Video and Sales Go Together Like Cake and My Mouth

“You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.”

You know, I never understood that phrase. Why would anyone waste money (or effort) on buying or making a cake if they aren’t allowed to eat it? (Mmmmm…cake…)

Same goes for video. Why put in all that effort, resources, and time if you’re just going to leave it there and let it go mouldy? Enjoy the yummy awesomeness of the cake, and make sure you’re putting it to work for you to get you a whole lot of customers.

Okay, my metaphor is starting to break down a bit here, so let me get to the point. Ready? Here’s the point. The point is:

Video isn’t just for marketing.

Whaat?! It’s true. Whether you’re new or consider yourself an expert in the video marketing scene, have you given thought to how video can help your sales teams? Video is perfect for top-of-funnel and mid-funnel content, but sales people can (and should!) be using it to get more customers, faster.

If you’re using video strategically to attract and engage leads, you may have the analytics that tell you which leads are most interested in which of your products. When you have information like that, sales teams can use it to engage with leads and develop lasting relationships with customers.

Engage with leads using video

Imagine, you’re thinking about buying a certain product that you’ve had your eye on, you’ve checked out their website and watched a few of the company’s videos. And then, you receive a video from a salesperson that has been personalized to your own interests! They’re talking to you about the product you were just thinking about, and answer questions you had before providing their personal contact information. You feel like you’re talking to an actual, real, live person with a face and a personality, as opposed to receiving calls you want to block and emails you filter into spam. Now wouldn’t that be an engaging (and converting!) experience!

Salespeople can use video analytics to determine when and how much of a video each lead watched, helping them to have better, targeted conversations with leads right in the moment that counts.

Connect leads with the information they need

More than just for initial conversations, sales teams can send potential customers all the information they need to help make a purchase decision. But they don’t have to send boring text document after document. Try a video case study, or a video testimonial, or video FAQs. These videos can be shared around a lead’s company so that everyone can get on board! Engaging videos create advocates like no other content type.

Keep customers feeling connected with you

So, once you’ve won over a lead and turned them into a customer, should you leave them to their own devices and just touch base when it’s time to renew a subscription or buy the latest product? Uh…no. Video can help make customers feel like they’re part of a big, happy family. They can see your faces and feel engaged with content that has been personalized just for them. Help answer further questions, or show them content on up-and-coming products and services that may be a great fit for their needs.

This is just a taste of what you can do…

Want a deeper look and more details on how video and sales together can totally change the game? Join us on November 23 at 2PM ET for our newest webinar called How to Use Video in the Sales Process to Close More Deals. Cake not included.

The post Video and Sales Go Together Like Cake and My Mouth appeared first on Vidyard.

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New Vidyard Live is First Video Streaming Solution Fully Integrated with Salesforce and Marketing Automation

New live streaming solution for businesses enables marketing and sales to see who watches their live events, automatically converts videos for on-demand use

Kitchener, Ontario – November 12, 2015 – Live streaming has become a prominent tool for businesses to engage with audiences when they cannot be there in person, but until now there hasn’t been a way to know who viewed a stream or for how long. With today’s launch of Vidyard Live, organizations can now see down to the individual viewer who watched, when and for how long – critical information to understand engagement and convert viewers into customers.

“Live streaming is a great way to engage with remote audiences, but you can’t know if you were successful or re-engage with those viewers unless you know who they are,” said Michael Litt, CEO and co-founder of Vidyard. “We’re essentially delivering Meerkat or Periscope for the enterprise with the ease-of-use that modern businesses expect. But we’re going beyond the ability to simply broadcast your message, enabling businesses to track who’s engaged in the live stream right inside their marketing automation and CRM tools to enhance customer insight.”

Live streaming is now a popular tool across enterprises. From broadcasting customer events to scaling internal training and sharing executive communications, more companies are turning to live streaming to connect remote audiences with compelling content. The missing pieces have been how to identify those viewers when they are watching and how to know whether they were really interested in what they saw. With Vidyard Live, a marketer or sales rep can see exactly who watched and then immediately follow up with the most engaged viewers when they are most interested in learning more.

