Proven Tips for Making a Kickstarter Pitch Video That Converts - Part 4: Cost effectiveness

Read parts one, two, and three.

Don’t repeat yourself

While video has a huge role in the success of any crowdfunding campaign, stills photography is also important. Potential backers of the Arcido campaign wanted to see details of the product, such as the texture of the fabric, that aren’t as easy to see in a short, fast-cutting video. Arcido also used social media to drive traffic to the campaign landing page, with a big focus on their Instagram account which they grew to 15k+ followers. For both of these uses they needed lots of high quality images.

On a tight budget, we decided that the most cost effective way to go forward would be to shoot stills and video simultaneously. To do this we picked one of the many modern cameras capable of capturing high quality stills as well as video.

Because only minor adjustments were required to switch between shooting stills and video, we only added 10 – 20% additional time to the shoot days, while still keeping the crew and equipment to a minimum. Compared to having a dedicated stills photography team and shoot day(s), this represented a huge cost savings in the production budget.

That’s not to say that a separate stills photography team can’t be a worthwhile investment for your campaign (in fact Arcido did have some studio product shots made before shooting the video), but finding a video team who can incorporate some stills photography into their workflow can be a big cost savings when budget is tight.

Shoot for the edit 

In planning your video, you’ll have created a detailed shot list or storyboard that details exactly what the finished video is going to look like.

However, as a fast moving startup, you’ll be learning through the process of producing this video. It’s quite possible that your ideas about what makes a great video will change slightly from the initial planning stage to when you get the edit.

‘Shooting for the edit’ means being aware of how the editing process works when you’re planning and shooting. Your video team will know about how this applies in terms of the technical details, like adding ‘handles’ to shots (when the camera person lets the camera record for a bit extra, before and after the action, so the editor has more to work with).

One other element of shooting for the edit that you should think about, is how much you’ll be filming versus how much is planned. Video people call this your ‘shooting ratio’, but I don’t want you to get tied up in all these technical terms – it’s the simple, fundamental concepts that are important. The key takeaway is that you should aim to film a bit more than is planned in the storyboard.

It might seem counter-intuitive when you’re trying to save money to shoot more than you need, but it’s actually very worthwhile, and can get you out of some sticky (expensive) situations when you come to edit the video.

With the Arcido video, we shot quite a lot of the streets around Ibiza, and of our model exploring the city. We also captured a lot more of the bag in London than what made it into the finished video. This allowed us the flexibility in the edit to mask mistakes or slightly change the messaging from what was originally planned in the storyboard. Obviously if we’d had to re-shoot anything it would have been a huge expense, so it ended up being the right decision.

Collaborating on video can be challenging, especially if you’re working with a video team in a different part of town to you. In our case, I was working mostly from my home office in London, while the Arcido team was based in Edinburgh. One tool that made this whole process much smoother was wipster.io, which lets the whole team see the latest edit, and suggest revisions. Each member of the team can click specific times in the video, as well as specific points (like where I’d accidentally reversed the product logo in a draft cut). This takes away from the pain of trying to explain everything over email.

Above: the Wipster interface, showing where members of the Arcido team had commented on specific parts of the video that needed some work.

How to craft these elements into a compelling pitch video 

Ultimately all I can tell you is what I’ve done, and what worked well for us. In the end the campaign turned out to be a success, raising 7x its original goal. I also received this message from Will shortly before the campaign ended:

Hopefully these tips help you get further along the process of making a pitch video for your campaign, that helps you beat your pledge goal.

I'm curious - what was your biggest surprise, insight, or takeaway from this? What are you struggling with or finding challenging when planning your pitch video?