Content Marketing: Create a One-Minute Video

1. Introduction: Welcome to Make Your Own Video to promote your business on Skillshare. I'm Sally. I'm the Customer Owner Photography at Animoto. I help businesses and photographers promote their products and services using video. Animoto is an online video maker that makes it really easy to make powerful and professional videos to promote their businesses. Millions of businesses, photographers, consumers, and educators are using Animoto worldwide. Video content marketing is such an essential thing for any business these days and so many people in a small business situation, they might feel paralyzed to get involved in creating a video for themselves, or perhaps not even have the money to afford to hire someone to create one. This class is going to show you how easy it is to actually do it yourself. Today, we're actually filming out of Jenne's apartment in Harlem. Jenne has a vegan blog and she helps people with vegan recipes and shows them how to cook great food. So, we're going to create a video for Jenne and show you along the way how we do it. It'll be everything from capturing the video. We're going to use an iPhone and a DSLR. The iPhone to show you that you don't need a great camera to do it, and we're going to show you both results at the end. Little technical aspects about what lens to use if you are using a DSLR, how to look for the light, what shots to capture, how to write a script, and all that kind of thing. Then in the end, we're going to use a video editing program. We're actually going to use Animoto to show you how to do it ourselves, and how to bring it all together and produce something really amazing. So, by the end of this class, you'll have the tools to create your own one-minute video to promote your own business. You'll have learned how to shoot it, how to edit it together, and then we'll give you some tips even on how to publish it and put it out there. At the moment, most people have their own presence online with a website. We're going to show you how to increase that presence by creating a video. 2. Project: Create a one-minute marketing video: Your assignment is to embed a one-minute video with a brief description of your company. You can create the video with the software of your choice. You'll need a laptop and a camera. You can either use a DSLR or an iPhone yourself. Your video will have a clear purpose and authentic voice that represent your company well. We've selected a few videos that show a great example of how to market with video. We having about me video. There's also a highlight reel and a video business card just to give you an idea of what it can actually look like in the end. 3. Understanding Video Marketing: Most people in business already have an online presence. Video marketing will just make it easier for people to find you and find out who you are. Seven billion videos are watched every day on Facebook and YouTube. Seven out of 10 people are likely to watch a video when online shopping. So let's start by covering the types of videos you can make to promote your business. It's important to understand the different stages of the buying cycle, and how to best engage your customers through all those different stages. The first stage is awareness. The point is not to sell, so personality and creativity go a long way here. Awareness videos could be "About Me" videos, "How-To" videos, guest interviews, or a highlight reel which is what we are making today. The next stage is consideration. Buyers in this stage are actually comparing you and considering you against others. So, examples of consideration videos would be behind-the-scenes, best practices, or "Meet the Team" videos. The next stage is the decision stage, where people are ready to purchase. The goal here is to be top of mind when people are ready to buy. Decision videos could be announcing free trials, promo offers, or just particular sales that you have going on at the moment. As you can see, there are lots of ways to get started with video marketing. So let's get started with our awareness video. 4. Making a Shotlist: The first step in this process is to know what you want to shoot. It's a really good idea to get inspiration from other videos. Check out YouTube, watch commercials that appeal to you, and really take notice of what you like about these videos. Sometimes, it might be the lighting or the color. Also, take note of the length of the video as it appeal to you because we highly recommend to keep your video short, tends to keep people's attention better by keeping the videos short, but just take note of those little things as you're watching other videos. The next step is to decide how you're going to shoot it, whether you're going to get a friend to shoot it or what equipment you'll use. Are you going to use a DSLR? Are you going to use a camera? Just those little logistics that are involved when shooting a video. So, the audio component is very technical and can tend to take it to the next level, but we're trying to keep it really simple today and show you the basics. If you're just getting started, you want to make a really easy video. So, we're not actually including audio today. If you do want to include audio, feel free to do like a talking head interview style and if you are doing that, include B-roll. B-roll is like cutaways. It keeps it interesting and not just all about a talking head and a person being interviewed. It's a really good idea to create a shot list before you actually start shooting. It doesn't have to be too detailed. It just has to, more or less, set out what you're going to shoot, so as you're going along, you don't forget anything. Creating a shot list is a little bit like a shopping list. It helps you get in and out of the store as quickly as possible and eliminate any sort of factors involved and you forgetting anything that you really should get. Creating a shot list is optional, but the best thing is to remember your strengths and go with that. In creating our shot list, we really wanted to take into consideration, Janae. She is the soul of this business and we spoke to have a full hand and we really