What is Factory Filming and why is it Important for eCommerce?

When it comes to eCommerce, there really is a lot of competition. Unlike traditional bricks and mortar establishments, which rely on location and associated footfall, your products are competing with similar products that are effectively displayed side by side. Whether you are selling products through third-party sites like Amazon or have your own dedicated eCommerce site (or both) the need for your products to stand out is absolutely paramount if you want to sell them.

Enter the humble product video. As this fierce online competition persists, it’s product videos that are increasingly being seen, by consumers and brands alike, as a key influencer on the purchasing journey. 

In this article, I want to explore how brands and businesses can overcome the challenges of mass-producing product videos for eCommerce sites, through a technique we hear at Aspect call factory filming.

The Power of eCommerce Videos

Product videos made for eCommerce allow consumers to see your product in motion, helping them to better picture themselves using it. Video also has the power to explain processes, features and functionality in a way that is more illuminating and subsequently useful than text or image-based content. Crucially too, a well-made product video has the ability to create a sense of style as well as purpose, infusing it with your brand image and further enhancing its appeal.

The various consumer studies and polls conducted around video point to the unambiguous potential of product videos to sway opinion and clinch a sale on eCommerce sites. Consumers are more likely to stay longer on product pages that have video, but they’re also more likely to browse through more product pages if they contain video. Both these things are good in and of themselves, but the added bonus is that they are both strong ranking signals to Google.

Perhaps most importantly of all though is that video boosts conversion rates. According to Goodvid.io product pages with video see 37% more add to cart clicks than pages without video and 73% of viewers are more likely to purchase a product after they’ve seen it in action on a video.

But this is all well and good, I hear you say. But we have hundreds, nay thousands, of products. How can we justify creating a video for each? Well, this is where factory filming comes into play.

A Templated Approach to Product Video Production

Factory filming is a methodology for creating multiple product films and maintaining high production values whilst keeping costs down. This is achieved through a templated approach to the scripting and production processes, which creates a ‘conveyor belt’ in which product videos are shot and edited at a far quicker rate, with less setup and takedown associated with each individual shoot.

In this sense, factory filming can be seen as bringing the individual and distinct processes associated with multiple shoots into one joined-up process. To achieve this, a template is created upon which each product script, set design and production edit is based. This cuts down on the time associated with creative but, more significantly, in the actual production stage.

Factory filming will treat each product as part of the same shoot, in a multiple asset production, often using a single set. By seeking to minimise the setup and takedown time associated with each individual product shoot through the use of a reusable set, several products can be run through the same process, in quick succession, delivering a stylistically consistent output.

This templated approach presents a number of economies of scale, with elements like scripting, sound editing and post-production visual effects and animation undertaken in unison across a number of individual product films.  

Factory Filming Tips and Advice

• Formulate a single stylistic template

Creating a template is essential to maximising the efficacy of factory filming. The trick to this is finding the balance between stylistic constraint and flex, so that each product video still has its own individuality, whilst adhering to a general format and tone. Your template will look to harmonise aspects like a colour pallet, transition shots, post-production editing and animated typography.

• A templated approach to scripting

Creating scripts for multiple product videos is always going to be time-consuming, but a template will allow you to approach the task with a distinct framework, eliminating the more time-consuming parts of the creative process. For instance, a pre-defined intro section will constrain the scripting in terms of time, points covered and type of language used (informal vs formal, technical info vs the benefits).

• Bulk post-production editing

The economies of scale that factory filming presents can also be found in the editing process, as well as the production process itself. Through the templated approach, editors, animators and sound editors can bulk edit multiple product films, creating a consistent and far faster output.

• Create packshots

Factory filming is about creating economies of scale in the production and creative processes but further cost savings can be found achieved by creating packshots during filming. Whilst video is important it’s still important to have product images and these will have their own stylistic requirements that can be built into your overall template. 360-degree video packshots can also be captured to further improve the consumer experience.

• Distribute across multiple channels

By mass-producing product videos, you are equipping yourself with an asset that has multiple uses, above and beyond eCommerce. Think about how you can utilise your product videos with existing followers, perhaps by creating a modular explainer series of films on your YouTube channel, grouping each product by category. Or you could embed your product film into your next email marketing campaign. You could even look to stitch multiple products shoots into a new edit, based on category or release date, further stretching the possibilities for distribution and promotion.