I am a member of several LinkedIn groups and recently someone posted a question.  They had made their own in-house video – and to put it bluntly, it clearly wasn't their area of expertise.  It was well, it was woeful (nice word, shame I have to use it).  And they wanted to know if people liked the video, because the guys in the office thought this was fine, and why would you pay for professional expertise when cameras are so cheap now.  So I wrote a response – and didn't post it, as it was too long and I didn't want to offend anyone (I was new to the group!).  Well I naturally have strong views on the subject, and I will pose and answer the question this raised for me here, and hopefully you'll enjoy them and find them useful.   

So here's the question (agony Aunt style):  “Dear Ben, I have a camera and some editing software, and I know how to use them;  Can I produce my own web video/advertisements in-house? Signed A B Zissman”

Dear A B, in answering this, I will give you my honest opinion.  Be warned though – I am passionate on the subject! 

First and foremost, I would answer the question as simply as possible; yes, of course you can produce your own video in house.  The question that we should really be asking I think, is should you do so.  And the answer to that is it depends how you want your brand to be viewed by your customers, your peers, and on what you want to achieve.

So here we go –

Part 1: Sound

The two basic elements anyone can name in successfully producing a video are the visuals and the audio, and the first thing that the inexperienced or the inexpert filmmaker does, pretty well every time, is forget that the audio is as important as the visuals.  Seriously, it is.  But without wanting to pick on anyone and specifically critique a particular video, I think I'll make a broader point.  There are so many thousands of videos out there, and so many more being created and uploaded all the time.  This is because from a business perspective savvy marketeers have long been in the know about the effectiveness of well made video.  However, the fact that there is a lot of noise out there means the first thing you need to do in producing your video is to cut through this noise, and for that you have to understand how to target your video, and then how to produce something that will appeal to your intended audience. 

The fact of the matter is, people switch off, or disengage from, or fail to take away and remember messaging from a video with poorly produced audio.  If you want them to listen, for goodness sakes get the sound right.  And a tip here – good post-production sound engineers will use what you do hear and what you don't hear to create the perfect effect. 

A simple rule that so many people even now don't understand - sound recording should not be done through the intrinsic camera mic.  “But what if” I hear you ask, “for aesthetic reasons I'm specifically going for the 'I made this at home' sound/feel?”  Even then, you should record the best quality sound and use post-production to create this effect, giving you maximum control, because unless you're a sound expert, you won't get the effect right on the camera mic – you'll just get people switching off!  Nor should your audio mixing be done by someone who frankly fails to recognise the importance of sound in the first place, and lacks the expertise to deliver.  If you expect someone to take the time to watch and listen to your video, make it as compelling as possible, give them a reason to watch it – but at the very least, don't give them reasons to switch it off! 

Part 2: The Visuals

And with visuals, please at least shoot at a quality that says “I care about this video”.  If you don't, we the viewers will not care either.  Yes, you can spend a couple of grand and get a decent full HD camera that shoots at 50 mb/s, but for the most part its the equivalent of buying a Ferrari Italia and putting it in the chimpanzee enclosure in the zoo.  You're asking for trouble, and the odds are they won't use it right. 

Mise-en-scene – a good phrase meaning, well a lot – essentially everything in your frame, the composition of all that you see on screen, from the lighting, the blocking – where people are stood – to the set, props – like I said, the whole shebang.  Mise-en-scene literally means “put in the scene”, and it is absolutely key to telling any compelling narrative.  It’s how you tell a story – and please believe me, everything you put on video needs a story.  So understanding why something goes where, why your actors are placed here, why there is white space there, back light here, fill light there, soft edges here – its all part of what the viewer takes in, and it is a real skill to understand and direct things to achieve this.  If you shoot in full HD (not usually needed for web delivery, but worth doing in terms of usage options) but your composition, lighting, blocking – whatever – is wrong, then you're selling your company short, because it won't work.

Lighting is important – key – to producing anything of real quality and you need to know how and why to use it, but if you are going to shoot low quality, lighting won't help much.  The equipment you use is important.  That said, its still probably only 10%, at the very most, of the battle in terms of making a video engaging.  The rest is down to the filmmaker(s).

I told you I was passionate about this, so you'll have to forgive me.

