Professional Practice: Promotional Video Research

After our initial meeting the team I was dealing with at Chatham Historic Dockyard, gave me free reign to produce a promotional video of the festival in a way that was stylistically my own with a few directive pointers and content they would like to see within the film. They provided me this in the form of a brief, which can be seen below.

BRIEF:

To capture the carnival feel of the event, vibrant colours, steam, motion and animation.  Focus on families and activities, live music, Steampunks, street entertainment, food and drink, vehicles and movement.  Show the Dockyard as busy as possible.  Potentially tell a ‘Day Out With The Family’ story using your fathers vintage vehicle and models to stage shots of a family enjoying their day.  Footage to appear to be natural.  End product is to inform visitors of what the Dockyard has to offer with all of the additions that the event brings.  Length of video approximately five minutes.     

After seeing the brief, i was confident that I would be able to produce a good looking, simple but informative promotional video, fit for their website.

My attention quickly turned to research to get an idea as to what makes a successful and informative promotional video. For this i looked at a variety of different styles of promotional video.

Previous Dockyard Work

I began by looking at promotional videos that had come out of the Dockyard, and videos that had been produced for the Dockyard. I looked to another student's work within our course, (Sam Babington) who had produced a film for the Dockyard the year before. I felt that this was the perfect place to start to get an idea for that was possible to be shot and to further get an eye for how it looks to shoot the Dockyard.

The shots that Sam was able to achieve looked excellent, which gave me a lot of confidence in what we were shooting would be visually interesting and come out well with our cameras.

Watching Sam's video allowed me to see what was possible and also gave me an idea as to what to expect on the day. It also gave me a plan of what i was going to shoot, how to shoot the event and how i want the video to play out.

Professional Examples

I also researched examples of promotional videos that had been created for Car and Music festivals looking at a range of different genres and promotional videos from informative formal videos to informal hype videos. Below are a few examples:

What i took away from these professional promos is that they key to a good promo video is if using dialogue, make sure its worth while hearing or not at all. Make sure shots are crisp and sharp, also editing pace to music is key. The video should not be too long but enough to be informative and explain what the festival/event/product is about.

I aim to take what i have learnt from my research and apply it to my own promotional Dockyard film, to make it as effective as possible.