How Investis Digital Shoots Corporate Video Onsite

Shooting a complex corporate video during a global pandemic is not always easy. But it can be done. At Investis Digital, we’ve completed 10 video shoots since mid-July for our clients. Our team has interviewed CEOs in their homes and their offices. We’ve filmed on the streets of London and in the countryside. And we’re creating more videos as I write this. Along the way, we have learned some lessons. Here are some of them:

1. You Can Do Anything if You Plan Ahead

COVID-19 obviously creates a heightened sense of health and safety. You can still do on-site video shoots face to face, but you have to plan ahead more carefully than you might have done pre-COVID-19 because you have fewer options for improvising once you arrive for a video shoot.

You have to do more research upfront about the location itself, like a Mission: Impossible team planning a complex operation. Let’s say you’re interviewing someone in their home – a common reality now for doing executive interviews. You need to know everything about the location. In what room of the residence will the interview be conducted? Will the dimensions of the room accommodate a crew needing to practice social distancing? Where are the access points to the room, and which access points will help us minimalize our exposure the residence (especially when we are shooting indoors)?

We’ve used Google Earth to answer questions about a location’s exterior, down to how congested the parking areas are. We also ask the subject of the video shoot to spend more time upfront helping us prepare. That means providing photos of the room we’re going to shoot in, and agreeing ahead of time on the ground rules for conducting the shoot safely. This is a new kind of role for clients who are accustomed to having the crew show up and do all the heavy lifting onsite. Bottom line: a client who is closely involved in the research upfront makes the video shoot happen more smoothly.

2. Client Involvement Can Bring about Unexpected Benefits

Since shooting videos onsite during the COVID-19 era, we’ve noticed how much more relaxed the clients are. Client executives being interviewed on camera seem more natural and comfortable than we’ve witnessed during pre-COVID-19 shoots. We believe we know why.

Before the pandemic hit, it was not unusual for someone being interviewed for a video to walk into the room cold without having met the video team personally. We’ve always understood that reality. Executives are busy people, and they often just don’t have the time to get involved in a video until the last minute. But during COVID-19, executives have gotten more involved in the planning. They have to. We’re usually entering their homes to talk with them. When they are involved earlier on in the set-up, they are more emotionally involved and prepared. They are part of the process. Hence, they are more relaxed and confident when it comes time to do a video shoot. If unfamiliarity is the enemy of a relaxed delivery, then the opposite also holds true: knowing the terrain ahead of time makes for a more comfortable delivery when the cameras are rolling.

3. A Video Team Also Must Also Act Like a Health and Safety Team

A video team needs to do more than manage the mechanics of setting up equipment and managing a shoot properly onsite. Our responsibilities are broader than that. A typical video shoot now includes steps like these:

1. Checks on people’s health. We ask everyone involved to check their temperatures just like some places do as a condition of admitting people.
2. When the crew turns up, we bring gloves and mask for the crew and sanitize everything – our equipment and the actual room where we are filming. (This is one reason why it’s so important we know everything about the location ahead of time.) Everyone is required to wear a mask unless you are on camera.
3. We come in and set up with the fewest number of people in the room. If we have accurate photos, there are no surprises. Our producer, wearing a mask, rehearses the scene and then wipes down any furniture we have used doing the rehearsal.
4. Only when all this is done can the client enter the room. Subjects of the video do their shoot exactly in the places we’ve designed for them.
5. We don’t use body mics. We rely on boom microphones. The interviewee can walk into the room, sit in a chair, and stand on the mark. With a boom mike, they don’t need to get close to anyone to attach a microphone. There is no handoff from the crew to the subject being filmed. With boom mikes, you have to be aware of ambient noise interfering. But if you do your homework and eliminate things, you can reduce risk.
6. We wipe everything down again. In fact, we wipe things down on the hour every hour.
7. When we leave, we need to reverse the entire process, loading up and lighting down.

Now, these steps are all in addition to the things you normally do on a video shoot – rehearsing, adjusting the lighting, and finetuning the sound and other elements. None of these steps compromises the work we do – it simply makes the day a little longer. So it’s essential to budget time to accommodate your additional role as health and safety custodian.

These measures are important both for physical safety and psychological preparation. When you make people feel comfortable, nervousness goes away. It’s replaced by reason, reducing risk and anxiety.

4. The Right Tools Support the Right Outcome

The days of video teams sitting together in a cramped production room editing video footage are gone. Post-production means using tools that support remote work. This is good. It’s been happening for some time. The pandemic accelerated the uptake of these tools. For instance, everyone involved in editing can upload video content on to a shared platform where the client can log in, view from a screen anywhere, and provide feedback. Again, using a shared drive to do remote editing is not a new or particularly sophisticated process. But it’s definitely a faster way of working – and a better one.

5. Resourceful Storytelling Is Even More Important

An effective corporate video tells an engaging story, whether it’s about a merger between two companies or the launch of a new product. Telling the story requires resourcefulness. For instance, let’s say you need to depict a busy, vibrant corporate office. That’s a challenge right now. But this is not a new one for us. Pre-COVID-19, we were accustomed to needing to shoot in empty offices on weekends or evenings to accommodate clients who didn’t want the video shoot to interfere with operations. So we’re applying the same techniques we’ve always used, such as using tight closeups of people rather than wide shots of space, using digital post-production techniques, or using stock footage. We use stock footage very carefully.

But the point is that the tools have always existed to help a filmmaker create a story. Know your story first and then work around limitations to tell it in the most compelling way possible.

Contact Investis Digital

Good filmmakers don’t let constraints stop them, and that’s certainly the case with Investis Digital. To learn how we can help you tell your story with video, contact us.