found out that she had a lot of personality. She's bright and colorful, and we wanted to incorporate that in capturing this video with her food and her cooking and her recipes. So, our shot list, we wanted to go through showing the ingredients, the fruits and vegetables before they actually went into the recipe. We wanted to show her mixing the dressing, pouring the dressing, mixing the salad, chopping ingredients, and adding the ingredients. The general rule of thumb is not to overshoot. You actually only need about 10 to 15 footage shots and 10 to 15 stills to make a one-minute video. The idea with this class is not to get too technical and just show you some of the quick tips, like what to shoot and composition. To me, the most important thing to look for is the lighting. A few tips with lighting came from a very good friend of mine, Jerry Ghionis. He actually taught me to look at your hand and see where the lighting hits your hand best. You'll notice too that when it's this way, there's not very good light on the hand. But as you turn it around towards the window, the lighting gets better. Another important factor is to choose the right location. So, where possible, find a room with lots of windows, some great light. Make sure that there's not too much distracting you in the background. Make sure there's not too much mess and that sort of thing. If you're looking for color, something with some nice color and, of course, also to make sure that the background is relevant and what you're actually going to shoot, it is relevant to your business. So today, Janae's going to cook a yummy sweet potato hash, and we're going to start going through the shot list. I think the first thing on there was to show the ingredients. So, we're going to start photographing and filming the ingredients before she makes the actual recipe. I'm actually going to shoot these handheld. I find that less restrictive than a tripod. A tripod is great for stability, so where possible, use the tripod. But when shooting handheld, it's really important to keep it kind of stable. I'm using a wide-angled lens because it shows less shake, and I'm also going to keep my elbows tucked in. You can also put the strap over your ahead and hold the camera up for stability as well. If you need to, lay the camera on a table, but just make sure that the whole time you're actually filming the footage, the camera's nice and stable. The same sort of tips apply with the iPhone. You can get a tripod for the iPhone, or if you want to handhold it, just keep your elbows tucked in when you're shooting footage, it just helps to stabilize the camera. 5. Shooting Your Video: So Janae, is going to start chopping the vegetables and because there's a lot of movement involved, I'm actually just going to hold the camera quite still as she's chopping the vegetables. When there's movement in the subject, it's best to hold the camera as still as possible. If there's little movement or not much going on and you want to shoot footage, it's a great opportunity to actually move the camera. You can move the camera from side to side or in and out a little bit or even up and down just to give the actual video footage movement because there's nothing worse than watching a video where there's nothing happening. It's awesome. When you're also shooting with someone like Janae here in this situation, we do have the luxury of asking her stop and do it again. So, because we're only putting half an onion in. Yes. Okay. If we can take that out of the bowl and I'll just take some stills of the chopped onion on the chopping board. Cool. I'm also actually just stop starting the footage because we don't need a big long piece of video footage. It's so harder to edit. I'm just doing little snippets as we go along. So with little bit of movement, we're going to get what's in the foreground. When you're shooting with the iPhone, I would also make sure that you use the exposure adjuster. If it looks too light, don't look down. You can actually see what you're shooting so really take advantage to use that. Just watching my own self in the light is causing a shadow on the food, so just be cautious of that sort of thing as well. The background looks really cool here because it's pretty colors and bananas in the background. I think that just adds to it as well. Yeah, go for it. That even sounds good? Okay. When you're shooting video or stills, it's really great to play with different angles. So shoot from down low, try it from up high, try it from in-between and see which one looks the best. It is a good idea as you go, to check the photos you're taking to make sure that you're getting what you need, to make sure that everything looks good, to make sure that everything is in focus. Just check it as you go along. Ready. Okay, that looks very good. It goes something like that. Flatten your hand a little bit. Okay, cool. Awesome. Okay, hang in. Hold on two seconds, I get that with the iPhone. Where are we? I'm glad it controls on this. Okay go, go. Okay. Ready when you are. Okay. Awesome. Crunchy. If you've been thinking about shooting video but you've been daunted by taking that first step, the best thing to remember is actually just get out there and get started. Make something, make a video and put it together and if you don't like it you can always make it again. But start practicing using your phone, practicing making a video for your business and that'll get you to that step where you're ready to actually put it online and start marketing. So with that, we're going to go to the next step now and edit our video. 