5 Tips For Pre-Production Success
January 24, 2018
24th January 2018 by CH
It’s not as sexy as shouting Lights, Camera, Action! but getting your head into pre-production is what you need to succeed in creating awesome video content.
Just like you wouldn’t go on a year-long trip around the world without some planning ahead, you wouldn’t start filming without having a script or a clear vision of what you want to achieve. Pre-production is where all of those things come together.
Here’s our top tips to help you get it right!
- Nail down your video brief
The video brief is the first step that everyone involved needs to know about, including your video agency. It’s where you agree all the important things like why you’re creating the video, your budget, when the deadline is or who your target audience are.
Need more help? Follow our easy step-by-step guide on writing a clear video brief.
- Define your deadlines
Having a realistic set of deadlines right from the start will save you a lot of headaches later. Once you know the final delivery date, you can work backwards to plan the project development in stages, including dates for reviewing the first cut and time to work on the amends. This ensures nobody is scrambling to shoot the whole thing and edit it in just a couple of days, which is no fun for anyone!
- It’s storytelling time
This is all about creating the script and narrative which is a collaborative and creative process between you and your video agency. Whether it’s a piece to camera or interview questions, this is a crucial part of the mix.
- Lock down the content
Another key element of pre-production is storyboarding . This outlines the exact content so you can lock down everything featured in the video. Storyboarding will help you envisage what is being produced, so you can agree everything before starting work. It also helps to determine which resources your video project needs and can help your agency when creating mood boards and design frames to start defining the look and feel of the video and give you a sneak peek of the final product.
- Use a professional
If it sounds like there’s a lot to think about and keep track of during pre-production, it’s because there is! But don’t worry, come to a production company like us
and we’ll look after you
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When Euronics came to us with a brief, it was a good one: take a true story about an extraordinary delivery and turn it into something worth watching. The Brief Joe, a Euronics delivery agent, had been tasked with getting a chest freezer to a customer in rural Wales. The road ran out. He carried on anyway, on foot, through fields, across rivers and over hills. The customer was delighted. The story deserved to be told. Euronics asked us to produce a short comedic video retelling that journey. The challenge was finding the right visual language to match the scale of the tale. The Concept We pitched several approaches centred on a comic-book aesthetic, bold, energetic and a little tongue-in-cheek. It felt like the right fit: a story that was equal parts heroic and absurd, told in a style that leaned into both. The concept paired real interview footage of Joe with AI-generated visuals to bring his journey to life. Where a traditional shoot would have required location days across Welsh countryside, generative AI gave us the tools to illustrate the story scene by scene. Creative Wrangling We filmed Joe against a studio blue backdrop, letting him tell the story in his own words. His delivery did a lot of the heavy lifting (puns intended!), dry, matter-of-fact and quietly brilliant. The AI-generated visuals were built around detailed multi-angle reference sheets for Joe, the Euronics van and the chest freezer.
Generative AI can easily open doors to help create bespoke, crafted content to elevate a video beyond the usual approaches. Recently we tested the latest AI tools to create vast scenic landscapes, humorous underwater worlds and visual effects shots for several campaigns. The tools have advanced a long way over the last few years and the barriers to creating believable or imaginative worlds are fading away all the time. Need an underwater disco full of dancing fish? Got it. A speaking anthropomorphic clown fish? Absolutely. The Key is Consistency It was key to ensure a good amount of consistency across each video. We created multi-angle reference sheets of characters and key objects and use node-based tools to link these, and additional brand references, to ensure the look was maintained throughout. The tools are now in a place where you can also direct and control the results much more closely. Camera moves, lens choices and lighting can be defined and adjusted to get closer to the image or video that you’re looking for and as the creative options expand, options for creativity within each shot expand infinitely.
