You have 8 seconds. How are you going to make a corporate video that drives sales? The simplest narrative storyline is by answering: who, what, when, where and why.
Narrative Storytelling Videos
At Maxime Photo and Video we don’t miss an opportunity to increase sales with a narrative video. 8 seconds is enough time to turn a bounce rate into video strategy. Don’t just edit pretty clips of your products or services, let us help you answer potential client or consumer’s questions, albeit unknowingly. Always be directing the funnel.
Grant (our genius Art Director at Maxime’s) and I (me, Tracy) were creating a fresh “above the fold” video for our homepage – something to show off our work. Quick website video tip. If you don’t know anything about website page speed load time and SEO, an “above the fold” video on a homepage needs to be short, so it can load quickly.
Concept Development
Without a strategic video concept you have a big fat waste of time and $. Every marketing video is all about the concept development.
Grant asked, “what story can we tell in such a short time?” I said, “well, it’s not a wordy one because there’s no audio.” And Grant responded, “well remember, the tried and true, simplest story is who, what when where and why.”
Our concept development often stems from the history of design elements. In this case, we used the “small multiple.” We wanted to give our potential clients the option of choosing what type of our work relates to them.
History of the Small Multiple
Bernd and Hilla Becher, renowned German artists, created a body of artworks that were presented in small multiples. They were captured from the same camera angle, and displayed in the same size, side by side. Say you wanted to build a water tower for your town, you could look at their work and say, “I like this feature here, and this feature there.” Making you the curator or expert. The viewer has the choice of what to look at – pick what you like.
For starters, we reviewed our recent work, and identified our fav 100 video clips. (We love to show off our camera movement, because camera movement is the boss-ass bitch of video production.) As our Directors of Photography are already the best in town, it’s safe to say, our video footage is already pretty, well lit and in focus.
Next, we talked over and tested a few ideas, to see, “how we could present our answers creatively?” By splitting the screen we could deliver a lot more information in such a short time. We discussed splitting the screen in two and four, but 9 blocks is much more of a eye pleasing design.
You can see our 8 second video here.
The original Thomas Crown Affair film, used small multiples below. I’m telling ya – good video marketing is ALL about the concept development and knowing the history of design.
Want to learn more, contact us today to find out how we can help you.