Vidyard Live has been built to be easy to use, enabling anyone across marketing, sales or internal communications to easily initiate a live stream on the fly or at a pre-determined time.

• Easy set-up – Vidyard Live is built around a user-friendly workflow and can be set up in just a few quick steps. Organizers don’t need to schedule their live streams weeks in advance. Vidyard Live can be started when it’s needed, even at a moment’s notice.
• Know who is watching – Identify both external and internal live stream viewers and track their engagement within Vidyard’s Analytics Center and leading marketing automation and CRM platforms such as Oracle Eloqua, Marketo, Act-On and Salesforce.
• Automatic on-demand video – As soon as a live event is over, the recording is automatically converted to an on-demand video asset available in the same player at the same URL. There is no need to manually upload or encode a separate file or re-embed the video.
• Embed anywhere – The Vidyard player for live streaming and on-demand videos can easily be embedded on any web page, landing page, and even within a Salesforce Chatter feed or Salesforce Community. Vidyard’s HTML5 player supports all devices and screen sizes.

“We’ve always believed that video is the next best thing to being there in person, and that makes it a powerful sales and marketing tool in an age when your potential customer could be thousands of miles away,” Litt said. “We continue to innovate and execute on our vision to help businesses engage with their audiences and generate more revenue through the use of online video.”

Already the first video platform to offer comprehensive integrations with Salesforce and leading marketing automation platforms, Vidyard also recently launched Personalized Video capabilities. Companies including Lenovo, Honeywell, LinkedIn, Cision, TD Ameritrade and Citibank rely on Vidyard for their video marketing and analytics needs.

To learn more about Vidyard Live, visit www.vidyard.com/live or register for the upcoming webinar How to Use Live Streaming for More than Streaming Live Stuff.

 

About Vidyard

Vidyard (Twitter: @Vidyard) is the industry’s leading video marketing platform that helps marketers drive results and ROI with online video content. With Vidyard, customers can add video to their websites in minutes, get real-time analytics, syndicate video to social networks and YouTube, create calls to action, optimize search engine hits, capture leads, and brand their player skins all from one place. Vidyard integrates with key marketing automation and CRM tools to deliver user-level video engagement data, turning views into sales.

 

Media Contact:

Tyler Lessard
Phone: (226) 220-5351
press@vidyard.com

The post New Vidyard Live is First Video Streaming Solution Fully Integrated with Salesforce and Marketing Automation appeared first on Vidyard.

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Trouble Coming Up with Ideas for Posts? Check Out This Generator

If you have been blogging for a while, you probably know that coming up with ideas for new and interesting blog posts can be quite a challenge on in a while. Keeping your blog updated and writing new content regularly is paramount to getting well positioned on the Google search results, but creating all that content is not easy!

Luckily there are some tricks and tools you can use for this purpose.

The tip I have is to take a look at a magazine stand or at magazines from niches different from yours. You’ll notice that the headlines and the stories can easily be adapted to your own blog and audience. For instance, suppose you have a blog about cars. Pick up a fitness magazine and you might find an article titled “7 Mistakes You Are Probably Doing in the Gym.” You could adapt it to your own site as “7 Mistakes You Are Probably Doing With Your Car.”

Easy huh?

Now here’s a tool that will remove even that work from your part. It’s called Blog Idea Generator. All you have to do is to input 3 words (preferably nouns) and the tool will automatically generate 5 blog post titles for you. I tested it and really liked the result, and the ideas it suggested were really catchy and engaging.

Definitely a tool to bookmark and use regularly, whenever your creative juices are not flowing adequately!

How about you, what tips and tricks do you use to come up with new blog post ideas?

Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

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My Paying Ads - Day 68

My Paying Ads - Day 68

237 How to Use a Webinar to Launch Your Digital Product

Using Webinars to Launch

Two weeks ago, I had a very successful re-launch of my Become a Blogger Coaching Club.

