How to Create a Commercial Video

Your brand is more than just the products and services you sell to your audience. Behind all of these things is a story that has led your brand to where it is today.

Communicating this story to your audience allows your audience to get in touch with your brand on a more personal level. If the values and culture in your story align with their beliefs, you could turn them into customers and clients soon!

To help you make this possible, you must learn how to create a commercial video that communicates this story. In addition, a commercial production template can help you manage the process. Here’s how you can do it:

Write a Tight Script

Before producing a tight and short script, you must let your creativity run wild first. Hold a session for brainstorming ideas with your team—there are no wrong answers here! Research and generate video ideas that are popular with your audience. From here, narrow down the ideas to the best ones and build on those.

Depending on the type of video you’re creating, you might want to check if you’ll need software to help you in this process. E.g. If you’re making a video tutorial, there are some great video tutorial software options available that have various features and templates that can help with the idea generation process.

Make sure that the ideas have your target audience in mind. They should resonate with their interests, likes, dislikes, and other characteristics to have an emotional and intellectual impact on your audience once you turn them into a script.

Also, you must have a goal in mind with your script. There needs to be at least a takeaway from the video that people will remember, even if they’re not directly your target audience. A call to action, tagline, or a specific visual will help your commercial stand out from the rest and makes it easier to remember.

At the same time, having a good grasp of your business allows you to develop a script that is in sync with your brand. A SWOT analysis helps you determine factors you can leverage (strengths), hide (weaknesses), take advantage of (opportunities), and avoid (threats) in your video.

When writing the script, never be afraid to drill it down to its essentials. Cut out the fluff and rewrite it to the point that the script succinctly features the story and leaves no room for imagination.

Remember that commercial videos can run as short as 15 seconds, so you must figure out a way to cram everything you want to say in your script without feeling rushed or unfinished.

Sketch Out Your Storyboard

To help visualize your script during these stages, consider creating a storyboard for it.

You can establish the video’s timeline and determine when the key scenes will occur. Detail each scene with annotation to help describe things that aren’t expressed in the images. For instance, define the camera movements for each frame to ensure that the most critical parts of the scene are captured correctly.

Ideally, you want to visualize your storyboard using slideshows or graphic design, but sketching it out using pen and paper is just as good. As long as you can communicate how you want to script to play out in real life, how you present it shouldn’t matter.

Shoot the Scenes

You want to capture the scenes in the most professional way possible. While this usually means you must use professional equipment like cameras and lighting, you can create professional-looking videos of the scenes with your mobile or handheld devices. It’s just a matter of adjusting the phone to the right settings.

For lighting and audio recording, you need to be in a controlled environment that enables you to control these factors to get the proper visibility and sound.

Also, never mix natural and artificial light. Their different temperatures cause uneven lighting in your videos. Find a way to use either one when shooting with your phone.

When shooting the videos, remember the “Rule of Thirds,” in which a frame is divided into nine equal sections.

The subject must be located in at least two anchor points (the intersection between the two horizontal and vertical lines) of the frame. This allows you to put a spotlight on your subject (product, brand, etc.) so your viewers get to see it.

At the same time, you don’t have to capture new footage for your commercial video if you have existing assets that you can repurpose and reuse. You can just use them to create the video instead of starting from scratch.

But for this to happen, you must have a video asset management system where you store all your b-roll footage for future use.

Finally, it’s okay if you’re not skillful enough to produce the video playing in your head. But what’s important is to get that vision out and into video format by any means necessary. This is why you should consider getting a professional videographer to help make your video script a reality.

Edit the Video

Once you have the videos of your scenes ready, it’s time to go to the cutting floor and piece them all together.

Video editing is a very sophisticated process that requires you to use software that lets you connect and splice videos and add effects and overlays. In most cases, you might want to seek help from a professional editor and guide them through the process to help capture the commercial video you want.

But if you plan on taking the task yourself, assemble the rough cut before fixing the timing issues. It’s best to set the foundations of the video before you deal with the fine details.

As mentioned, you will have to add video and sound effects in the final cut, but use them judiciously. Don’t overload the video with transitions that could dilute the quality of your video and the message you’re communicating.

Last, don’t expect to fix the scenes in post-production. Even the best software can’t mask any issues your scenes may have. In this case, get everything you need from your initial shot.

Conclusion

Getting your commercial video right the first time is crucial to your business’s success. By effectively communicating your message to your audience, you can increase brand awareness and sales, enabling you to create more videos to achieve the same goals—if not higher.

Hopefully, this post gave you ideas on approaching the commercial video process concerning your brand and audience. You can refer to examples of how to create commercial videos to help you further.