As an emerging producer, it’s essential to hone your craft to create high-quality videos. This in turn can help you establish yourself in the video-making industry and build your reputation.
Your job as a producer is to ensure that the entire video-making process is as smooth as possible. As such, it’s important to be aware of common mistakes made by other newbies and to learn from them. Polishing up your production skills will also allow your crew and team members to perform at their best too.
Here are the top five video production mistakes to be aware of and try to avoid.
1. Poor Production Planning
Creating an effective video for your brand will require a great deal of planning. This is so that you end up with a video that has high production values and looks professional. As such, poor planning can lead to having a low-quality production that could affect your brand reputation.
The best way to plan the production of your video is to organize a meeting with all the parties involved. This includes scriptwriters, talent agents, and videographers. You can see here that outsourcing production services can also be a good option for your planning and filming. In either case, you’ll need to gather experts and plan every aspect of your video. A detailed video treatment can help you find the most ideal approach to achieve your vision for your content.
2. Making Videos With An Unclear Objective
This could be the most important decision of your video- it’s the reason why you’re making the video in the first place. Before you can showcase a video to your audience, you need to decide what is the goal of the video. For example, it can be to build your brand as a producer or to get consumers to purchase a product.
Making a video with an unclear objective runs the risk of your video not getting any valuable attention or engagement. If audiences are confused or uncertain about what to gain from your video, they might dismiss it. One way to avoid this is to tailor the messaging of your video to your target viewers. Additionally, you can write an exciting screenplay that will help you focus on the story you want the video to tell.
3. Taking Post Production For Granted
Once the video has been filmed, it’ll need to go in for post-production, also known as video editing. This is where mistakes are corrected and excellent shots are enhanced. This stage gives the video its final touches to finalize and mark it as complete. However, many emerging producers overlook post-production because it’s mostly taken care of by other experts.
There’s a limit to how much a video can be edited, even with the most advanced software tools. Due to this, post-production should be planned for and kept in mind before and during your filming. For instance, if the sound quality and lighting of the shots are poor, it might not be fixable to your suitability. As such, you should plan to film editable footage during the prep stage.
4. Making Videos Too Long
The days of audiences watching 5-10 minutes of video are over for the most part. In this current digital era, attention spans have gotten shorter. This is mainly due to consumers feeling overwhelmed by the volume of media messages they’re exposed to every day. What this means for your video planning is that you should aim to keep your videos as concise as possible.
You can prevent your videos from being too long by focusing on the objective or purpose of the video. From there, think of ways to get your message out as briefly as you can make it. The general rule for video length depends on the type of video you’re making and where it’ll be viewed. Social media videos can be between 9–15 seconds. For video streaming platforms you can stretch it up to 60 seconds provided that the video stays entertaining and engaging.
5. Not Utilizing The Correct Video Platform
Where your video will be shown is a key strategic choice that will impact on its success. If you choose the incorrect platform to show your content, it could be ignored or the intended audience won’t see it. Thus, you’ll need to research what platform is most frequently visited by your target consumers.
In this case, you can make use of cross-platform marketing as long as you modify the video for each platform. You can use snippets of the original video for social media and then put the full video on the video streaming player. For online video advertising, you can create loop videos to continuously play as the audience browse a website. Whichever site you decide on, make sure it generates a lot of web traffic from your specific consumer base.
Conclusion:
You can avoid common video production mistakes by following the above tips. It’s also useful to be aware of some of your own habits that you may have developed and that need correcting. Furthermore, don’t be afraid to consult and learn from industry leaders.