6. Stylizing and Editing Your Video: Once you finish shooting, the next step is to get the images onto your computer. You do that by taking the card out of the camera and popping it into computer if you have that facility, if you don't you can use a card reader. If you're actually using iPhone, you can use the USB cable for your iPhone, or you can use some sort of cloud-based thing like Dropbox or Edge Up. So, once you've got the photographs onto your computer, the next step is to actually choose the ones that will go into your final video. In order to do that, I use a program called Photo Mechanic. It makes it really easy to view the images, to highlight the ones that you want to use and select them, and once I've actually done that, then I bring them into the editing platform. The thought process that I use when choosing the images to go into the final video, it's generally, I go by the shot list. Sometimes, some of the shots look better than others so a lot of it is also aesthetics. I also think of the story I'm trying to tell and which ones tell the story the best. So, generally you might have a hundred images, you need to call them down to 20 or 30. So, you need to be quite brutal with that sometimes because otherwise, it will just take you much longer to do the editing process in the end. But that's generally the thought process that goes into it. So once we've chosen the images that will go into our final video, the next thing is to work out the style of the video we're going to make. The style can mean how it's going to look? How it will transition? Will it be fast-paced or will it be slow? It's good to sort of work out at this stage too in your mind what kind of music you're going to have because things like pacing and timing come in to this point as well. Part of the reason I'm using Animoto is because they have a series of video styles already created. The video styles are like templates and make it really easy to delve into the kind of aesthetic that you're looking for. Another great aspect is they have music included in Animoto. So, it's all commercially licensed and you don't have to go out and buy your own music. So, there's over 2000 songs included in Animoto Professional, making it super easy to choose the right track to go with your video. So, now that we have a folder of images that we want to use to create our video, I'm simply going into Animoto and I'll hit the 'Create' button. From here, our choice of style comes up on the page. There are over 75 video styles to choose from. For this particular video today, I'm going to use documentary. I'm going to use documentary because it's a customized style and I can choose the colors, the fonts, the transitions that I want to have in the video. So, this is the creation dashboard. It's where you pretty much control what goes into the video. It's very easy to add photos and video. You can simply do it with the left hand menu here or click on the plus button within the dashboard. Once you open that, you have different options of uploading your photos and video. You can upload them directly from your computer. You can also upload them from Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox, Flickr, and SmugMug. So we're going to upload these directly from the computer. We're going to choose the folder that I've created with the images and footage to actually use and we're going to select all of those and open them up into our dashboard. So, while they're all uploading, I'm going to choose the song. The Song Library is in here. You can actually just click on that to open it. We've suggested songs for you to use with that particular style or you can also go into the ones that are popular for business and you can also go into My Favorites which is where you can save your favorites too for easy access. To start with, we'll just browse the full library where all of the musical will come up here. You'll see here on the left hand side, that's all of the songs. We have over a thousand songs from Triple Scoop Music and there's also your favorites there that you can select from. You can also choose by song length, where you can shorten it if it's a shorter video or you can actually make it longer. That's for if you're looking for a specific length of video that you want to fit your images and your video to that length. We've also got different genres here to choose from. Remember, when choosing your music that the tone of the music will set the tone of your video. I've actually got a couple here in my favorite which I like to use for this kind of video. Today, we're going to use 'A Whimsical Journey.' With this particular style documentary, we can also customize a lot of the features. So, you can click here on the top left to customize the style. In here, you'll see what all your options are. We have different font that you can use if you want something more casual like handwritten. We've got modern, playful. Different ones to choose from there. I'm actually going to choose 'Modern' did you know? So once everything's uploaded into the dashboard, this is where we organize the content to really tell the story that you're trying to tell. You can actually organize it like a timeline, or we can randomize it to make it more like the highlight reel that we're looking for. So, by actually organizing it, you simply click on the image. If we wanted to actually highlight this entire series here, you can do so and just move it to the position that you want. It's also in here that we can adjust the pacing, the pacing is up here in the 'Settings' button and you'll see you have the ability to make the pacing faster, and you can also slow the pacing right down. I get the feeling this will actually be quite an upbeat kind of video, so we might increase the pacing on this one. You've also got the option to make the image pacing order which means that we'll fit the images and the footage to the song. So, the song here is two minutes and 29 seconds. They'll actually just paste those images and footage to fit that whole song. So we'll flip that back to menu. Here you can also trim the song. So if the side of the song is a little bit quiet and you want it to really come in at a crescendo, you can move that song trim up here and same thing at the other end of the song. You can actually trim it down to be shorter than the entirety of the song. If you don't adjust that it'll just simply fade out at the end for you. So, we'll hit 'Save' there. It's here within dashboard that we also have the opportunity to trim our video clips. You'll see here it can tell us how long each clip is. You can actually double-click on the video clip, play the video clip and see the specific part that you want to include in your video. By trimming it, all