Planning and creating great course videos

“The success of a production depends on the attention paid to detail.” – David O. Selznick

This blog post is the first of a four-part series that discuss what you should keep in mind when shooting course videos. In this first part, we will discuss what a shoot schedule is and how it can be beneficial to you, especially in the pre-production process.

Videos are a widely-used resource for online learning, and producing them is an extremely time-intensive process. It requires a lot of support, both from the equipment and the crew. While it costs more (both in time and money) to create a course video, the final output offers a cleaner and more engaging experience when compared to a traditional classroom lecture.

To minimize the amount of time, effort and money spent on the shoot, it’s always good to work with an idea ahead, even if it isn’t fully defined yet. To get started with this, you can adopt a shooting schedule.

A shooting schedule is a master document that contains an exact timeline of when you’re going to shoot and for how long you’re going to shoot. It is best to get these details down as early as possible to ensure that your production and content teams will be able to make the shoot. A shooting schedule helps in the following ways:

• When you have an idea of where you want to set up and how you want the videos to look, you will be able to make the most of the process. You can create the video that works best for you while keeping costs low.
• A shooting schedule helps you assess whether your video project is moving as planned and if it will meet the deadline. This, in turn, increases the efficiency of the team and makes sure the work stays on track.
• Setting terminology and rules for on-location shooting behavior also helps. It’s crucial to understand the rules of how to act at the shooting location. Everyone has their own methods of working and communicating, and it’s important that these boundaries are maintained and respected.

Now that you’ve had a glimpse of a shooting schedule and its benefits, it’s time to look at a few other elements of video production. In the next part of this series, we will explore the most overlooked rules in the video shooting process.

Watch this space for more posts!

[This post was written by Srikanth Bade, Video Lead, IIMBx]