fits with the strategic aims of the video, and is practical on the budget available. 

The creativity stage might involve research into the latest trends or it might involve coming up with a brand new style. 

The aim of the creative stage is to come up with a clear concept for the video. This might involve style mockups, mood-boards, or test sequences. It might also involve identifying the ‘talent’ that will feature in the video, such as presenters, actors or narrators.

Overall, it’s important to work out the best feel and tone of the video, so that its implementation is both appropriate, engaging and effective.

Ingredient 3:

Technical Production Skills

Producing video content takes time and skill. This might involve:

  • Directing filming in way that will work in the edit
  • Camerawork, lighting, and high-quality sound recording
  • Directing people who aren’t used to being on camera 
  • Logging, transcoding and ingesting footage
  • Editing skills
  • Animation skills
  • Motion graphics, compositing
  • Titles, idents and lower thirds
  • Sound design and music editing
  • Subtitling & Captions

These skills are vital to creating a professional video which enhances your audience’s impression of you.

Digital technology means that anybody can film and edit a video on their phone – and sometimes this will be sufficient. But for most creative concepts, it requires significant levels of skill and production experience.

bringing it all together

It’s tempting to focus attention on just one area, depending on what excites you most.

You might have a really powerful creative idea, but without the right technical skills, you won’t be able to pull it off. And without the right strategy, it probably won’t do what you need. 

You might really understand the strategic importance of a video, and how it will fit in with your campaign… but without the creativity and production skills, you won’t get very far.

Or you might be a budding filmmaker, keen to try out your new camera and editing software; but without the right strategy or creative concepts, you’ll probably waste your time.

Here at Envisuals, we can support our clients with all three areas, so we can fill in the gaps of exactly what they need….

  • We can help work through the strategic aims of the video, and seek to understand your audience. 
  • We offer a creative ideation service where our creative team research and develop a fresh concept for your video.
  • Our in-house production team can film, animate and edit with all the technical skills to produce high-quality professional video content.