How to start the creative process with video

Let’s set the scene.

You’re thinking about commissioning a video. Perhaps you’ve got a new product to launch, need a way to consistently train new starters, or want to build on your brand’s presence.

How do you get the ball rolling with a creative agency and ensure you get the right outcome?

Let’s look at three simple tips…

1. Be clear on the challenge

Video is a uniquely powerful tool in a business’s communications kit.

It can be used to inform, to educate and to entertain, drawing viewers into an immersive world of your brand.

Most video briefs can be traced back to the identification of a problem. This may be “our customers need to know about our new feature” or simply “we need to sell more”. The more specific the brief, the more targeted the video project can be.

If your insight allows you to create a brief with detail, something like:

Then all creative can be driven towards this goal and designed specifically with that demographic in mind.

The more focussed the brief, the more targeted the content can be, since we know more about what will resonate well with the target audience.

2. Bring the creative agency in at the early stages

The earlier you can engage the creative agency, the more value you’ll get from them.

By all means, present a fully formed concept, but at Epix, we can often give much better value if we’re brought in just as the need has been identified so we can explore wider options and use creativity to solve your problem in the best possible way.

It may be that the one big video you were thinking of commissioning would actually work better as a campaign over multiple weeks, or that with some careful thought social media content can be shot and edited at the same time.

These ideas can come from the creative agency – that’s what they’re there for – saving the effort of you and your team and opening up a wider range of options.

3. Spend time planning

Those first few conversations are where the creative team learn about the brand and its products.

If the team are not retained with your company on a long-term basis then this relationship-building stage when you first start working together means they can start to think like you do and make the creative decisions that are right for the project.

We find that the best projects spend a majority of the total production effort on briefing and pre-production planning, getting the idea right on paper before the “record” button is pressed.

Without this thinking projects can go astray, taking time to steer back in the right direction.

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So really it’s simple: if those three points have been followed in the early stages your project should be on track.

Creative agencies are ideas factories full of people who really enjoy getting deep into a business problem. For us at least, it’s when we do our best work and create those ideas and campaigns that amaze our clients and their audiences!

Do you have any thoughts on what helps creative projects go smoothly? Let us know on Twitter @EpixMedia or via our contact page.