A Very Small Shooting Ratio

Producing even a short video usually takes a long time. For a total of four minutes of footage in the Triple J videos we made earlier this year, it took a solid two days of production work and several more days of editing. The two minutes you see in the Hit The Gym video was cut together from about 20 minutes of actual footage, filmed over about five days.

The first promotional video I ever used was three minutes long, and was culled from literally about 14 hours of video footage. It took me months to trawl through to find the best moments.

This promo video for PerthNow, on the other hand? Three minutes.

[jwplayer config="simonjwplayer" mediaid="706"]
(via perthnow.com.au)

It helps that both Nancy (the camera operator) and myself had respectively done many similar videos before, and that it wasn't an especially complex or challenging shot. As you can see by the resulting video, it's also not like we were aiming for full Hollywood production values. The whole thing was one 60-second take of the dialogue, plus one close-up shot of the hands. Personally I think the cuts in and out of close-up in the final video were a little over-zealous, but I'm certainly not going to complain about free publicity.

It served its purpose, gave the show some much needed exposure, and did it all with only three minutes of shooting time.

Next post: Non-Target Demographic »

« Previous post: Post-Perth Wrapup