When asked to produce a video for the opening of our applications I was initially concerned knowing that I had to make a very professional video under tight project constraints. The deadline was one month and the budget was $15. With the right plan and tools, our first video for the Unreasonable Institute, “Searching for Unreasonable People,” was completed on time and $.01 under budget.
Looking back I realized many things were done the hard way so the following tips were created to help you move more efficiently towards an Unreasonably awesome video for under $15.
Why Have a Video: Having a video is a way to quickly tell people what you do and get them excited about it. By piquing their interest with a video you can gain more attention for your work.
Storyboard it: Before you start spending countless hours tinkering around on a computer, take the time to create a basic story or outline of your video. What message are you trying to get across? What images do you want to use? How will the whole thing flow together? For this video the storyboard process took about 2 weeks.
Creative genius? I think not: You don’t have to be an expert in video design to make a video that looks awesome. To get the creative juices flowing scan YouTube for videos that you like and use some of their techniques. Some of our inspiration came from The Girl Effect and Enviu.
Find Music That Fits: Choosing the right music will make or break your video. Choose something that fits the mood, look and tempo of your video. Be sure to pick a song with no words in it as they will take away from your message.
Shorter is Better: When take-one of the video was finished I was proud to have squeezed it down to 3:45. My team quickly pointed out that the video could say the same thing in half the amount of time. By doing this more people would watch it the full way through. The basic axiom? Shorter is better. Aim for less than 2 minutes.
Be Relentlessly Picky: We were steadfast in making sure that each word, each frame, looked exactly as we wanted it. Repetitive items were removed, colors of words were changed to make sure the correct ones stood out, and timing was edited down to the one-tenth of a second. While the miniscule details can become frustrating for the producer, they will make your video look immensely more professional.
Tools We Used: By far the most helpful technology that we found was Jing. It captures a picture or video of your computer screen and is ridiculously easy to use (I recommend the Pro Version, which costs $14.99 for a year subscription but gives you much better video quality). To create the images we used Adobe Illustrator, but in all honestly, you can design images in any basically any program, including Word, and it will look great thanks to Jing. Another awesome (and free) tool to use is Prezi, which allowed for all of the movement in the video. The audio was edited on Apple’s GarageBand, but if you don’t have access to that you can just pick a song that doesn’t need to be edited. All of the aspects were pulled together on iMovie.
If you have created an Unreasonably awesome video, we’d love to see it in the comments section below!
