Our top 5 ways to create video content remotely

It’s fair to say when it comes to video, nothing beats being on a film set. But the reality is there are certain times where you can’t… whether that’s due to budgets, timings, or because the world is self isolating and you’re having to work remotely!

So, we thought it would be useful to share a few tips on how you can still create quality video content, even in the most extreme situations:

---

1. Encourage more user-generated content

Asking your team or customers to contribute footage to the film you’re making can be awesome for creating something that feels really authentic.

When it comes to sourcing the best footage, start by asking people to share content they’ve already shot on their phones or search for hashtags online and reach out to those creators to see if you can use their content.

If you’re looking for more specific shots, put together some clear instructions with example references you can share with people just to ensure the footage that comes back is usable! We’d also recommend a webinar style briefing session with all participants just to make sure any questions they have can be answered in one go.

This is exactly what we did with Lovecrafts and our Paintbox campaign and it worked a treat.

---

2. Use your assets

“Repurposing” for repurposing’s sake is not something we encourage, but if you are really struggling to create anything new, we always encourage clients to look back into the assets we’ve created on set together and figure out how we can create something new out of what’s already there.

Grants did this really well with our above the line TVC campaign, taking the opportunity to use the ad to create more social content to bring into the new year.

Give something worth remembering. The gift of together. #TripleWoodTripleGood #GrantsWhisky pic.twitter.com/r2HqhelEUp

— Grant's Whisky (@Grantswhisky) November 14, 2019

---

3. Take Stock

The dreaded word for any self righteous filmmaker, but actually in today’s world, leveraging stock to tell a story can be really effective.

We’re big fans of this for start ups who can’t necessarily afford everything being shot live and once you add a decent soundtrack, voiceover and any other bells and whistles, it can come out looking great. The key is to ensure the stock matches the tone of the message…for simple educational films, use sites that have huge asset libraries and a subscription model…

We’d recommend: https://www.videoblocks.com/

For a project that needs shots that are of a high quality, you may need to pay a premium for specific shots so use sites like: www.filmsupply.com which hosts content shot by cinematographers around the world.

Or if you are creating something comedic or more forgiving, we’d say own the cheese (like we did with Hiyacar) and look for old school shots and cartoon imagery that can be found on most cost effective sites.

---

4. Let’s get animated

Probably the most obvious way to avoid live action shooting is creating an animation. To keep budgets and timings in line, remember it’s a two stage process… a storyboard is created and then these “still” assets are animated.

So make sure you’re really clear what you’re getting at the storyboard stage and avoid having to make changes after the animation starts! On the positives though, this can all be managed remotely…and if you have a script, VoiceOver artists can easily record remotely now too.

Here’s an example of this kind of project in play with Cambridge Audio:

---

5. Hangout with your audience and/or team

Whether it’s Zoom, Skype or Google Hangouts, you have an opportunity to create some epic content out the endless meetings in your calendar. There’s an even greater opportunity to involve your customers/staff/fans who are also stuck at home and get them to record a message.

The best thing to do is send them a list of simple questions to answer so you can edit them together to be used in various ways - whether that be to generate written thought-leadership pieces on some of your challenges or even creating bitesize cutdowns to be used further down the line.

Check out this film made a while ago which we think shows the power of digital UGC very well:

---

BONUS TIP: A Moving Image

One of the things we’ve been thinking about recently is how to re-think what a film can be - getting creative is all about how you can expand on the resource you have!

So consider the other elements you have at your disposal right now, whether that be through using audio, photography, titles and still graphics, or even combining all of these elements.

A great example of this is from one of our extended Mattr family, Director Miles Langley. We loved this brilliant film he created for International Women’s Day, where due to restrictions with availability of the participants, he cleverly combined photos and simple animation with some really personal voice recordings.

There are lots of other tips and tricks but hope that gives you a little bit of inspiration on your quest to create epic content whilst working remotely! If you have any questions on what you’re planning, feel free to get in touch and we’ll happily give you our two cents…

Our (now famous!) guide on how to create killer video content

We’re absolutely thrilled to be featured in Startups Magazine’s ‘Advertising and Branding’ Issue, the first edition of 2020!

