Video Production | Sell.com Video Ad

The goal was to create a 2-5min promotional video for a fictional company allowing merchants to open up an online store and reach their customers during the Covid-19 pandemic. Created in collaboration with Brad McLeod & Elnaz Foroutan.

The process of creating a video from concept to completion usually consists of three phases: Pre-Production, Production, and Post-Production.

Throughout these phases, we ran into challenges that we will talk about in detail.

in this process, we focused on the goals of the video, scope, storyboard, script, talent, equipment needs, and location scouting.

This project was done during the covid-19 phase which introduced a different set of challenges, such as working with talent at indoor locations, equipment rentals, and more, so compromises had to be made but we stayed true to the goal of the video which to portray what it was like for new entrepreneurs starting a business as the world shuts down. We really wanted to keep things authentic and so our talent tried putting herself in the shoes of an entrepreneur and improvised the majority of the script.

Because of Covid-19 restrictions, several locations that we had in mind had been closed so we had to settle on one of the team member’s house that was big enough for us to follow the 6 feet distance rule while at the same time being able to take the necessary shots and conduct the interview style video with the equipment that we already had since equipment rentals were also not possible at the time.

As for equipment, for our A-Roll we used Canon RP with a zoom lens allowing us to distance ourselves from the talent, and used DJI Mini 2 and the Canon for our B-Roll shots. Neewer’s lights were used for our key lighting and a smaller LED light was used for our fill lighting highlighting the talent’s hair and separating her from the background.

For audio, we used a Zoom H1N, and because the living room where we conducted the interview was obviously not treated for audio, during the recording we ran into other challenges which required us to rely on post-production edits to make the audio usable.

And finally, talent, again, due to Covid-19 we couldn’t risk having many people in the production so we asked our team member to play the role of Alicia in this case and credited her accordingly.

With the pre-production steps now over, it was time to start setting up the audio, lighting, and video equipment and conduct the interview as well as record the B-Roll shots required to support our story.

With the help of the storyboard, we set out to record our B-Roll first, walking through the empty grey city of Vancouver and taking several shots using the drone and the mirrorless camera.

As for the interview, we set up our 3-point lighting, audio, and video recording equipment in an interview style and began the recording.

During this step, we had visualized that when Alicia (talent) is speaking about her struggles we use black and white color grading and rather sad background music which later on transitions into this hopeful and more vibrant vibes when she starts talking about sell.com this platform that allowed her to conduct her business online despite the Covid-19 challenges.

As mentioned above, we ran into challenges with the audio recording, and our backup audio using the camera’s onboard microphone proved to be even worst than expected, so during the post-processing step, we had to rely on a few audio effects to get the best of what we already got, since going back and recording again was not an option. This is where having proper equipment and backups is crucial to projects like this but we had to work with what we got.

After figuring out audio challenges, we started with some base timeline editing, cutting footage into pieces to see our total duration length as it was one of the requirements to keep the finished product under 5 minutes.

With the timeline and our A-Roll and B-Roll shots in place, we started introducing music, adjusted the current and peak levels and desaturated the footage for the first half of the video, and introduce color again for the closing segment when Alicia (Elnaz) starts talking about Sell.com.

Finishing touches include adding a few sound effects, animated graphics, logos, and texts.