Planning Your Next Video Shoot

Lights! Camera! Action! Key tips in planning your next video shoot.

As you may have noticed, Boston venture capital firm OpenView Venture Partners has upped the ante on various content marketing initiatives. We have been creating all sorts of content such as blogs, a newsletter, case studies, and videos. Recently we have been dedicating a lot of time to our video creation.

For the past few weeks Devon and I have been sorting out all of the details for our next video shoot which is scheduled for tomorrow! Since we are hosting our portfolio companies for a forum on customer service Thursday and Friday, we are going to jump on the opportunity. Many of our companies are based outside of Boston, so it is very unique to have so many different senior management teams from our companies all in one room. Needless to say, we are taking advantage of the situation by hiring a video production crew to help us create the best videos with the help of our portfolio company members.

Throughout the day we will be pulling people from our portfolio out of the workshop to interview them on camera about their experiences working with us. In a period of one day we will be creating the footage to make nearly 20 new videos! Talk about leverage! It took a little bit of planning, but once we narrowed down the topics we wanted to cover all of the other plans seemed to fall into place. After this week is over, we will have nearly enough videos to release one per week for the rest of the year.

Here are some of the planning steps we followed:

• Identify a solid video production crew that will take care of all of the setup, filming, and post-production work. In the Boston area, we have used Maverick Productions and D2 Productions for this type of work.
• Narrow down a set of topics that are the most important for you to cover now.
• Build a list of participants you’d like to interview on camera.
• Identify the main points you wish to cover in each video.
• Develop interview questions and prompts to guide your participants throughout the filming.
• Plan out a rough schedule to follow during the day of the shoot. Each session may be anywhere from 5 minutes to 1 hour depending on what you’d like your participants to communicate.
• Communicate all of this information to your participants in advance to ensure they are comfortable speaking on camera, in addition to communicating your message.
• Have participants sign video release forms during the shoot.

I am super excited to be a part of the crew on Thursday. Stay tuned for our upcoming editions of OpenView TV.

Let us know what topics you would like to see covered on OpenView TV in the future!