If video content is king, the production workflow that supports video creation is queen. Having a solid production workflow and asset management system is absolutely essential for any brand wanting to get started working with video.
Before you sit down to create a workflow, define your video style. This will make things so much easier. Once you've done that, here's a template process to get your started with a workflow.
The Video Production Process:
Pre-production: The Invisible (and most important) Part
Pre-production is the stage where you prepare everything you need for the video production. It is the most important stage because it determines your video project's quality, budget and timeline.
This stage involves meticulous planning and coordination, encompassing tasks such as video planning and storyboarding, scriptwriting and revisions, casting and location scouting, digital asset management and organization, and more.
- Video planning and storyboarding
You need to define your video goal, target audience, message and tone. Once the basics are in place, a visual outline of the video has to be created in the form of a storyboard, a shot list or a mood board to guide the video production process. This is the most creative part. Don't get hung up on the final product in this step. Let your mind run wild, and further define the deliverables as you move through the production process. - Scriptwriting and revisions
The visual outline needs to be bolstered with a clear and engaging script. The script’s voice and tone must match your video goal and the intended audience. Further, you may want to revise and refine the script by sharing it with the team or clients and collecting their feedback. - Casting and location scouting
If you are making a video involving real people as actors, you need to find and hire the actors, crew and equipment for your video project. On the other hand, if you are making a digitized or animated video, you will have to collect reference images and videos for building the storyboard. These could include things like royalty-free assets, logo files, AI or PSD files, etc., all of which need to be carefully organized and stored. - Asset management and organization
The whole activity of video production is going to generate a lot of digital assets, including images, video clips, logos, fonts and much more. You need to store and manage all digital assets in an organized fashion for easy retrieval and safe storage. The use of tags, labels and categories can make it easy to search and find your assets when needed. - Define deliverables
As you're preparing your video shoot and have narrowed your storyboard and scripting, have a clear idea of where you want to publish the video. Videographers are editing video for both horizontal and vertical display, so it's useful to know going into a shoot if you need a vertical edit. At AKC, we feel strongly that low-fi media can be just as valuable as hi-fi media, and thinking about this step will also help you decide whether the project can be shot on a cell phone or needs a full team with 4K cameras and lighting.
Now that you've made this plan for deliverables, be ready to burn it. Sometimes things change entirely when you get into active production and remaining flexible can be the difference between a good finished product and a great one.
The pre-production stage is also where a lot of digital mockups and assets relating to the video production will be collected for reference and production. Implementing a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system is paramount in optimizing the pre-production phase. Poor digital asset management can leave assets astray, delaying the production or even driving up costs.
In the pre-production phase, a DAM system serves as a centralized storage hub for organizing, storing, and retrieving digital assets. It also streamlines the team’s collaborative efforts by bringing them together on a common platform.
Production: The Fun Part
After you've got a solid plan and have done the work necessary to scout, set up and overall prep work for a video shoot, now comes the fun part. Production is the most active part of the process, and in turn, the most fun.
- Creating video footage
For ease of discussion, we are going to call it creating video footage. Today, video can be created by filming with a camera or even digitally rendered using animation software. The latter is the most preferred choice of marketers and the businesses they serve.
To create any video, follow your storyboard and shot list. If you are following the traditional way of shooting video, you might also want to specify the best camera angles, subject movements and techniques to capture your video content the way you envisioned it. - Monitoring and controlling lighting, sound and other technical aspects
Making a single frame in a video is a collaborative effort. There are so many technical aspects to be monitored and controlled, like lighting, sound, and other technical aspects such as color, exposure, focus, and white balance, that it usually takes a team to ensure everything is how it should be.
Also, you have to use the appropriate equipment, such as microphones, lights, reflectors, and filters, which will have to be used to make the specific type of video. For example, documentaries and animated videos require a whole different set of equipment. - Post-production preparation
Production is only half the battle. The other half happens when the raw footage is moved to processing. Today, almost all of video post-production activity has taken the digital route. This requires that, no matter how you shoot the video, you need to backup and transfer your video footage to your computer or cloud storage. Storing video files on the cloud is the first step. One must then organize and label the video files and folders using the right file nomenclature, tags, etc., so that they are stored in an orderly fashion and can be retrieved quickly when required.
Now that you've collected the footage, it's time to edit!
Post-production: The Hard Part
Post-production is the stage where you edit and polish your video footage and add the finishing touches to your video project. While it demands a certain level of creativity, it is the most technical stage because it requires a lot of skill, patience and attention to detail. In a way, it is post-production that chisels away the unnecessary parts of your video, refines it and makes it suitable for mass consumption.
Post-production activities mainly consist of:
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Video editing and revisions
Raw footage is never ready for distribution. You need to cut, trim and arrange your video clips to create a smooth and coherent flow for your story. Further, if you have plans to publish the video on social media channels, you should also consider transforming the video dimensions, format and file size to meet platform requirements. -
Color enhancement and manipulation
Even if you use a high-end camera, it is necessary to do some color correction and grading to get the color, contrast, brightness and saturation in the right ratio. There could be scenarios when you also need to apply different color schemes and styles to your video and match the color of different shots and scenes. -
Audio editing and mixing
No video is complete without supporting audio. One of the important tasks in post-production is to edit and improve the sound quality of your video footage, removing any unwanted noise, distortion or echo. This is also the stage where dialogue, music and sound effects are added to create a clear and immersive sound experience for your video. -
Effects and animation
Raw video footage often needs to be enhanced with the help of visual effects and animation. Most marketing videos require video overlays and watermarks to make them suitable for promotion. This part of adding effects and animation takes place in the post-production phase.
Publication and distribution
By this phase of the workflow, you should have a video ready to publish! Stay tuned for our next post about how to develop a solid distribution strategy.
If you've read this and think "I don't have the team to execute on this," AKC runs a production house called StudioMAX, where you can submit raw video and then we'll edit, add captions and branding, and send back for publication. For more information about pricing and video services, email content@akcmarketing.com