Tips to shoot and edit videos for your story or product
by Dufa Staff | 5 September 2020
This is a basic guide for tips to shoot and edit videos for your story or product. You can upload this video on your store page to engage with your customers.
Video is a powerful way to communicate your brand story and build relationships with your customers. Including a story or product video on your page can dramatically increase your conversions and is also more likely to show up in Google search.
Plan:
To get started, you need to create a plan of what you would like to showcase to your customers or how you would tell your story. You can upload a video to either tell your story or show the scenes behind creating your products or to showcase a new product in your line. It could also be a story about an achievement or a promotional ad/video that you may advertise on other channels.
Once you have decided what kind of video you want to upload, you need to come up with a draft of questions of the outcome you would like to get from the video. Example: If it’s your story, you need to answer questions such as “When you started?”, “What motivate you?” or “What you actually do?” and “What’s the impact?”
If your video is about your product, then you need to answer questions such as “How is it made?”, “How is it useful?”, “Setups or scenarios where and how you can use it”, “What are the variations?” and any other useful and interesting points such as “Where you source the product from, or your inspiration behind the particular product”.
Format:
Once you know what kind of video you are creating, you need to decide the format of your video.
- Narrative: This video is more like you are talking and explaining your story or product. You can weave it with narrations from your team and workers or also include interviews from happy customers towards the end.
- Voice over: In this type of video, you can show your work area, you products and do a voice over of your story or products without showing your team or you in the video actually talking. Make sure you show relevant pictures as you are doing your voice over to make a compelling story.
- Titles and captions: If you would like to do a video without any voice over or narrations, you can simply have titles and captions within each frame and play a background music.
Write the Script:
It’s always better to write the script before you shoot. Your videos need to convey your message and meet your goals in a short span of time. So, writing the script can be helpful to get the layout, props and length of the video right.
- Keep your videos concise and to the point: Surveys show that nearly two-thirds of consumers prefer videos that are under 60 seconds. Approximately 10 to 15 images or video clips will result in a video that’s a minute long.
- Videos for Facebook: If you’re creating a video that will go on Facebook as well, remember that viewers need to click to hear audio so think if your video is able to capture attention without sound within the first few seconds.
- Branding: While writing the script, think about your brand and how you will incorporate it in the script and video. You want the video to be recognizable as coming from you, so make sure you include the logo, your brand colors.
Gather your props, assets:
You need to gather all your props, assets per your script well in advance before the shoot. While you’re gathering the assets you already have, also grab a high-resolution logo for branding purposes and any images you would like to include from the past – your products or video clips.
Shoot and Edit the Video:
You can easily shoot quality photos and HD video clips using your smartphone or any other camera. Here are some tips to shoot your video:
- Lighting: Make sure the room is well lit and you have professional lighting setup if you do not have a good source of natural light. Make sure you are not getting unwanted shadows, use reflectors or diffusers.
- Steady videos: Make sure your videos are steady, using a tripod will help achieve getting steady videos and shots.
- Audio: If you are narrating in the video, make sure you are shooting in a quiet place with no background noise. Use a microphone and test the sounds levels before going ahead with the shoot.
Edit and Upload the Video:
There are some great tools to edit the videos. Make sure you include the voice overs/music as needed and edit the video. Some of the recommended tools are as follows:
- Adobe Spark
- Video Cutter
- In Shots
- Animoto
- Movie Maker
Once your videos are edited, you need to send the video to Dufa team so we can upload it to our Video channel on You tube. You will then be provided a link which you can update on your Store Settings from the Seller App.