I attended a short 1 day program on video production and marketing bootcamp at Iconik Coworking Space. The event was organized by Crazy Ants Academy. Iconik Coworking space is located at Icon City Petaling Jaya, a Mah Sing project.
Being already been doing videos which are all self taught, I felt that going to this event will further sharpen my skills and see the skill gaps I had. The instructor CK Khoo (CK Khoo Creative Studio) was an experienced producer and director who specialized in making short videos for advertisements. His portfolio mostly are online social media advertisements.
The 1st part of the course was an introduction to video production and about planning the video. I got to learn that there were 3 types of marketing videos, namely awareness, consideration and decision.
The awareness videos are mostly about just repeating the brand name and introducing the products and no mentioning of price and detailed features of the product. Consideration videos are generally about how to use the product, detailed features of the product and valuable product tips. The decision videos are mostly about closing the deal, the videos are generally testimonial videos with call to actions at the end (eg asking user to subscribe).
Later we were required to create a script on the video that we were suppose to later shoot.
The second part of the course was introduction to the equipment used in video production, tips on how to use phone camera to take video. Some of the interesting takeaways from this was to hold camera close to body when shooting to get more stable shots, this method reduces the body shake and will reduce shaky footages.
A couple more tips were to set exposure to manual to remove the camera's AI to adjust the scene. One tip I think I appreciated was setting the phone to Airplane mode, I usually don't practice this and always get those pesky whatsapp messages and incoming calls during some of my video taking.
Finally, for mobile phones footage, shooting videos at 720p is sufficient to save space. 1080p would be more for PC monitor display.
After all the theory was learnt, all the students were required to shoot video based on their script, edit the videos and then present it to the class.
One of my fellow participant's video was based on promoting maternity packages and the approach to do was to create testimonial videos. We had to mock do all the camera, lighting and seating positions setup.
The videos shot were then edited using beginner video editing software called Filmora. This software is considered an entry level video editing software but has got powerful video tools (transitions, titles) built in already. The trial version of the software will have the company watermark when generating the video. At home I'm a user of Cyberlink PowerDirector and found the software features of Filmora to be very similar and also the pricing point are quite on par. I think Filmora is a tad bit faster than PowerDirector.
Overall the course was quite basic but informative to newbie like me. The course did serve its objective as an introductory course for people who have no prior experience in video production. What I appreciated from the class was on the planning of the video part (creating the why and script). While I wished the course was more technical in nature to teach about video styles and techniques (eg B roll) I think's overall a good course to attend.
Everyone will get a certificate of completion upon completing the course.
Note : Crazy Ants Academy was recently rebranded into TGG Academy. While I still prefer the old Crazy Ants name, I guess things changes and probably some investor injected cash into the company and thus the rebranding.