Video content: how we did it - by Charlie Parker

In May last year we undertook a large scale video project to visit organisations across England; 15 videos over 8 regions in England and a hugely diverse range of organisations to film. Film is a great way to get your message across and move away from content heavy websites and YouTube is increasingly valuable for good SEO. So I thought I’d share my experience and a few of the things we learnt along the way.

First of all put together a project briefing. There are so many different messages, stories, styles, and opinions that could form this kind of project and getting everything down on paper really helps to focus and drive things forward. This is particularly helpful when it is a large scale video project as you have something to refer to when juggling edits and filming days.

Depending on the size and the budget, you might want to invite a range of companies to pitch for your project. We chose to work with Spectrecom Films Ltd, a London-based video production company who I had worked with on a film project in a previous role and knew that we had had a successful relationship with them and they produced high quality work.

Recommendations are always a good place to start, but also look at places like the Media Trust for media matching or try a tweet on Twitter to see if anyone has had positive experiences with any film companies.

Once you’ve chosen the company you will work with, get a project team confirmed and decide their responsibilities.

We had:

• one person managing the relationship with Spectrecom
• one person managing the relationships with the people we were filming
• one person overseeing the project and liaising with internal stakeholders

Depending on your project you may want to set it up differently, the key thing is that everyone knows what they are doing and they share their updates and information.

The hardest part of filming (in my opinion) comes now – arranging dates/calendars/cancellations, locations, and all the people involved. The most important thing is to brief both the interviewee and the film company with as much detail as possible.

A brief might include:

• how many people will be on shoot
• if parking is required
• what you would like to film
• clarification on who is available to speak on the day

Be sure to send them any permission slips and check if there are any parts of buildings or specific people who can’t or do not want to be filmed. Ask your film company to get them signed and sealed on the day if you haven’t received them beforehand. If there are vulnerable people or young children, ensure that you have expressly cleared with the organisation that it is ok to film these people and get permissions from parents if required. It is a bit tedious and requires a lot of smiling, but it is not as tedious as removing a video from the site or re-editing your film if a complaint is raised.

Then feed all this back to the film crew. We made sure both film crew and interviewee were given a point of contact for any unforeseen emergencies on the day.

Although it’s not always feasible, we found it really beneficial to be on the film shoots as often as possible. Not only was this a great opportunity to meet the people behind the projects, but inevitably problems occur, things change and sometimes communication (even with all the briefs and phone calls) breaks down. This is absolutely to be expected, and being on shoot means that you can deal with it there and then and shape the way the film goes. If you’re not there, it does help if you know that your film crew are capable.

For the first edit of the videos we thought it was a good idea to have someone from our team in on the first edit. We had shot a lot of footage and I had been on the first shoot (with South Holland Radio) and so I headed down to the studios for an afternoon. This was a really good experience and well worth doing, it also gave me insight as to how easy and difficult certain things are to change when editing. I was able to see how important it is to ensure you get an interviewee to say all the things you want in clear sentences.

We had agreed two rounds of edits as part of the scope of the project. This is worth bearing in mind when receiving the first edits back. For our project we compiled all the feedback for the final edit into one document and fed it back through one point of contact. It helps to include the time stamp if there are really specific edits or cuts you want.

Finally, once all that is out of the way and the final edit is done just make sure you have the videos in the right format for whatever you will use them for. We were using them on our YouTube channel and as Spectrecom shot them in HD we wanted to put this quality on our channel.

A video project, whether large scale like this or just one promotional video, is absolutely worthwhile but takes time, dedication and is a learning curve. Let us know your experiences of producing video for your charity or not-for-profit or tell us what you think of our videos on our YouTube channel.

We asked Christiaan Harden from Spectrecom to write us his top tips for making videos for charity. You can read Christiaan’s tips in our Resources section.