Promotional videos need to win engagement if they are going to be successful, but how do you produce them so they gain the attention of those most important to your message? There are many elements to consider, in this short blog post we discuss the importance of pace and tone.
When we receive a brief from a client, we need to decide on the overall feel of the video long before we call “action!” Are we creating a high-speed, action-packed, stimulating, thrill-ride? Are we delivering sensitive content? Do we want to elicit emotion? What kind?
There are various cinematic tools that contribute to a video's atmosphere and mood. Video pacing, like a movie score, tells us how to feel about what we’re seeing on-screen. It can help build suspense, create excitement and determine our emotional response.
It can also represent your brand or product. When we started planning this promotional video for Hop It, a hop on/hop off bus service exploring the Yarra Valley & Mornington Peninsula, we knew we wanted it to have a languorous, relaxed tone in line with the actual experience of cruising around award-winning wine regions sampling local produce.
The general rule is that faster-paced videos create a feeling of intensity and energy like this one for Orbitkey.
But you know what they say about rules: sometimes they're meant to be broken. We may decide that its stylistically important to intersect fast and slow segments in a video to communicate something else entirely. An example of fast/slow footage is this 60-second promotional video we created for Flip Out, an indoor trampoline and adventure park.
The feeling inside a Flip Out venue is one of energy and controlled chaos, so we communicated this by creating a high-impact, stimulating video with shots of varying speed. Inserting some strategically placed slow-motion footage, allows the viewer to linger on stunts that would otherwise flash by in a second. If your shot contains a lot of detail or captures something that’s happening very quickly, it makes sense to leave this on-screen for longer so that your viewer has time to absorb it and savour every detail.
There’s no such thing as the ‘right pace’ for a video. It’s determined by the brief, developed further on location, and then brought together in the edit. If the pace doesn’t feel right after the first edit, it can be adjusted in post-production in ways that will completely change the experience for the viewer.
