Business Writing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 17

Ten Steps to Creating Video

IN THIS CHAPTER

Knowing your stages: Preproduction, production, and postproduction

Creating scripts that interweave picture and words

Balancing production values against practicalities

If you’re creating mini-videos with your smartphone, you’re probably shooting spontaneous moments to share with friends. While you want to take advantage of better picture quality and special effects as the technology develops, you may not need to plan much.

But it’s different when you have a business goal. Then you need an overall plan for producing a “show” that achieves your business objectives and engages your target audience. A promotional video done for public relations or marketing reasons demands good production values: interesting and well-lit video, quality sound, good graphics.

Between the spontaneous smartphone video and marketing production is a wide range of in-between videos — the how-to demo for YouTube; your self-introduction for your website; video blogs; your short commercial for an email offering; Snapchat and other social media posts. How good do these videos need to be? That’s up to you. But whatever use you make of video, and even if you’re ...