If you’ve been following our blog posts, you will know by now the benefits of choosing video production for your events. Doing so can:
Show off your brand personality
Give potential customers a reason to choose you
Give current customers a reason to stick with you
Be used for future marketing
Create content for months ahead
Create an emotional connection with your audience
If you choose to film an event you’re running yourself, check out these top tips to make sure it’s a success.
You can’t start filming without some sort of idea of how you plan to edit the final version. Planning ahead will help you to hone in on key moments that you know will make the finished cut. When filming events, we at Peak Fable like to choose a montage style, although, of course, we will happily go with a preference if our clients have one.
A montage video is basically a condensed version of the entire event, capturing all of the best bits. It’s a mash-up of live action, smiling faces, funny moments, and a great backing soundtrack. However just because you’re choosing a montage style, doesn’t mean you aren’t telling a story. Just like any good story, you need to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
It’s always a good idea to capture the build-up to any event, starting slowly in order to build a tempo before reaching the final crescendo. This part of the event video is a great opportunity to show behind-the-scenes footage that viewers absolutely love. You want to capture the anticipation and excitement, and important elements like the surroundings before it gets crowded, particularly if they are scenic.
You can choose to do some short interviews, asking people as they arrive why they have chosen to attend. This is great for future marketing campaigns and for social media clips later on. The idea is to encourage the viewer to keep watching, to make them feel like they want to see what happens next.
The middle is naturally where all the action is, it’s the main highlight of the day. This is your biggest opportunity to grab attention. The middle needs to capture excitement, joy, sadness, and heartache if necessary and depending on the event type. It needs to capture relief and pride, but most importantly, it needs to capture emotion. If you can’t connect with your audience at this point, you’ve already lost the game.
Make sure you film sponsors, stallholders, entertainers, and all of the stuff that happens in the periphery of the main event itself, so that people understand the whole picture. If it pours down with rain, don’t try to hide it, instead, find the children squealing in delight, splashing in puddles. Find the grown-ups laughing as they run for cover. If you can, use drones to capture ariel shots too. The middle is such an important section of the event video, so do whatever you can to make this part shine.
The end is actually your beginning. How you finish your event video will decide how your next event starts, it will either encourage or discourage future attendees from buying tickets. By now your video would have built to a crescendo, but it’s here you need to slowly bring the tempo down. Depending on the event, you might want to throttle it right down to a dreamy exit, or you might find that keeping that high temp going fits instead. What’s important is what you capture.
The end is all about showing how much fun was had by all who attended. This is the part when you want to capture those end-of-the-day interviews, with revellers all too keen to share their happiness and tell you how much they can’t wait to come next time. If you’re not doing interviews, that’s fine, the story works just as well by capturing emotions instead. Perhaps this is a sporting event and runners are lying on the ground, wiping sweat from their brows, but clearly evident they’ve had the time of their lives. However you choose to do it, just make sure you focus on the fact that the end result was achieved.
There’s a lot more that needs to go into video production for an event than people realise, as we’re sure you can see from reading this post. It’s imperative that you get it right, so, if you’re not sure you can take on such a big responsibility, consult with a professional video production company instead. Marketing in your future is worth the investment, and might not be as costly as you think.
We hope you found this post useful, please reach out to us if you would like to know more about the video services we offer instead of going it alone.