Part 3: The Presenter and the Voiceover

An interjection here might well be; “But surely Ben, a simple talking head video can be produced in-house?”  (I crowbarred this in here as the video which prompted this post was a talking head video).
 
If you're going for a very basic model of video, such as the talking head, the presenter needs to communicate through the screen directly to the viewer.  Using people from within your business can be a good idea.  BUT if you can't help them out with some nice visuals, a strong sound mix, a tight, engaging and succinct script, you need someone with immense charisma and a good director to help them through it, or a trained professional.  It simply isn't fair to ask someone to pull it off if it isn't their forte, and certainly not if the production values are so low that much of your audience isn't listening anyway. 

Common problems for non-professional presenters;

1) “Acting” - they will try and act, look like they are acting, and become clownish.
2) Remembering – if they have a script they need to learn, they will often look like they are remembering lines from it.
3) Delivery – it takes training, and more importantly years of practice, to become proficient as a presenter or voice over artist.  If someone tells you they are the exception to this rule – trust me, they aren't.
4) Autocue – reading from an Autocue is not as easy as it sounds.  Amateurs will tend to struggle with the combination of concentrating, delivering with the correct emphasis and appearing natural and at ease.

Part 4:  The Conclusion

In a time of austerity, I completely understand why you might want to produce your own video rather than pay out for expertise, but I would say this; if it’s for your business, do it properly, and the minimum here is to use these sort of forums to get the right advice from experts.  And I feel I must ask – why would you spend 5 or 6 days doing video when it isn't your core skillset?  That's time you could be working with your customers, refining your own processes – or if you're like me, sitting back with a cold beer after 6 o'clock!  Don't waste your time getting to a place where you're producing “not-as-bad-as-it-could-be” video, when you could be spending it more valuably.  If you like playing with a flip cam or handycam, play about with it at home – it isn't good business, on the whole.  For example, I'm not an expert cameraman, so I don't do camera work on our videos.  I could, because I'm pretty good at it.  But I don't and shouldn't. 

All of that said, if you're going to do it yourself, ask for some advice, I and my fellow producers here at MWS are always happy to provide helpful advice.  As a 5 point technical plan to getting it closer to right, here is what I would advise for anyone thinking of shooting in-house video – as a bare minimum.

1) Buy a camera that at least gives you a quality that shows you care about the end product.
2) Record the sound using an external condenser mic – the sound of the whirring camera screams “we didn't put much effort into this!”  When you use something amateur to represent your business, it's dangerous territory.
3) No cut points and reading awkwardly from a script is being unnecessarily cruel to the presenter.  One seemingly random cut point often says “I'm covering a mistake”.  Even iMovie lets you cut and edit effectively.
4) Any effect, such as desaturation or going fully black and white for no apparent reason doesn't make your video any more classy.  Any amateur with a home video camera has done this for a laugh – don't make your business a laughing stock.
5) Don't start the camera rolling until you have carefully targeted the video and know exactly; what you're going to shoot, why, and how you're going to measure the results (asking colleagues, friends and family if it's good doesn't count!).  Otherwise, you're probably going to waste your time.

In summary: A B, yes you can shoot video yourself.  And no, you probably shouldn't.

Ben

In my blog post last week I talked about recording the audio for our latest feature film, which is a completely improvised film with no script, just characters who meet at a tree in a field and essentially have a completely unscripted conversation. Even we didn’t know what they were going to say and our job was to record it, which as you can imagine was a bit of a mission!

We placed multiple mics around the location itself and the two actors also wore lapel mics that were discreetly hidden under the tops they were wearing. The lapel mics were initially considered more of a backup solution, just in case the other mics didn’t pick up clearly enough the dialogue. However when importing and syncing the eight different mic sources it became clear that while the six mics placed around the location had captured the dialogue cleanly, none of them had captured the level of detail the lapel mics were giving us.

Before importing and syncing the audio sources I’d imagined we’d be using a blend of mic sources to create the final mix itself, but there were phasing issues, and the sources themselves sounded too different from each other to easily swap back and forth between different mics. It would’ve been a bit of a nightmare trying to select the best source for each line, then also have to try and EQ each mic so that they all sounded cohesive and natural to listen to.

