The Corporate Video Library
Let’s talk about a key part of having great corporate video—building a library of footage and videos. When we start shooting for a new corporate client, it’s usually for a very specific video… maybe a training video or a web video. When we shoot, we don’t ever delete anything. That footage goes onto harddrives and those harddrives are backed up to tapes.
Building Videos
Then we get called to shoot for a second project. And then a third. And that footage starts to build up. Then you call us because you need a quick internal video on your company culture. You send us a script or voice over and we pull from these previous shoots to put video over that voice over. Without ever shooting anything. And it’s fast. Clients that we’ve been working with for years, will call us and need a short, quick video that they can put on the web, or in their e-learning portal and with a growing library, this becomes a much easier process. Of course, sometimes it’s a mixture—one client had an announcement of an upcoming meeting. We shot a little new footage and used a lot of library footage from their last conference. Having a library to pull from gives you the flexibility to have great looking videos at lower cost and quicker turnarounds.
Increasing Production Value
And we’ll use that footage often to increase production value. Maybe the talking head interview talks about the warehouse… we could stay on that shot, or pull from the library that time we shot in the warehouse.
And often, I’ll use interviews as an opportunity to build the library—maybe asking some questions that aren’t necessarily the focus of the current video that can be re-purposed from something down the road. One client I have, we were shooting events at their retail locations. In addition to asking associates the questions of the day, I also asked them what they liked about working for the company. Later, human resources needed a video to play at job fairs—they were extremely pleased that we were able to get them a great video from footage they didn’t have to pay for again.
One note—if you’re using outside video companies, the industry standard is that you, the client, own the footage, even if the video company keeps it at their place. You should never have to pay to get footage back from a video production vendor.