It’s an awesome opportunity for us to really dive into how we work with our clients to tell meaningful and impactful stories - and share some of our biggest learnings across the whole process.

Scroll through to read our entire feature here:

Have a brief you want to chat through or you need some desperate help building out your content for the rest of this year?

Email josh@mattr.media and we’ll be in touch!

The top things that mattered to us in February

We’re back with our take on what’s happened during Feb that we think matters, and there’s been a lot going on in the world of purpose-led brands.

1) Ecover’s Laundry Against Landfill campaign

We’ve seen a huge momentum towards the end of last year of brands producing more impactful rallying cries - like this one we covered by Friends of the Earth last month. 

This month the spotlight was shone firmly on the huge amounts of material waste in the fashion industry, by Ecover’s Laundry Against Landfill campaign. We loved how their awareness piece is simply non-preachy yet effective, and how they’ve scaled the campaign to be multi touch-point, providing supplementary ‘how to’ guides on how to properly take care of our clothes on their site. 

Sara Mendez, Marketing Director at Ecover explained that  “with this campaign, we wanted to raise awareness of the problem of fashion waste. But also show people ways they can lessen their impact by falling back in love with the clothes they already own, keeping them in use, and out of landfill”.

2) Cans for Equity by BrewDog

It’s always interesting to see brands explore the ways they can attract and engage their superfans.

Look no further than what Brewdog have launched during Feb, with their Cans for Equity campaign - with the result being you can recycle 50 cans to become an ‘equity punk’ in Brewdog. 

This is such a great way to not just encourage behaviour change in the short-term, but also to show they care about their product at all stages through partnerships with First Mile to give their cans a second life. 

This initiative has created a more intimate perk for their superfans by feeling truly part of the brand, and we applaud it.

3) Sanctus’s campaign for Children’s Mental Health Week

This particular campaign is proof of how a creative can really thrive in the long-term. Sanctus, a brand providing mental health coaching businesses and individuals, decided to flip the script and create a film a couple of years ago on their socials for Children’s Mental Health Week. 

It made a comeback during the past month, and we wanted to highlight how much making this tonal switch on such a sensitive topic matters… it’s so great to see this from a brand with a more corporate audience. 

We spoke to George Bell, the brand and marketing lead at Sanctus who agrees that the power of the film also lies in the script. It’s comedic but authoritative on a subject when “all too often mental health is associated with images of someone sitting in a dark room clutching their head - this is, of course, part of mental health but it's not the full spectrum.”

“Although it's a couple of years old now, we still re-use it and still have a great response every time, which shows that it still remains uncommon for people to see mental health presented in this way.”

4) NHS x Notes to Strangers 

#notestonhs with @imalilo

411 Likes, 1 Comments - Andy Leek (@notestostrangers) on Instagram: "#notestonhs with @imalilo"

We’ve all seen these notes pop up around London over the years and one of our team is a huge fan, so we had put this in our highlight. 

Notes for Strangers started as an Instagram account by ex-creative Andy Leek, writing random notes on telephone boxes and bollards, spreading positivity and kindness where he noticed it’s severely lacking. 

This month we saw the launch of a collab with Notes to Strangers and the NHS, creating posters and notes for hospitals UK-wide to show support for nurses under severe stress. 

Hospitals tend to be a pretty bleak place and these notes are intended to spread positive messages at a time where political conversations are taking up much of the discourse around their work - it’s just a lovely thing to see.

5) ‘Meet the New Joby’ by Joby 

And finally in our roundup we wanted to include this really simple but effective repositioning campaign by Joby. If you don’t know who Joby are - they’re a tech brand that sells tripods for all different devices. 

We love how instead of putting their product front and centre, they hero their creators interacting with their product, weaving in UGC to add a mixed media element. 

It’s great to see Joby are exploring a new creative angle, becoming more experience-focused - so we’re looking forward to seeing their creative progression down the line!