The other option was to simply pick the best source, which was clearly the lapel mics, and to work harder on getting those to sound as good as they can. For the most part this method makes it a lot easier to achieve more, faster. I applied simple compression, EQ and basic gates to each lapel mic source and then proceeded to listen though to the tracks individually, adjusting the setting for the inserts as and when each required it. After approximately fifteen to twenty minutes I’d heard as much as I was going to in terms of range of dynamics and volume, so I was confident the setting of the compressors, EQ’s and gates would be good enough to do the job of keeping the sound mix of the film under control.

The next step was to painstakingly go through the two tracks individually again, picking out all of the pops, clicks, interference and general rustle and noise on each lapel mic track. For some reason one mic was particularly prone to interference noise, while the other was more prone to clicks and pops? Either way, I used good old-fashioned cut and paste techniques to cover up any noises I didn’t want to hear. There were lots of moments of silence between the actor’s dialogue where I was able to steal snippets of “silence” to paste over random clicks and pops.

The actors were also sat close enough to be able to dip the volume of one mic and bring up the other mic momentarily, where I needed to cover a click or pop that occurred when an actor was speaking.

Probably the biggest challenge is wind and plane noise. It’s random, can sometimes completely cover a line of dialogue if its loud enough, and worst of all happens just when you don’t want it to! I used EQ as best as possible to reduce the level of wind and plane noise during dialogue, but ultimately in the end we decided that the rustic, gorilla feel that we took to the film meant that leaving some wind and plane noise in actually brought quite a nice texture to the sound mix, especially considering there is nothing else to listen to in the whole feature other than two actors speaking. The film is actually sometimes more about the silence between the lines than the lines themselves as well. Because the actors were improvising every line, there are a lot of beautiful silent sections where you can see the characters thinking about how to respond to what’s just been said. And so all those little things that make up the audio soundscape of the field they were in at the time, the birds, the trees, planes flying overheard, wind, rustle of clothing during movement, these are all the things that make it actually quite an interesting listen as a sound track, rather than simply tidying the whole thing up, whacking some music and audio sfx here and there and just giving audiences exactly what they expected to hear.

We hope it’s a nice refreshing change if and when you ever view the film, to know that every moment you see, and in particular hear, was a natural, organic moment created by the two actors as their characters, and everything you hear is exactly how it happened on the day of filming itself as well.

Phil

So you might have noticed a little thing called the ALS ice bucket challenge … ok you probably can’t escape it. Love it or loath it though the ice bucket challenge highlights several important points.

- It further confirms video as the preferred medium, especially on social.
- It proves content doesn’t need to be expensive and complex.
- It shows that user generated content is successful.

Your social feeds are probably full like ours right now with thousands of videos of your friends, family and celebrities dumping ice water on their heads. Most are around 10 seconds long and in Facebook's case auto play when you scroll past. How has that resulted in the ice bucket challenge going viral? Well watching Victoria Beckham, your best mate and your mum chuck water over their heads is entertaining, easy to do and provides a challenge. The desire to get involved, peer pressure of nominations and simplicity of participation has lead to thousands of people completing the ice bucket challenge, hearing about ALS and has raised millions for the cause.

How does this relate to me and business?

Well according to the Content Marketing Institute, 60% of businesses plan to spend more on content marketing this year. As our appetites for content seem to be growing more and more insatiable, user generated content such as user generated video is a viable option to add to your strategy. There are several ways you could use UGV:



- Testimonials

- Product Reviews

- Support and Customer Care

- HR and Recruiting
- Events

- Video Contests

- Ideas and Improvement Suggestions

But most importantly remember when devising your strategies to consider how your campaign is going to make people want to get involved, what they get from doing it and how simple it is to participate. For example running a video contest to create a new advert? Give a long enough entry period for people to produce quality content and offer prizes (which don’t have to be monetary; free stuff, meeting a celebrity, exclusive tickets or that advert going on TV can be even more desirable). Asking for ideas and improvement suggestions? Maybe the winner gets the new product free of charge and before anyone else?



As always comments and questions are welcome!

I’ll leave you with the MWS Media Ice Bucket Challenge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlYUehxcp0Q

Hayley