Your business needs video production, whether you know it or not. The way customers learn and decide about brands these days is far more driven by video than ever before. 68 per cent of YouTube users, for example, are watching videos to help them make purchase decisions. Meanwhile, Instagram recommends that brands post 3-5 times per week to maintain visibility or 5-12 times per week if they have a larger following (more than 10,000 followers). That’s a lot of content!
In addition to that, bear in mind Instagram reels (i.e. videos) outperform image posts (i.e. non-moving images) quite significantly, gaining twice the reach and 1/3 more comments per post. Hence, if you’re a brand (either B2C or B2B) thinking you probably ought to be making more video content — you’re on the right track. But where do you start?
When it comes to producing all this content, even production houses like ours (who have all the gear and the professional expertise on-hand and “ready to roll”) can find ourselves turning to technology to help either lighten the workload or enhance the quality of the final product. But you must know what you’re doing. Some of the new technologies coming online are very powerful but should be approached with caution!
As an old-fashioned example, let’s take the now ubiquitous “steadicam” (first used professionally back in 1976). It’s a piece of equipment we quite often use on larger video shoots, but you always hire both the steadicam (a bit of kit) and the steadicam operator (a skilled human being who knows how to operate it). There’s no point having one without the other and that same general principle applies to much of the most eye-opening video production tech that’s newly emerging now.
Let’s have a look at some of that tech.
Virtual production and LED stages
Being a filmmaker, this is the tech that excites me the most at the moment. Technologies like Unreal Engine and advanced LED stages (used in shows like The Mandalorian) allow filmmakers to create realistic virtual environments in real-time. If you can possibly visit one of these studios, I recommend it – the other day I was standing at the foot of the Eiffel tower, watching the sun set behind it, from downtown Bukit Merah.
Of course it’s easy to be wowed by this technology because it’s “life-size” rather than something you hold in your hand, but from the point of view of creative inspiration, you can’t help but imagine all the possibilities for shooting scenes all over the world (or even on other planets) without having to leave the studio.
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It’s an amazing experience for actors, especially in comparison to green screen, because you can really feel yourself “there” rather than having to imagine, and it’s fantastic for lighting cameramen and colour grading because the “spill” of light onto your set and performers is also not green screen but an accurate colour, taking away that “fake” feeling you can sometimes get from green screen. This tech is best, really, for those with a big budget and large-scale ambition. Where it comes into its own is on saving the cost of travelling round the world, but it’s also incredible for “playing with time”.
I have a “sustainable energy” client whose vision is to play their part in creating a greener world. I was talking to them about creating a film in which their CEO talks to the camera about the difference green energy choices can make and around him I can have the world either decay into a post-apocalyptic hellscape of fire and black smoke, or into a lush green paradise, all within the time it takes him to read a few lines of script.
Equally you can slow down time and hold what filmmakers call the “magic hour” (as the sun goes down, the light is warmer and the shadows are longer) to become a magic 24 hours, or even a magic fortnight! My advice, though, would be to do a set build as well. Just having your characters in front of an LED backdrop is a bit “plain”.
If you can build some tangible “foreground” from having sand and a few real palm trees in front of the paradise island backdrop to having a burned-out car chassis in front of the futuristic city ghetto – that foreground will add a lot of value, and depth, to your shot. Though of course it adds more expense too.
Automated editing and video summarisation
I admit, I haven’t really tried this yet, but I have a social content production division of my business called SoVo and this technology would be an amazing opportunity for SoVo, if it can do what it promises. The gist of it is that AI and machine-learning algorithms can automatically edit videos based on predefined rules or patterns, such as creating summaries of long footage, detecting key moments in events, or even generating highlight reels for sports or presentations.
Because AI tools can now analyse raw footage, suggest edits, create effects, and even generate deepfake-like virtual actors, my hope for this is that my team can focus on creating really inventive and creative “templates” for social video, and then we can train the AI to apply (and adapt) these templates to fresh incoming footage from new clients. If it works, it will be amazing. But the devil, as they say, will be in the detail.
Cloud-based video production
A phrase like “cloud computing” can be daunting, nevertheless from what I can make out, it boils down to all those platforms that allow several people in different places (or even different parts of the world) to work on the same document or project at the same time.
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We use Adobe Creative Cloud with our creative teams, and we share work with our clients over Frame.io (on which they can pause videos at any moment and make comments). I’m sure many people are familiar with this already so it’s hardly “new” but, as opposed to some of the AI technology which still has a bit of a “coming soon” feel to it, these cloud-based tools are immediately useful.
AI voice-over technology
You’ve probably noticed that most newspaper articles now offer you the opportunity to listen to the article. That’s a remarkable new AI-enabled change that seems to have happened almost overnight. Transformers architecture (used in models like GPT-3) has made it easier to generate not only written but spoken language with contextually accurate inflection and tone, leading to more human-like audio.
Deep learning and neural networks have drastically improved the quality of AI-generated voices. Models like Google’s Tacotron 2 and WaveNet (developed by DeepMind) use neural networks to generate speech that is almost indistinguishable from human voices. These systems can now produce nuanced, natural-sounding speech with appropriate intonation, stress, and rhythm.
This is wonderful news in terms of accessibility (think of partially sighted people who can now listen to newspaper articles). But obviously one can’t help but wonder what will happen to “the voice over artist”. When it comes to the power of AI, I suppose creative people like me should not ask for whom the bell tolls.
Coming back to content creation for brands and businesses today, I mentioned before the example of the Steadicam (technology) and Steadicam Operator (skilled technician to operate the technology). More broadly when it comes to enlisting technology to support your content creation efforts, it’s very important to remember that technology, while valuable as a means of enabling your brand to express itself, should not be the tail that wags the dog. Any brief that begins with “How can we use VR technology?” (for example) doesn’t feel like a brief that’s starting in the right place, in my opinion.
A brand should surely begin by understanding its objectives, being aware of what their competitors are saying and the media through which they are saying it, as well as (last but certainly not least) knowing their audience and what’s on their minds. The work that happens “earlier” (or further upstream) is the most important. Because, when it comes to technology, you can’t pick your weapons unless you really know what kind of battle you’re going into.
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