Like what you’re seeing and want to create content that matters?

Email josh@mattr.media and let’s see what we can do...

How to build a water-tight brief for you (and your agency partner!)

Writing a decent brief for both you and your agency partner is massively important. If done well, your brief should act as a touchstone for you both to create actionable instructions out of… it also ensures everyone is staying on course once the project is off the ground.

Trouble is, people aren’t really taught how to brief. So often important details can get left out and details that are supposedly set in stone change halfway through, leading to timely mistakes and costly errors.

This is definitely the case with video content, in spite of it probably being the most effective way to emotively connect with your audiences and educate them on why you exist.

Often video teams are often briefed at the “end” of planning phase… we’ve certainly felt this pain ourselves, and over the years have often had to rewrite briefs with the client to ensure the proposals we come up with are fit for purpose.

So, to save you time, stress and potentially money for when you’re putting your next video brief together, the below are some common details people leave out that are really important for your partners to understand:

1. Communicate your business challenge

Discover & share this BBC GIF with everyone you know. GIPHY is how you search, share, discover, and create GIFs.

Often brands tell us the communication objective of their video project, but it’s even more important to understand what the underlying business problem is that has led to your decision to create this video.

One time we were asked to create a campaign for a client who needed to raise awareness with a new audience, but when we learnt that they also needed to drive sales once that audience landed on their website, the amount and type of content we delivered was reprioritised vs what we had been asked.

If we hadn’t have dug deep here, perhaps it wouldn’t have been as effective as it was.

2. Write down any relevant audience insights

Any audience insights you have to hand should be shared as part of the brief for the video.

Most briefs explain what the brand wants the audience to “know/feel/do” after watching the video, but it’s just as important to understand their mindset and what their painpoints are BEFORE they watch the video.

Frankly even if you don’t have large pools of research to hand, just informing the agency what these people love and worry about around your brand and the sector you work in is massively important to understand.

3. A deep dive into your budget

Discover & share this Money GIF with everyone you know. GIPHY is how you search, share, discover, and create GIFs.

No, this isn’t the point where you should say what budget you have, that should be a given.

However, you should also include information on what resource you have internally that could help with savings. This could be anything from team or customers who you could feature in the films, locations you could make available, team members who could support with anything during production or after.

Basically it’s worth putting down as that way the agency partner should be able to work out how to best spend the budget knowing all the tools they have at their disposal.

“TOP TIP: if the budgets allocated don’t match your ambitions, consider how you can look money together between your teams... ultimately if the content produced can help recruit new talent or sales teams use in meetings, they should contribute towards the project.”

4. Use the brief to think about how you can scale the campaign

What else are you doing beyond this video to drive the action you want? Are you creating supporting content for the viewer after they watch the video we are being asked to create? What about a landing page that stores some of that info you can drive traffic to and capture emails from? Is there a social competition being created to drive further engagement?

When we say we create “scalable” video this is how we think and often the client is thinking this way too, so let your agency partner know...it can spark new ideas and sometimes additional content that can be captured on set to support your plans.

5. Explain to your partner what types of internal resource are and aren’t available

Can't stop, won't stop, please stop

Following on from this, explain to your video partner what internal resource can support their work. Do you have in house pr or paid media taken care of? What about social community management? Graphic design? It’s great to know this can be leveraged and if you don’t your video partner should have its own decent network of partners they work with to help plug the gaps.

There are plenty of other elements to building out a brief. And whilst we can share briefing templates to help you with this, we also run complimentary briefing workshops to ensure absolutely nothing is missed out. If you’re interested in having one, just get in touch with josh@mattr.media

The 6 steps you need to follow to create a killer crowdfunding video

Like many start-ups raising investment through crowdfunding, fintech brand Chip knew their investment video was crucial. With only 2 weeks till the raise, they were worried the traditional ‘talking head’ interview with their founder they had produced just didn’t do their mission justice. They needed help…and fast!

Enter Mattr Media, who helped create one of the fastest ever campaigns to reach £1m (eventually raising over £3.5m+ with a 380% oversubscription rate) and a video shortlisted for Crowdcube’s Video and Campaign of the Year.

