Professional videos come in all different lengths, styles, and with varying messages. While videos can be as different as the creative brain power behind them, they actually have more in common than what might initially meet the eye. Each client, project, and their end goals are undoubtedly unique, but there are a few phases that almost every high-end video will progress through. From the creative development process through post production, we’ll dive into the various steps of the video production process below.
Consultation
When you choose a full service video production company for your project, you’ll most likely be with them from the inception of your first ideas to the final product. During the consultation stage, we sit down with you and discuss your goals and how video can help you achieve them. What’s the purpose of the video you want? What’s the creative needed to tell your story effectively? What’s your budget? What’s your end goal?
It’s in our best interest to give maximum value to our client while maintaining our production standards. Our goal is to discuss how to achieve a high ROI with your video objectives and deliver the final creative video content with style and purpose. We don’t want to only deliver high-quality video content, but also a purposeful service and an overall experience to help the brands we collaborate with grow.
Pre-production/creative development
This is where a lot of the preparation and creative development for the project comes in. Developing your video production creative brief thoroughly and accurately will give you the best foundation for success. Strategic planning and properly investing in the budget at this stage greatly increases the client’s ROI and ensures a smooth production process. With budget in place, we allocate the resources to the various areas of the video production best fit for the project. Our goal is to scale the creative accordingly based on the budget while maximizing quality and production value.
In this stage we’ll map out what we want to film, how we’ll approach it, and a rough timeline of the project and delivery. Storyboarding can come in useful in this stage—picturing what shots you want and how you want your subjects to look in them will help streamline the process on the day of the shoot and ensure you get the shots you need. Setting delivery dates for various parts of the video will also help the production process stay on time and on budget.
Depending on your project, there might also be script writing, location scouting, and casting to address at this point. These will typically be the last aspects of the video creative brief to decide on, as your overall story and budget will help dictate what resources are needed and feasible. An easy way you can think of this stage is the zoning, permitting, and blueprinting of building a house. Just like a well-drafted blueprint, a clear and detailed pre-production plan will send a project off for success.
Production
This is primarily the shooting day(s) or principal photography as it’s called in the world of video production. This is where everything we’ve prepped for comes together to execute the vision decided upon in the initial consultation and pre-production phases. This stage usually involves at least one full day (8-10 hours), but can span multiple days of producing and filming.
The importance of pre-production and fully developed creative brief really comes into play here. Time on location can be wasted or you might not have enough time budgeted if there wasn’t a clear game plan created beforehand. We’ve witnessed clients not plan accordingly and waste valuable production dollars only because they didn’t invest the time on the front end to have a clear and actionable production schedule. This phase of the video production process is where we see clients pushing, or going over, their budget due to lack of planning.
Thorough preparation and planning can help this phase run smoothly. Conversely, lack of preparation or changes in the plan last-minute can balloon production times and cost. Although this stage can be exciting because it’s where the fruits of the pre-production labor come to life, it’s also where things can get messy if you’re not prepared. Time is literally money here and your video production company should be there to ensure things are done right to save you money with excellent preparation and contingency plans.
Post-production
We edit the video to align with your goals, creative brand story, and vision. We try to inject as much personality into your video as we can to help make it unique to your brand. We’ll generally do a basic rough cut for the client preview/sign off with up to two rounds of revisions, then a final cut with final music selection, color correcting, and final revisions for the polished project. Ideally, your video production company will be involved throughout this process, whether that’s with visual effects, voice overs, or music selection/scoring. It’s our job to communicate and style what you need to achieve the final video desired.
Hiring a video production company that’s confident in achieving the creative and is agile in their approach is key. Having a team that can maneuver and push through obstacles to deliver video content above and beyond what the client asked for is priceless. There are many unknown variables and surprises that can be thrown into the mix during production. It’s important to make sure enough production support is budgeted and time isn’t wasted on the days filming.
Cutting corners in the beginning can cost you big-time once things are put in motion, so be weary of video production companies with false confidence who are willing to execute higher-concept creative videos with a lack of production support and budget. Nothing is more accurate in the video production business than the saying, “If it’s too good to be true, then it’s just that.”