During the launch, I surpassed my goal by 258%. Needless to say, this made me happy.

How did I do it? I used a combination of a carefully crafted webinar and email sequence.

In this post, I’m going to share all of the details with you, so that you can go out and do the same to launch your digital product.

Why You Should Use Webinars

I love webinars, but not only because I find them to be a lot of fun. They are extremely effective when it comes to selling products.

Here are three reasons:

You are able to demonstrate value upfront

For someone to decide to buy your product, you have to establish some level of trust. Think about it . . .

You are asking them to go to a web page, pull out their credit cards and buy from you.

How do they know that your purchase process can be trusted?

Best Value Delivered

How do they know that they will get what they pay for?

How do they know that the quality of your digital product warrants the price you are charging?

Some of this uncertainty can be eliminated (or at least reduced) by demonstrating the value before the purchase.

Teaching your potential customer something useful in a webinar can help them understand the real value of what you provide.

With Live Events comes Energy

How do you feel when you get together with a group of friends to watch a movie? You probably get more excited than when watching a movie alone.

That’s the same thing that happens during a live webinar. It’s not simply someone going to your sales pages and reading.

It’s them having a shared experience with others, and that brings a lot of energy to the experience.

The Sense of Urgency is a Great Motivator

If you do a webinar in the way I outline in this post, there will be a sense of urgency.

This is a great motivator to action.

How to Launch Your Product with a Webinar

To launch a product successfully using a webinar, you’re going to have to go through several steps.

I’m going to share the exact steps that I used that resulted in my successful launch. I hope you can take these steps, tweak them (as needed) and apply them to your next launch.

Create a High-Quality Product

Yes, I know that this is not an episode on creating products. But this part is so crucial that I need to cover this part in some detail.

Here’s the thing – if you sell a mediocre product, you’re going to have mediocre results.

Creating a high-quality product doesn’t mean that it will sell itself, but it will make the sales process easier.

The goal is to create a product that solves a specific problem for your potential customers.

This can be a course or (as in my case) even a membership site.

You want to make sure that the value is so good that you can give away a lot of valuable content during the webinar and still have LOTS to share in the product.

Regarding the technology for my membership site, here are the tools I use:

• WordPress: Do I even need to explain this one? All of my sites are based on WordPress because WordPress ROCKS!

WordPress Hosted Blogs

• Amember: This is the membership site software I use to handle member registration and protect my pages.
• Stripe: This is the payment processor I currently used. I go rid of PayPal because of technical issues that always seem to arise. Stripe makes it SUPER easy to accept payments and integrates with Amember well.

Stripe

• Facebook Group: After trying forums for previous launches, I’m so glad to be using a Facebook group now. Fewer problems and more interaction. A win-win situation for everyone.

Planning your webinar

It’s time to plan your webinar – the big event. This is where you will be providing your attendees with a ton of value and then announcing the launch of your product. Here are the things you must do:

Set a Schedule

Set a date

The first thing you want to do is set a date. When will you be launching your product? That will be the day of the webinar.

Once you set that date, you can take a step back and set the milestones you need to reach to be ready on time.

Create an Outline

All of my content starts as an outline (even this post). By creating an outline first, you’re able to get a birds-eye view of your project.

It allows you to get a good idea of the flow of your content and make decisions about what should be removed or added.

Get Feedback

Once your outline is complete, it’s a good idea to get feedback from someone else. Did you miss anything? Does your flow make sense?

Getting an outside perspective can often go a long way and help you spot mistakes, refine concepts and make your content more effective.

Revise your outline

Once you’ve collected feedback, take some time to revise your outline. The more work you do on the outline, the less work you’ll have to do when you create your slides.

The Structure of Your Presentation

Webinar Structure

What makes a great presentation? One that engages your audience, delivers value, and gets the desired result.

Of course, in the case of launching a product, the desired result is to sell your product.

I’ve toyed around with the structure of my webinars and here’s what works well for me:

The Pre-Webinar Banter

Around 5 or 10 minutes before the designated time for the start of the webinar, I start the broadcast and chat with the attendees who are on early.

