The legendary photographer Ansel Adams once said that there’s nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept. With attention spans getting shorter, a sharp concept for your video messaging is absolutely vital for marketing and public relations alike. A storyboard can help clarify, and the B2B marketing services provided by a Rockford digital marketing agency like Cain & Company can keep you on track from the first line of your script to the finishing touches in post-production.
Simply put, a storyboard is the plan that you’ll follow to shoot your video. It’s a dry run to think through your visuals, sound, lighting, narration, and transitions from shot to shot. More than that, it’s also a way to ensure the narrative you’re trying to spin has a logical flow and that everything stays on track.
Speaking of staying on track, that’s one of the key benefits of storyboarding your marketing video. It’s rare that a marketing video is scripted, acted, shot, produced, and edited by a single person. Instead, it passes through multiple hands from script to finished product. The storyboard ensures that everyone is working from the same script (literally), but also that any changes made along the way are clearly communicated to all stakeholders.
Storyboards help in another key respect. The old adage that time is money is especially true when you’re shooting video. After all, when you’re doing it on a shoestring, there’s still a time cost even when the budget is small. Being able to keep the process as friction-free as possible ensures less time and money is spent.
Finally, if you plan to repurpose your video across multiple platforms—especially if you’ll be editing it down to use different scenes in different places as part of your social media strategy—a storyboard can help you identify the edits that make the most sense.
So, how do we get started storyboarding? A storyboard can be simple, with brief text descriptions of the visuals and a few words to describe the action, or it can be a more complex affair that incorporates illustrations with an accompanying breakdown of the action, dialogue, lighting, and sound from shot to shot. As a rule, the more time you spend on this stage, the more you’ll save later.
This requires some forethought. Your script should always come first since it’s the backbone of all that follows. Next, create a blank storyboard or download a template that will represent scenes, shots, dialogue, special effects, and the action taking place in each scene. Now you’ll want to sketch out the visuals; you can hire a storyboard artist for this, but we’ve found that simple line drawings and stick figures can be just as effective if you’re thorough. Then insert the appropriate parts of the script under the visual representation of each shot and add your notes. Once everything has been finalized, you’ll be using this to create a master shot list that will keep you on track toward a memorable final cut.
Decades spent serving the marketing needs of manufacturing businesses have taught us the importance of video. It isn’t just something that’s optional or nice to have. It’s vital. But we also know that video marketing is chock-full of opportunities to tell your story, highlight your products or services, and even have fun while you’re doing it. The team at Cain & Company will help you devise a video marketing plan that complements your voice and values and guide you through the process from start to finish.
