Your Complete Video Production Cheat Sheet

In today’s day and age, people want dynamic content that’s short, crisp, and can be gobbled up on the go. Videos fit these criteria perfectly! Video marketing has multiple benefits for your business – increasing your search rankings, offering a more engaging way of showcasing your product, and boosting brand engagement. Some studies show that video traffic will dominate the consumer internet traffic by up to 80% by 2021! For this reason, businesses everywhere are adopting video-based communications to engage with clients, consumers and employees.

For the uninitiated, the thought of making a video can be daunting. Where do we start? What’s the first step? How to see it through? All valid concerns, of course. Given the dynamic nature of videos and fast evolving technologies around it, it’s hard to keep track of the latest trends in video making . To top it, videos come in so many shapes and sizes – from a full blown TVC to the AVs that present stats at board meetings. Script. Animation. Live action. Music. Voice overs. *Gulp!*

We have come up with a simple and comprehensive cheat sheet to give you an overview of the video production process.

Let’s imagine, just for a moment, that a video is like a baby. (Well, technically it is your baby, isn’t it?) From the baby’s birth (the inception of an idea) to it turning into an adult (when the video is ready to go out and face the world), it needs a lot of nurturing, care and planning to raise it right. A video is no different… except that it doesn’t take 18 years to grow up, thank God!

Step 1: Briefing

Before your video can open its eyes and blink at the first ray of light (ahem.. Read: iteration), the first step is to chart out a vision for the video – what you want your video to achieve and the one key message you want to convey. Once you have this vision in place, it is just as important to communicate this well to your video partner (the production team) so that they can nurture your baby right.

Step 2: Ideation

Here onward, all the heavy lifting is done by your video partner. And once a brief from you is in place, their next step is to brainstorm, brainstorm and brainstorm! Ideation is the most essential process to find the perfect way to tell the world your story. Think of it as the video partner finding the best school for your baby.

And after sifting through multiple content plans, discarded and reinvented concepts and treatment references (…a few sleepless nights and endless cups of coffee), that one perfect route is found! Now, while you sit back and picture your video getting all the accolades it deserves, your video partner is ready to kick off pre-production. 

Step 3: Pre-production

You know all those years of planning done, investments made, tantrums tolerated by parents so the baby can grow up and be successful – well, the pre-production phase is kind of like those growing up years, except crunched into a handful of days. Does that sound a little scary? Well, you gotta clean the poo now so they thank you in their graduation speeches, right!

Pre-production is the most important part of any video production process. This is when the script is developed, the visual storytelling style is locked on, and depending on the format of your video, everything from casting, location scouting, graphics development, music production, storyboarding to crew onboarding is done. All hands in the video production process work closely together. Trust us when we say this – a sound pre-production pretty much ensures 80% of your video’s success.

Step 4: Production

Finally! Lights, Camera, Action! Anybody who has ever been on a shoot will tell you that this is the most fun part of a video production process. All the buzz, all the excitement, there’s a different energy rushing through everyone’s veins on set. It’s like witnessing an orchestra – all the notes, tunes, instruments just coming together in perfect harmony making you dance to it.

Thanks to a super efficient pre-production process, half of the work is already done. So now, your video partner just spends some quality fun time with the baby and let’s the creative juices flow!

Step 5: Post Production

*Drumrolls* We are in the endgame now. The final step. Consider this your child’s dissertation, after which your child is ready to go and conquer the world. A general perception around post-production is that it’s all about editing. Nope! Nada! Nuh-uh! Post production is an umbrella term for a whole host of processes – editing, animation, music incorporation, colour correction, voice overs and dubbing – everything to make your video look top notch! 

This stage usually involves multiple drafts of the video wherein your video partner stitches it together with your support in the form of feedback and reviews. Sometimes, it takes a ridiculously short time to finish it while other times it can take days. However, the hack is to be patient because at the end of it all, when your video is finally ready… well, it’s a bit of a tear-jerking moment. *wipes the eyes*

And so, your baby is now an adult – ready to go out and make waves on the internet! A video helps you achieve 4X more engagement for your products than any other form of content. So you can sit back and reap the benefits of all the effort and time invested in creating this video.

Video is the future. And with the correct amount of planning, right associations, and the best production team, you can create any video to suit the needs of your business. If ever you feel a bit daunted or unsure of the next steps, you always have this cheat sheet to fall back on.

While you’re on here, don’t forget to check out our portfolio of work.