Promo Video

When I researched what a promotional video is, one explanation that I found is “A promotional video is a business video with the intent to promote your products and services to customers and prospects.”

I tried to find out if there is a difference between a promo video and what I think of as adverts like you see on the TV, but what I found was many different opinions and definitions. There seems to be a general consensus that promotional videos maybe don’t attempt to make you go out and buy a specific product in the same way as many TV adverts do, e.g. for toys at Christmas and M&S food.

When I asked a few people generally if they thought there was a difference, most people weren’t sure, but felt that a promotional video was often like a tourist board video or travel video for a whole country rather than for a specific company. People also suggested that a lot of adverts were much less subtle, and more “in your face” than promotional videos. On the whole, I think that people are becoming a bit tired of adverts pushing them to buy things using what they see as psychological advertising tricks. and treating them “like idiots who can’t see through all that stuff” as one person said. Some people said they would prefer it if adverts just gave them “the facts” and showed what the thing was. Those people preferred what they thought of as promo videos because they felt they were less of a hard sell and indeed did show photos e.g. of the country or place. But these were informal comments with various people, rather than a survey of a lot of people, but they were useful as Qualitative Research.

Looking at the brief, we are being asked to make a promo video for a town, rather than a specific company. I looked up some promo adverts that related to “places” and found 2 that were of personal interest to me as well. They are both promoting the 24^th World Scout Jamboree in 2019, which I applied to go on, was selected for and went to. I am one of the target audience for both these videos. I can say that both videos accurately represented the jamboree and the emotions they evoke are accurate too.

WSJ 2019 Promo Video

This is a general promotional video for the 24th World Scout Jamboree in 2019. At 2 mins 46 seconds it is significantly longer than our promo should be, and I do feel that maybe it does go on a little bit too long. However, I remember seeing it before I went to the World Scout Jamboree in 2019 and it did make me want to be there, so it achieved the aim of a promotional video.

24^th World Scout Jamboree – Oxfordshire Unit Advert

This is a shorter WSJ 2019 promotional video (1 min 25 secs) specifically from the Oxfordshire Scouts, to encourage scouts in their area to submit an application to be selected to be part of the Oxfordshire Unit going to the World Scout Jamboree. It is a cut down version of the WSJ 2019 Promo Video above, with different music and different titles on it. At the end it also has details of how to apply to the Oxfordshire Unit. I was selected to be part of the Buckinghamshire/Hertfordshire Contingent. I saw various videos like this, before I applied, and they made me really want to apply.

In both these promos I think they are effective by showing lots of images of what the World Scout Jamboree will be like, and all the activities you could do there. Although I had read about it, words on a page didn’t do justice to it, whereas both these videos do, especially to the scale of it. However, if either of them had just been a series of images then I don’t believe it would have kept people’s attention in the same way as these 2 promo videos do. To do this they use filming and editing techniques such as a variety of appropriate shots, some close-ups showing people’s happy faces (implying that we will be happy if we go there), very high angle shots, probably by drones, which show the scale of the event, making us go “Wow! That is amazing!” and want to go.

I think both of these promos were necessary because many people still think of a scout jamboree as a lot of scouts sitting around tying knots and whittling wood, and both these videos show that is not so. A Jamboree is a vibrant, exciting event, with lots of exciting activities like climbing, zip wire, skateboarding, sailing etc. Both these promo videos achieve the aim of this accurate and exciting portrayal, and showed me that we need to think about the tone of our promo video and use images appropriately to evoke the emotions that we are being asked in the brief to evoke.

Both these videos use music to capture that excitement successfully. Again, that shows we need to tie on our music choice with the image we are trying to portray and the emotions that we want to evoke.

Something that I feel is particularly effective in the second promo is the simple but direct way in which they show some of the facts like “45,000 Scouts” and “150 Countries” with simple titles, placed just before images of huge numbers of scouts. This gives you a context for what you are then looking at. Just the figures are hard to relate to just how many people that looks like, and just the images doesn’t let you know how many people it actually is – who can count 45.000 people? But the combination is what works, making sure that the whole promo video is cohesive and tells the same story.

Preproduction
Our brief – “Don’t Move to Amersham”
In our group of 90%Bloopers plus Charlie G we looked at the brief shown to us by Nick. It was to persuade Londoners to move out of London and come to live in Amersham. Research was showing that due to Covid-19, many Londoners were wanting to move somewhere more rural but still with many amenities that they enjoyed on London like good train links.  This brief asks for a humorous approach, which we as a group like and feel is a strength of ours. Going with this brief, rather than making something up from scratch, would allow us to concentrate on the creation of the promo video, putting together the shots, music, cuts etc, rather than having to start from scratch and come up with something to promote. It is also more representative of real life, in that an organisation would come to you to ask you to make a promo video for them, rather than you just creating a random promo video about something.

We liked the counter-intuitive requirement, this is a fun and gentle humorous approach. Counterintuitive messages are something which we haven’t attempted yet. It is a humour created by the combination of the images and the words spoken, by showing opposite images to the words. When the words state “It’s got terrible traffic problems” you show an image of a lovely quiet country road. We realised that we would need pleasing images so that that is the image left in the audience’s mind, and making them smile when they hear the contradictory words. This gives us a good opportunity to explore a different linking of images to words to when we would usually try to make them match. We decided to use this brief and the prepared items like the script.

We discussed our ideas for shots for the promo, based on the script. We all worked on the preproduction documents, having done both independent and group research. We discussed which roles we each should have. I was allocated Director, which is a role I enjoy and my eventual preferred career direction. I was also Assistant Camera. I would like to work towards becoming a Director by taking a technical cinematography route, so I was very pleased with these roles.

Roles

We agreed our individual roles. I have discussed my role as Director in my Promo Video Journals and in my Promo Video Evaluation

• Gareth – Director / Assistant Camera
• Adam – Sound Engineer / Behind the scenes / Tech
• Ellie – Cinematographer / Camera / Assistant Director
• Harley – Editor / Second Unit
• Charlie – Soundtrack / Assistant / Actor
• Jack – Actor / Props / Graphic Design