Templatizing Bulk Video Production With an Asset Library

Bulk video production? What’s that even mean?

Bulk is a word which comes from the mid 15th century the good ole’ ship cargo days. Meaning a volume of something being held (think cargo).

But, of course that’s not how we use it anymore. Today bulk means: discount.

Bulk means buying something in volume. And when it comes to bulk video production the underlying assumption is simple: if I order more, can I get a discount?

Well - the truth is, usually you can’t. Why?

Because video production is a complex multi-layered process and there’s not a lot of ways to reduce the workload. People often assume that if they order a lot the work will somehow go down - and this can be true for some styles and types of video.

But not for stuff like frame by frame or 3D or even just highly customized things. In these cases the workload barely diminishes, leaving you with minimal savings.

So how to save money on video production in 2023?

The secret is an asset library. Hmm. What’s that?

And asset library is like a collection of templates that are made for your brand. So sure, you can go and buy a bunch of templates from a site like ThemeForest, but where does that get you?

It gets you a bunch of off-brand assets which still need to be customized heavily in order to be useful. What you save in the money of producing custom assets you usually have to make up with your own time of editing them or paying someone to.

So our solution to this is bulk video production. We even have a service revolving around this - and the basic premise is simple: create a library of templates that are specialized to your brand not the market at large.

When done correctly this does two things

It keeps the quality of the visual assets on brand & presentable
It lowers the cost over time

A caveat in this is that these are usually simpler animations.

NOTE: simple doesn’t mean bad.

Actually for some brands simple animations are more, well, on brand. And it also allows them to experiment with video content at scale - to drive more return on investment, and who doesn’t like that?

The modern day video problem

This idea of driving ROI is a bit deal in 2023. In fact, most marketers that we work with can’t seem to get enough video. What do we mean by this?

Well - they want more. But, budgets are already stretched thin. So thin that they barely have enough for a FRACTION of what they want.

Common issues are:

Executives saying “MORE VIDEO” but also not giving up the budget
Budget going towards high end productions - which don’t give enough bang for buck
A lack of budget going towards formats, resolutions and reusable content
Marketers struggling how to repurpose their content, making it “one time”

So the solution really is bulk video production or in other words templatizing what it is you do. This way you can have your cake and eat it too. Imagine unique videos in massive amounts that you can flood the market with and grab more attention than your competitors.

Well, no need to imagine - just choose bulk video production.

Why choose bulk videos, tell me the benefits.

“Explain it to me like I’m 5”. OK challenge accepted.

Your company would benefit from a series of videos, but you don’t want them to look amateur or break your budget.

If it looks bad this = bad.

If it costs too much this = bad.

So what if we took the best parts of your brand, and made it into reusable video assets. How would that help you within your market?

How to templatize your brand into video assets?

You want the big secrets, that’s why you’re on our blog. It’s no secret, don’t even try to hide it.

So what do you have to do? Well first we have to understand your existing brand and the synergies which exist within it.

It’s both the simple stuff and more complex

Who are your targeting and what are their expectations?
What colours are you already using? And why?
What fonts, styles, and design details exist?
Is it illustrations or photos? A mix?
What’s the feeling that it conveys - fun? Serious? Futuristic? Psychedelic?
What are the techniques of animation which could be used to bridge the gap?
What styles are you using and how do they lend themselves to scale?

These questions are explored over a lot of experimentation, discussion, moodboards, and just generally pulling references in from all over the web. To see what we can end up with.

‍

The output we want: a video template.

So in video production the amount of hours you put into designing something IS the big cost factor. It’s your labor cost. How do you minimize your labor cost?

By not having to re-create similar stylel objects or assets.

So this is what a template is: a re-usable asset that can be customized, re-colored or re-written to satisfy almost any need. Instead of doing 5 drawing of a stick man, why not just make 1 and reuse it as necessary making small variation shifts?

This is the approach to bulk video production: design smart solutions which allow us to be more efficient when that bigger volume is needed. Some easy examples are a title or logo animation for instance.

Tl;dr everything takes a click, these clicks add up, with an asset library you avoid having to click so much so more effort can be spent on other things therefore lowering the cost of animation.