During that time, I ask them simple questions like who they are and where they are tuning in from.

I might also ask another question that’s related to the topic of the webinar. For example, in my last webinar, I asked for them to let me know if they already have a blog.

When they answer in the chat, I read their responses out loud for them to get a sense of who’s in the room. This helps to warm them up for the main event and gets them excited.

The “What” Section

This section contains the title slide and the slide that outlines what we’re going to cover. The goal here is to set expectations and to hook their attention.

This section shouldn’t take more than 2 or 3 minutes.

The “Why” Section

Audience Interactions

This is where you really sell the value of what you’re teaching by explaining why it’s such an important topic? What pain will it help your audience solve by the end of the webinar?

If they resonate with your “why”, they will be excited to watch the entire presentation.

I find that this is best accomplished by sharing a story. For example, In my most recent webinar, I shared the story of how I went from being an unsatisfied high school science and math teacher to a university professor by leveraging my blog.

I then showed how I was able to leave that job to be a full-time blogger. By sharing that story, I was able to connect with people on the webinar who wanted more from life than they were currently getting.

This clearly showed why they needed to pay keen attention to what I was teaching.

The “Who” Section

This next section is where you let them know a little bit about who you are (as it pertains to the content). For some people, this might be their first interaction with you.

You never want to assume that everyone on the call knows you.

This also allows you to demonstrate why you are qualified to speak on the topic you are presenting on.

Side note: The “Why” and “Who” sections can be reversed – whatever makes the flow of the presentation better. Also, everything up to this point shouldn’t take more than 10 to 15 minutes.

The “How” Section

Webinar

This is the most important part of the entire webinar because this is where you deliver on your promise. Whatever you said you would cover in the “what” section should be covered in great detail here.

The goal here is to give so much value that the webinar could serve as a standalone product because of how much value you packed into it.

Attendees should be able to walk away, take action and achieve results.

This should also be the longest section. If everything before the “how” section took 10 to 15 minutes, this section should take around 30 minutes.

A key thing to keep in mind is that while this webinar should be very actionable, you should leave room for “more”. And that more will come in your offer.

The Offer (including the “when”)

Once you’ve over-delivered with some awesome actionable content, it’s time to make the pitch.

Your attendees have seen the value and can walk away and take action. However, for those that want to take things further and get even more guidance, they can get even more value by buying your product.

In this offer, you should include the following details (and a lot of this will sound familiar):

• What pain your product is solving
• What are the benefits to choosing your product
• What your product includes
• Testimonials from others who have had success with your product
• The price of your product

The Offer

Once you’ve gone through all of that, there’s one more important thing that’s needed – a time-sensitive special offer.

By having a sense of urgency, you will increase your number of signups significantly. This can be a reduced price for those who are on the webinar or for those who take action quickly.

I did my webinar on a Thursday and offered a $1 trial for those who signed up by Tuesday at midnight.

Prepare your Marketing Assets

So you’ve got your slides created and you are ready to go. But in order for your promotion to be successful, you will need to create some marketing assets:

Your Sales Page

This one should be fairly obvious. When you give your call to action at the end of your webinar, you will need a place to send them to in order for the to buy.

Elements of an Effective Sales Page (P.A.S.T.O.R.)

That’s where your sales page comes into play. Here are the elements of an effective sales page as described by Ray Edwards‘ P.A.S.T.O.R acronym:

• Problem: State the problem in a way that your audience can identify with it.
• Amplify: Amplify the problem.
• Story/Solution: Tell a story that shares the solution
• Testimony: How has your product worked for others?
• Offer: What exactly are you selling?
• Response: This is where they respond to your offer and take action.

For more on this, check out Ray’s Episode on P.A.S.T.O.R.

Your Email Sequence

When launching a product, your email sequence plays a vital role. As great as your product will be, subscribers often need to go through a nurture sequence before making the decision to buy. Here’s the exact sequence I used to launch my Coaching Club.

