Slow video is dead.
Back in the day, brands would spend a big chunk of cash on a single video that took weeks or months to make.
Teams would agonise over every detail, rounds (and rounds) of changes were made, and much midnight oil was burned to make fancy awards' submission deadlines.
The rise of online video marketing changed all of that.
The question brands now need to ask is: How can we produce a high volume of good quality video content?
Internet users spent almost seven hours a week watching video in 2019, and 54% of consumers want to see more video from brands or businesses they support.
With newsfeeds moving at the speed of a thumb flick, you need to produce a lot of videos – and fast – to stay visible.
So here are three tips for producing fast video:
Before anyone presses record, make sure you're clear on the intended outcome of your video series.
Who is your target audience and what changes after they watch these videos? How do you want them to think, feel and act differently? What could you show them that would produce this result?
It helps to define the problem you're trying to solve.
Let's say you've introduced a new way of working at your company. How could an internal video series improve adoption of the new system? Are some staff members still confused about how the system works? Are others actively avoiding using it?
Once you understand the problem, you can design a video series to produce a better result.
In Absa's cybersecurity video series, the objective was to combat cybercrime over the festive season.
The problem Mann Made defined was that many customers don't know the common techniques used by scammers. Our solution was to create an entertaining series in the style of a mentalist reality show, to show how common scams work.
To make a fast video, you need a low maintenance show format.
This means that once you've designed the concept and structure of the show, a junior team should be able to roll out episodes with minimum supervision.
The fast video should require minimal – if any – scripting.
Filmed interviews or conversations are perfect for this format. Try to write a list of questions or topics that can be reused in each episode. In this way, variety is created through the different people you feature in each episode, rather than through time-consuming scriptwriting.
If some scripting is necessary, make sure the formula is clearly defined and easy to repeat.
In the advice video series for Creators Live, Mann Made created a simple episode format:
To make a fast video, you need to build a production machine that can pump out content without any strain on your resources.
The secret? Batch production tasks together.
This means shooting three to five episodes in one afternoon, back-to-back. It means doing all the graphic elements for your series in one go. And it means the edit suite must operate like a factory production line, not an artiste's studio.
(If any of the above sounds unrealistic to you, you need to further simplify your episode format.)
For SingularityU South Africa's Exponential Africa YouTube show, Mann Made shoots up to eight episodes per day. When show host Mic Mann attends a conference, he schedules as many back-to-back interviews as possible while the speakers are all in one place.
The result is that the production can capture a full season of world-class content in just a few hours.