you simply do is made a slider to where you'd like to have it start. Might just cut out that rubber glove and then at the other end, trim it down to where you'd like to see it finish. Within here too, you can turn off the audio so we're not going to have any of the ambient audio come across within this video. So, we'll switch the 'Audio Off.' If you are doing talking head or an interview style, and you want to keep the audio on, you would actually just leave that on but for this entire video, we're going to turn all of the audio off. We'll just play that back, make sure we're happy with it and click 'Save.' So, we'll end up doing that with all of our video clips just to make sure that everything in there is what we want to include in the final video. Because we didn't do any talking head or interview style in this particular video, I'm going to add some text slides to give it more context and tell us a little bit about Jenne that perhaps the video and the photos don't actually convey. So we add text slides here, you can actually enter a title and a subtitle. Let's start this one by simply introducing Jenne. Hi, I'm Jenne. You can also organize your text slides into the split they want to be. Part of the beauty of using text slides is that you can continue to tell your story and get across certain messaging that's important for your customers to know about you and your business. Let's add another text slide with a call to action that says, "Visit my website for hundreds of recipes." We'll position that somewhere maybe midway through the video. In the end, let's talk about the location where she is because sometimes it's great for your customers to know where you are located. So we'll add one more slide, that says, "Brought to you from my apartment," and then the subtitle line will just simply say, "In New York City." An important part of making a marketing video is to include your company's brand. Most importantly, your logos. So there's a feature here where you can add your logo to the beginning or the end of the video. It just simple as uploading the file, Jenne. You can select whether the background is black or white. You can also select to have it on the intro or the outro. We actually suggest just to have it at the end of the video because the first three to six seconds are the most crucial part of your video and you don't want that to be taken up by simply having a logo there, you want to have something really impacting at the start. There's also features here where you can choose how your logo appears, is different animations that make it look more dynamic and much more professional. The main goal in creating this video is to make us more discoverable online so when we go into settings to name our video, be sure to keep this in mind and name it something that makes you much more easily found online. Her business name is Sweet Potato Soul. She's a vegan recipe blog. So, we're going to call it Sweet Potatoes Soul, Vegan Food Blog. There is a call to action button. The call an action button enables your viewer to click a link at the end of the video to take them somewhere, best place would be to your website. You can simply put your URL at the bottom and that link at the end of your video we'll click directly to that website. Finally, you get the opportunity here to choose a cover image. All the different thumbnails come up and you can choose the cover image that when you're sharing within Animoto, this image will be on the front cover of the video. So everything is in place. Looks like how we want it to look. The next step is to actually preview video. It takes about 15 to 30 seconds to generate a preview depending on your connection and it'll be a low rates preview that appears here with Animoto to show you how you video looks before you take it further and produce a full resolution copy. Once you previewed it and you're happy with the way everything looks, simply hit the 'Produce' button. This will take you through to the next page where you can actually choose the quality of video that you want to output. Again, you've got the options to change the title, add a description if you want to and tie up the video so that it's ready for presentation. The video will automatically produce at 360p which is really just web quality. I want to output the best quality video that I can so I usually choose 720p and also 1080p which is a higher-resolution export only file. So everything's selected and we hit 'Finish' to produce those videos. 7. Wrapping Up: Now that your video is produced, it's time to think about where you're going to distribute it online. Don't think that the only option is YouTube. You can also embed it directly into your blog or your website. There's Facebook, Vimeo, there's many different platforms where you can put your video online and make yourself more discoverable. Within Animoto, we do have the facility feed, it create an embed code for your website, we also have many other one-click options to share your video online. So, with all that said and done, let's watch the video that we produced. Bear in mind that we did shoot it with a DSLR and the iPhone, so that'll be the opportunity to watch the two of them, and hopefully, you won't see much difference between them. So, just a few things to remember when making a video to promote your business. Make sure you get a model release for photo and video footage from anybody in the video. If you know them or even if they're a stranger, if they appear in your video when you are promoting your business, you have to have permission from them to be in that video. Also remember to use commercially-licensed music. If you're not using Animoto, which has over 2,000 songs in there already that are licensed, you can go to websites such as triplescoopmusic.com or musicbed.com, and purchase the music from there. Just a reminder, the assignment for this project was to create a one-minute video and embed it into the gallery on Skillshare. We can't wait to see your videos, to learn more about your businesses, and also just one final reminder is that just get started, start somewhere, create a video, put your business out there online and be seen.