Before the webinar, I sent out three emails:

1. The first email announced the webinar and gave them the link to register. This email went out on the Monday before the webinar, which was done on Thursday.
2. I sent a second email on the day before the webinar.
3. I sent a third email to let my subscribers know that we’d be starting in one hour.

The result was a well-attended webinar. Yipee

After the webinar is where the real marketing began. Here are the emails that were sent out then:

1. The Replay Email: I sent this email out on the day after the webinar (Friday). In this email, I sent the link to the replay page and I let them know about the $1 trial offer that would be expiring on Tuesday.
2. Two Days Remaining: In this email, I decided to share a success story from one of the members of the coaching club. I also reminded them that there were only 2 days left to claim the special offer.
3. 24 Hours Remaining: In this email, I answered 2 questions that addressed concerns that some of my subscribers might have had. The two questions I chose were:
   • Is the Coaching Club right for me?
   • Is the Coaching Club worth the cost?
4. On the day of: On the day of, I decided to send out 2 emails:
   • First email (12 hours remaining): I shared one benefit of membership. For this promotion, the benefit was the hot seats that I just implemented at the beginning of our coaching calls.
   • Final email (6 hours remaining): This was the “last call” for the $1 trial offer. This one was more direct and focused on the fact that the offer would be ending soon.

In the past, I’ve hesitated to send out that many emails. Then I realized that by really promoting the Coaching club, I’m actually helping my audience out.

Because I created a quality program, I knew that members would get a tremendous amount of value from it, so I was more confident in my promotions than ever before.

It’s also important to note that 56% of my sales came in during the last 24 hours. Yes, by doing that final promotional push, it more than doubled my sales. This emphasizes the importance of sending those email reminders.

Bonus Tip: Use Countdown timers

I’ve already mentioned the importance of creating a sense of urgency and how that results in increased sales. Using countdown timers are very effective for emphasizing the time-sensitive nature of your offer.

Knowing that the sale is ending in approximately 6 hours is not as effective as knowing that it’s ending in 6 hours, 15 minutes and 4, 3, 2 seconds

Whether you use LeadPages or OptimizePress, they both give you the ability to use countdown timers on your landing pages. However, with LeadPages, you have to specifically choose a page that has the countdown timer feature. With OptimizePress, you can add it to any of your pages.

For your emails, I recommend using Motion Mail. It allows you to create countdown timers and add them directly to your emails. It’s a beautiful thing. Urgency even before they leave the inbox

In Conclusion

Webinars are powerful. When you combine a carefully crafted webinar with a well thought out email sequence, you are setting your product up for success.

Feel free to take the steps I shared in this post and modify them to suit your needs. If you plan on launching a product, use this as a guide and then come back and let me know how it worked for you.

Your Turn

Have you launched any products of your own? If so, what tips did you learn that could help us all. Go ahead and share in the comments below.

The post 237 How to Use a Webinar to Launch Your Digital Product appeared first on Become A Blogger by Leslie Samuel.

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The Making of Our Most Engaging (Halloween) Video Ever

This year, just a few days before Halloween we launched our first ever TV show / theme song / 90’s revival parody with the Vidyard Family version of the Addam’s Family. Holiday videos are kind of a tradition at Vidyard, but this video outperformed any of our previous videos by leaps and bounds.

If you weren’t lucky enough to see it when it was first released, here it is again.

As a non-videographer myself – but a marketer who loves to utilize video (obvs!) – I thought I’d sit down with our video team after the shoot to find out just how they accomplished some of the things I’d have no idea how to go about. Here’s what I learned and think you might find interesting, too!

Creating the Illusion of a Full- Body Drag

A lot of us saw this scene being shot in the office and I think about 10 of us, at various times during the shoot, looked at another colleague walking by and gave an “oh s#!$, that’s resourceful”.

For real, though.

