Best Practice Guide: 5 Tips for Preparing Your Clients for Their First Video ShootApril 8th, 2013, In Best Practices, by Tris Hussey+

First in a series of posts aimed at helping digital agencies prepare their clients for being on camera, this week some basic tips to help people feel at ease and have the whole process go smoothly.

For most people being on camera isn’t just an unusual experience it’s an absolutely terrifying experience as well. While only so much can be done to settle jitters, there are some things that you can do for your client to help them prepare for the shoot. Simple things that won’t just help the shoot go well, but also helps make everyone feel at ease and ensure the video turns out great.

Pre-Shoot Checklist

In order for a video shoot to go smoothly, everyone needs to know what to expect during the shoot. Not knowing what is going to happen makes people more anxious and nervous about being on camera. Just knowing what the plan is will set people at ease. Provide your client and everyone involved with the shoot with a simple checklist of what is going to happen before, during, and after the shoot. Having simple things on the list like:

1 Day before shoot make sure the office is clean and tidy2 Let staff know videographers will be coming and how long they will be

there.3 Videographers will arrive at a certain time to set up.4 Filming will start roughly 15 to 30 mins after they arrive.

Many producers and videographers provide checklists of their own, if they don’t, taking a few minutes to create one for your clients will set the stage for a great video shoot. Just knowing a few details ahead of time helps everyone avoid surprises on shoot day.

Practice Makes Perfect

Run through the script and make sure that everyone knows their “part” in the shoot. Typically scripts for interviews will come in several days ahead of time, plan to meet with your client to run through all the points so they are comfortable with them. While the best videos are the ones where all the dialog is unscripted and natural, that doesn’t mean that it should be fly by the seat of the pants dialog. Have speaking points and help everyone work through what they are going to do for the shoot. Don’t over think the whole situation either, practicing should help people feel at ease, not under more

pressure to perform. No one needs to memorize their lines, just know what they are going to say.

There Will Be Mistakes

If Hollywood stars can have blooper reels in _their movies_—people who spent their lives in front of the camera or on stage—it’s pretty safe to say that it’s going to take more than one “take” for the shoot. Needing more than one take has already been accounted for in the pre-planning process. Making mistakes is all part of the process. It’s okay to flub, even the pros make mistakes. Letting your client know that they aren’t expected to get it right the first time will help them relax and be more natural in front of the camera.

It Might Take a While

To shoot a 60 second video, the videographers might need a couple hours to get everything they need. Make sure your client knows that this won’t be a quick few minutes out of the day, it takes time to record all the parts that will be put together into a final video. Expect that a video shoot will last between two and four hours (depending on how long the final video will be). If everyone knows that the morning or afternoon is a write-off, then expectations have already been set that nothing else will get done during that time.

Tidy Up

Your client needs to know that the entire office should be as neat and tidy as it can be before the shoot date not the day of the shoot. Tidy like company is coming over—because essentially company is coming over and that “company” is the entire world. What looks “a little cluttered” in real life can appear like a complete disaster area on camera. Don’t take the chance that the audience will be distracted thinking “what a pig sty that office is” and miss the message of the video.

More to Come

In the next installment video best practice series we’ll discuss how to help your client prepare for a video interview. Giving a great interview isn’t just about the words you say, it’s about how you present yourself in front of the camera in the most professional, polished, and relaxed way possible.

Photo by Freddie Peña from Flickr.