by Joe Monzo | Jun 8, 2022 | General
If you are planning on producing videos that feature people and tell a story, you’ll need to get familiar with the casting process. You’ll want to create a casting plan early on in your pre-production process to ensure you can find the right people to feature in your videos. Often, who you cast will shape the story and message of your video, so you’ll need to make a decision about who will be featured.
It’s likely that you’ll need these individuals to perform well in both “active” roles – like speaking parts – and in accompanying b-roll footage. By getting clear on your goals during pre-production and making confident casting decisions, you should be able to cut down on both filming and editing time.
Be Intentional about Whom You Interview
Before you get started with casting, think about the message you’d like to convey in your video. If you’d like to showcase a particular job role, you’ll want to specify during casting that you need people who have experience in those roles. If your message is to tell a brand story, maybe you’d like to have people representing different roles in the company and highlighting various experiences and perspectives.
Instead of spending days or weeks interviewing candidates, have an idea in your mind of a few people you know who would be best for the video. Having 50 interviews with everyone you can find will not only waste time in the casting and filming process but also make it difficult to review all the candidates and select the right ones.
The last thing your production process needs are production delays. By being intentional about the casting process, your editor won’t have to go through all the interview videos, and your video will feel more cohesive when finished.
Cast the Natural Choices
As you’re conducting interviews, take note of which candidates can speak well, have a notable experience or story to tell, and don’t seem nervous or difficult to direct. Keep in mind that it’s best to have b-roll footage that complements interviews in your video. You’ll want to choose people who do well speaking on camera as well as acting out the experiences that they’re talking about, for your b-roll footage.
Keeping your video’s story in mind, try to hone in on the interviews that seem the most natural. Make sure you also include a variety of people, both to represent diversity and to highlight different perspectives. If you’re casting people for b-roll footage who won’t have an interview, it’s especially important to have an organic representation of people who fit well with the message being communicated by the speaker.
Cast Your Video for Success
When it comes down to casting the right people for your video, it’s about following your gut. Who do you know has charisma and a great story to tell? Who really moved you as they spoke about their experiences? If you were impressed during the interview, then it’s likely that your audience will be impressed as well.
By following your intuition, you can save yourself time during filming and save your editor time in post-production, when they would otherwise be performing some heavy-handed editing on subpar performances.
Looking for more guidance on casting? Contact Monzo Media Productions to discuss your video project.
by Joe Monzo | Jun 1, 2022 | General
You’ll never see your computer slow down quite like it does when you start trying to save video files from your production project. If you’re a beginner at video production, whether creating an online course or building a marketing campaign for your company, you’ll soon find that video files are massive. They reach way beyond the amount of space that word documents, audio files, and even photos demand from your computer storage.
If you don’t find a new solution soon for storing your video files, you’ll quickly run out of space and your production process will grind to a halt. Take some advice from a professional video production company and try these storage solutions.
Use External Hard Drives
Even with high-end computers, internal storage space isn’t made for running and storing large quantities of video files for video production while maintaining functionality for your other needs. The solution is to use external hard drives, which you can buy separately and continue collecting to have limitless potential for storage without affecting your computer.
Portable hard drives can be used to store any files, but they’re especially great for video files. Try to get into the practice of backing up all of your files onto hard drives in the event of a computer crash so that you always have copies. You’ll also want dedicated hard drives for your video work, both for projects in the editing phase of productionand for projects that need to be stored.
HDD vs. SSD Hard Drives
When it comes to storing footage on external hard drives, you have two options: SSDs and HDDs (solid state drives and hard disk drives). HDDs are great for storing a decent amount of footage or files, and they are much more mechanical in nature. They are built with mechanical spinning platters and have a moving head that reads the platters to access your data. At Monzo Media Productions, we try to buy hard drives that allow between 2 to 4 terabytes (TB) of storage. HDDs are where we store older projects or videos that are on the backlog waiting for edits.
Whenever we’re actively working on a project, we store our videos on an SSD hard drive. SSDs are a more active hard drive that allows for quicker loading times. They’re more expensive, but they don’t have the mechanical aspects of an HDD drive that slows down the process. When we switched from editing videos on an HDD to an SSD, we saw an immediate improvement in the speed of the editing process and fewer computer crashes.
After a project is done, we transfer the project from the SSD drive to the storage HDD drive. The best practice is to label all HDD drives with the date of when they were established. For example, label an HDD drive with the month that you bought it and store all your video projects from that time period onto that hard drive. That way, you’ll always stay organized and find your video projects easily.
Streamline Your Video Production Process
With experience, you’ll find the best ways to organize and streamline your video production. It might take some time, but soon you’ll be able to set up a workflow that makes it easy to find the files you need and improves the functionality of your equipment. Smart use of HDD and SDD external storage will ensure you keep your computer running quickly and your editing process rolling smoothly.If you’re concerned about hard drives and which ones you should buy for your projects, contact Monzo Media Productions for more insight.
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