So, how did we do it? And how do we continue to achieve record-breaking results for our other crowdfunding clients? Well, the below are 6 key steps we take with all our crowdfunding projects…

RULE 1: DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE IMPORTANCE OF YOUR VIDEO

Unlike pitching to traditional investors, you aren’t going to necessarily meet crowdfunding investors face to face and they aren’t just looking for a 10x return.

Dan Hardy, Head of Business Development at Crowdcube, summed up perfectly why that means your video is so important: “video is the dominant media format online and since Crowdcube is primarily an online investment platform... (so) your pitch video is the best chance you have for investors to learn about you and your business…”

So doing one and doing it well is crucial.

RULE 2: TELL A STORY

So how do you do that? Well, don’t forget on crowdfunding platforms, most of the people watching your film are not as financially savvy as traditional investors. So whilst top-level metrics are important, it’s just as crucial to answer deeper introspective questions that your audience will connect with. Things like “why did we start this in the first place? What’s the problem we’re trying to solve? How can we show we’re a big deal (PR/Awards/Team etc.)? What does the future hold?”

It’s also important to not get lost in explaining the “features” of your product. As Hardy explains, “the objective here is to get people to invest in your business, not to buy your product. That's a big difference… You need to strike the right balance.”

Overall, keep the message simple and save the detail for additional supportive content.

RULE 3: BE DISTINCTIVE 

Depending on how much time you’ve spent defining your brand tone of voice, this will make life easier or more challenging for you. But if you haven’t the foggiest, this is where a creative partner like us can help.

In order to make this video feel distinctly “you”, it’s helpful to consider questions like-

• If we were a brand from a different sector, which would we choose to be?

• If we had 3 words to describe how we want people to feel after watching this, what should they be?

• If we had 3 words to describe our product, what would they be?

• If we imagined our brand as a celebrity, who would they be? And why?

It’s exactly these kinds of questions that led us to creating such a fun and quirky fundraiser for Chip.

RULE 4: PUT YOUR AUDIENCE FIRST

The rise in popularity of crowdfunding has been born out of a desire for consumers to feel more connected with the brands they buy from. And that’s why so many successful crowdfunding campaigns are community focused - just look at Monzo and their amazing £20m crowdfund, or Brewdog and their 2000% overfund to total £10m. 

Alex Latham, Chip’s CMO says “It’s really imperative that our staff and customers feel a part of our mission, particularly for crowdfunding. There was no better way of doing this than when Mattr recommended we champion these guys in our films. I would say a lot of our Crowdcube success has been because of this attitude. ”

You should not underestimate the value of people being your advocates, helping spread the word for you and hopefully investing too.

RULE 5: CREATE VALUE BEYOND THE HERO FILM

For some investors, watching your main film may not be enough to sway them to part with their money. So think about what content you can create to support their final decision. 

Supportive “product explainer” films are great for the nitty-gritty you haven’t spoken about in the main film and of course, there’s the pitch deck for the financials. However, if budget can stretch, we also encourage films about the staff.

It surprises us that not too many companies create update films on how the raise is going  after the campaign goes live, a useful tool to stay top of mind.

RULE 6: CHOOSE THE RIGHT PARTNER

Most video agencies have fixed “packages” (as do we) for crowdfunding campaigns and many of us have proven experience, so how do you choose the right partner?

A big component of that will be whether you believe your chosen agency is not just doing this to get paid, but ultimately because they believe in your business.

You can gage part of this from initial conversations and the value they provide. But whether they “walk the walk” is tough. That’s why at Mattr we developed two further offerings to the standard package, which aligns us even further to you in your quest for a successful raise:

1. A part fixed fee part success fee package 

2. A pure success fee package (i.e. absolutely no up front fee to do so)

Finally…

You’re at an exciting stage in your company’s journey, but we know your video will be a crucial piece in the success of your campaign. If you’re interested in learning more, do contact Chief Shmoozer Josh at josh@mattr.media