‘It looks like TV!’ How to Commission Successful DVD, Video and Screen Based Business Communications

Written by Cathy Bentley award-winning director at iceni, a UK visual communications company, this free guide will help you brief a Video Production Company and outlines the things you need to consider when commissioning a successful Video, Film or DVD project.

A Little Bit of History

In the 80s and early 90s video was widely acknowledged as the best way to deliver training; promote a product or service. It is entertaining, highly effective and requires little effort from the viewer. It was also ‘cool’.
Then in the late 90s came the Dot Com Boom – This new and exciting technology meant that everyone had to have a website or a CD-Rom. Suddenly video tapes were seen as old fashioned.

Corporate Video Production Today

But things are changing again. Today, the widespread uptake of broadband, and ever more sophisticated encoding and data compression mean that video can be delivered at excellent quality to a large number of viewers at little cost. Video no longer means a black plastic tape – it has merged with digital media – with affordable ‘Hollywood studio’ quality MPEG encoding, advances in webstreaming and the ubiquity of the DVD, screen-based media can be delivered in many ways:

CD-ROM (small amount of video on a small screen size) with text.

DVD – lots of video in smaller sections with interactivity such as menus and downloadable documents.

Webstreaming – the high quality video on our website http://www.iceni-tv.co.uk/ proves how viable this cost-effective distribution method is for delivering your MD’s message, your customer testimonials or your promotional video - and it gives your website personality.

Video-mail – video embedded in an email sent straight to your client’s inbox means you’re not relying on your time-poor target audience to open a tape or CD case and put a tape/CD into a machine to watch your programme.

Retail TV – many shopping centres, pub chains and supermarket chains have their own in-house screens.

Call Centres/office receptions – A video jukebox system can show your promotional video as a key client arrives – or educate call centre staff from their desk.

Billboards, PDAs, Pen Drives and Mobiles - iceni can encode video for almost any delivery format - how do you want to reach your audience?

So, How Do You Go About Commissioning Corporate Video Production for Your Company?

For the purposes of this article, let’s assume your corporate video production project will include video production as well as graphical/multimedia content. iceni can of course provide multimedia projects without video, but video production is our core service – it’s what we’re passionate about.

It’s important to sit down with a production company and discuss your requirements in detail rather than just emailing a brief to several companies to get comparative quotes. There are subtleties about your company that cannot be understood from an emailed brief such as preferred terminology, your company culture, your personality and your working environment.

Try to establish a rapport with your chosen company. Video is very labour intensive and you will need to work together to get the most from your investment.
Before you meet them, you should think about these questions –

Read the whole article at iceni - a UK Video Produciton Company

For more information call Andi Jepson on 01283 792 990