A lot of thought went into this shot. Mat King, one of our unbelievably talented videographers at Vidyard, explained that it was important in this scene to make it look like Lurch was actually dragging Wednesday and Pugsley and not just walking along with them while holding onto their t-shirts (which would be much less intimidating). Mat was initially planning to have Katie and Ji (a.k.a. Wednesday and Pugsley) crouch down and walk really slowly with long steps beside Tyler (a.k.a. Lurch), but after a few minutes of planning this out on set with Blake, our Creative Director and co-videographer, Mat thought of another, resourceful idea. “I just looked over at our skateboard wall and was like, oh hey – we’ve got longboards right here. Why don’t we just use these?”.

So Blake got in there right away and used skateboards to help Katie and Ji along. Blake pulled and Tyler pushed the two on skateboards with his forearms. Of course, Mat coached Katie and Ji to crouch down and slump their shoulders in order to create the appearance of their body weight being lifted from the back of their neck. As Mat says, giving proper direction is absolutely critical to the success of live-action videos:

“The ability to give direction is really important. You’re the one with the vision in mind. It’s really important that you communicate your vision well so you don’t have people just acting out their own interpretation of your vision.” Mat says that if you give people sequential instructions, they can figure it out. From his experience, “if you just give your actors one action to do, they’ll do it and then look at the camera, which pretty much always renders that shot useless, unless you’re making really tight cuts. If you give them multiple steps and let them know how to finish at the end, you’ll be golden.”

Making Electrocution Look Real

Watch this shot closely. What is it that makes it look realistic? It’s not actually the “lightning bolt” effect, but the lights strobing in the background. But of course, in his usual style, Mat did take a few shots without the strobing lights just in case the effect didn’t work out well once they got down to editing. He’s always making sure there are options to play with! The electrical currents are definitely necessary here, though. That was an effect in After Effects called “electricity”. All you have to do is show where you want to the current to start and end and it essentially does the rest for you!

The other thing that makes this scene is the props. Mat and Blake recreated their own electric chair with a mic stand, a metal salad bowl, and some extra wire taped on to the bowl. As Mat puts it, “it worked out really well that the props could look homemade just due to the quirky nature of the Addams family”. While homemade props are a lot easier to work with, Blake and Mat still spent a fair amount of time sourcing the right props at Value VIllage. For example, this bowl had to be big enough to fit Garth’s head without being too large. It also needed to be deep enough to get a good portion of his head inside the bowl. There was a lot to think about!

Turning ‘on’ the Bulb in Uncle Fester’s Mouth

This one is relatively simple, but it’s still something I had questions about. I mean, obviously they didn’t plug the light bulb in, so I assumed that Blake and Mat added this in in post-production. Turns out there are such things as prop light bulbs! Garth (acting as Uncle Fester) took one for the team here and wrapped some tinfoil on the end of his tongue. Whenever the cue came to light up the bulb, he would just touch his tongue to the end of the bulb, complete the circuit, and voila! He did say that there were a couple times he got a pretty good tingle. So be careful of this one if you’re planning any ‘light bulb lights up in mouth’ scenes.

Building Real Life Moving Photos

To get this shot, Mat and Blake filmed 4 different segments: one of Lurch dusting the wall and one of each of the people in the portraits. In post-production, Mat adjusted the lighting on each so they were all comparable, then masked out the centre of the frame so that it became transparent, moved the videos in behind the frame and moved them around until the subjects were in the right spot. They found the frames online after searching for “Victorian, Gothic Frames” (or something like that!), but one thing Mat said that he made sure to do was to create a backup shot with actual frames that were on the wall. Why? Because if he couldn’t find the frames he wanted online, he would have had to recreate the entire scene, just when he thought he was done filming!

“Usually you don’t use the back-up, but especially when you’re getting into more technical things, this can really save you.”

Turning V-bots Claw into the Real ‘Thing’

This representation of ‘Thing’ from the real Addams Family is the craziest, most complicated, and definitely most awesome effect of all of the effects in this video. Mat and Blake spent a lot of time brainstorming how they could add Thing into the video in an authentic way – i.e. it actually just being a floating hand, of sorts. (Of course we adapted the bodiless hand to be a claw for a little Vidyard brand infusion.) Mat and Blake determined that having the claw jump in and land on a chair was a great way to showcase this effect, so they created a scene to make this work using Morticia, who was a stoic figure, sitting formally in an arm chair.

In order to have the claw look realistic and not just be dragged in awkwardly by some fishing line and flip-flopping about, Mat and Blake used a two-layer process. The first layer was shot as you see it, but with Blake wearing the claw and a blue sweater. The blue was used as an alternative to the typical “green screen” approach because we couldn’t use green due to similarity in color to V-bot’s claw. But blue is another color that can be easily removed from shots.

The second layer, called a backplate image was a still shot of the scene. If there was no secondary image then when Blake removed his own arm (yep – I just typed that) in After Effects during post-production there would just be a black hole where his arm was previously. A critical tip is doing this with the shadow as well! Leaving the full shadow in would include Blake’s arm, so that portion had to be removed. Mat described this to me saying “you couldn’t rely on the blue in this scenario to pull out the arm shadow, but you have a little more leeway with shadows because they have a softer focus and therefore a less-defined edge. If you don’t pull it perfectly, it’s unlikely anyone will notice.” And yes, you do need the shadow. Even though people might not be able to pinpoint what’s off without a shadow, they’ll know something is!

In order for Blake to remove his arm from the shot, he had to track the jump of the claw so he could remove the arm throughout the whole motion. Blake and Mat did all of this in After Effects although Mat explained that it could also be done in Premier – it would just be a little more time consuming!

Take a peek into the real editing process here as Blake explains the process to our design team!

Killin’ It in Black and White

“Shooting in black and white comes down to adding the appropriate level of contrast and planning ahead of time”, says Mat. “It’s not enough to film in color, desaturate your footage, and move on with it.”

Mat explains that producing a black and white video involves tweaking your black tones, mid, and highlights. “If you’re going for a retro look (like we were), you up the highlights so the skin is bright. You really do need these three layers of shading to sell the contours of people in your video.”

In every single shot, Mat took a photo on his DSLR camera on the monochromatic setting to get a feel for the black and white appearance of the regular scene. This helped him to determine if there was too much black, too much highlighting, or not enough contrast. For example, in the scene with Pugsley chained to the wall with the apple on his head for Wednesday’s shooting practice, Mat and Blake initially set up the shot with a red apple on Ji’s head. When he looked at the monochromatic shot, though, Mat realized there wasn’t enough contrast and switched that Red Delicious for a Golden one!

Taking monochromatic photographs throughout also helped him to adjust the exposure for each scene which made color balancing easier later on. As Mat explains, “there’s only so much adjustment you can do later on. If each scene is drastically different in grey-levels and contrast it’ll stand out in the final product.”.

Mat taught me that if you’re using a second videographer to edit footage in post-production, to make sure they do so in full color and send you the source files in full color. You’ll want the switch to black and white to be done by one person since there is actually quite a large spectrum of “black and white” and one person’s conversion may look different than another’s.

The most important tip Mat had for those looking to create a video in black and white is to “re-approach” – or in layman’s terms, walk away from your video editing and coming back later. Your eyes adjust after looking at something for long enough so they may trick you into thinking your black and white video looks well-balanced when it’s really not. Walking away and allowing your eyes to reset will help you optimize your blacks, mid-tones, and highlights.

Some Final Tidbits

When asked if there was anything else he wanted our readers to know about this shoot, Mat said “it seems like this video was really simple, but it was so important that we planned this out. Without the pre-planning, storyboarding, scripting, and prop planning, it just wouldn’t have turned out like this. Oh and also, if you haven’t done anything like this before, practice. Do tests to see if your scenes are going to work, if you have your lighting on point, etc. Practicing can make a world of difference when you do it before everyone’s on set and you only have 10 minutes to complete a scene.”

The post The Making of Our Most Engaging (Halloween) Video Ever appeared first on Vidyard.

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