Even though there are recurring themes and animations in these videos there are just tremendous ways to differentiate / re-order / customize each and every video. No one will ever be able to tell you that your bulk videos are not entirely unique.

Our high-level bulk video production process

We study your brand

Style

This requires both analysis and synthesis with design. To build on some of the things we wrote about speciifc to design we think:

Is your style rather elegant or minimalistic?
Maybe you prefer a more playful approach or you'd rather base your visual language on stock footages?
What shapes does your brand show a more intimate resemblance to?
Round and smooth, edgy like the tip of a knife, maybe grungy and not well-defined?

Everything lies upon this foundation, titles, transitions, the selected animation approach will greatly depend on this first orientation step.

Colors

We love coherence. And one of the easiest ways to stay coherent with your existing branding is by using the same colors.

Extracting the necessary and only the necessary colors from your brand is the number one step to reach that.

And if you’re not that strict with your color set there’s no issue. We are good at color theory and advising extra ones, for instance complimentary colors that can result in a more balanced overall outlook.

Fonts

What fonts does your brand utilize? What extra fonts could also work with it? We are always glad when we are able to give extra design tips for our clients. It might sound surprising but fonts do add great weight to what feeling a video conveys. Elegant fonts can enhance the seriousness and majesty of your brand, while more playful and handwritten letters will make it rather approachable and friendly. Everything depends upon what your goal is.

Audience

Youngsters, businessmen or elderly people - your target audience makes a big difference: slow or fast-paced videos? Vivid or muted colors? Easily readable scenes or more dynamic flow? Even the aspect ratio depends upon it.

As most social media sites are better for a vertical style format 4:5 or 1:1 kind of ratio. Interesting huh?

Time to play around, experiment, evolve and discover: the playground.

With this base of analysis being completed it’s time to move forward with experimentation. Trying to match the “atmosphere” closely as possible.

This is really where our creative gears get turning - building the asset library from scratch.

Now from scratch isn’t entirely true since we’re not re-designing your brand. It’s really about making specific, narrow as possible guidelines and playing within them.

To make it easier to follow we’ll first start with a moodboard. This presents a selection of our static wireframes and design ideas. We ask the client to weigh in on this part of the process and it looks something like this:
It’s a presentation of static wireframes and design ideas. Not everything gets the greenlight obviously, but hey, this is part of the creative process - this is “try, fail and experiment”.

(An example of a moodboard)

Only after this lingua franca is established we shall move forward: we now really start to give shape to the Asset Library (it finally moves - this is where motion design starts): we make title animations, A->B scene transitions, basic templates: one picture with 2 lines of text, 3 lines of text.. image grids, stock footage with overlays, the list is endless here.

This is where evolution plays a key role in the process. We don’t usually know upfront what will work and what won’t - because there’s always an element of “nothing going according to plan”. This means we’re at the mercy of our own experimentations.

And similar to nature: where many experiments are done at once with only a few being the clear “winnners” we try to disconnect from our own biases, instead letting the work guide us.

Sometimes this can be painful and lead to heated internal discussions, but, it’s a process we find pays dividends forward.

Custom, brand-specific animations

Aviation? Banking? Carpentry? You can bet we will use our (motion) design skills to amplify your message by a more brand-specific customization.

There are always theme specific associations to make with movements. For example if you’re animating a bicycle you could think about the wheels or chain moving, how that affects the rhythm and feeling of the eyes.

Or if you were making something for an eye blinking you could explore the pacing of eye lids shutting - sometimes fast like a small animal that’s frantic and sometimes slow, like someone who is sleepy.

It’s these kind of custom brand animations which make all the difference. And a lot of our time will go to exploring specfic details relating to these types of associations.

This is all very much part of the experimentation phase. Which is by far the most labour intensive part of the process - it’s the front end loading that allows us to streamline and optimize on the backend.

Simple logo animations

If you don't have your logo animated we prefer to give our love to it as well - since everything will move, why would your logo be an exception, right? If you don't want to dissect it we totally understand it, maybe a gentle scale could still work.

This is one of the first “go tos” for finding out what works specifically for your brand. Since it’s an element which we’ll be able to use a lot.

Music / sound effect options

What music would amplify your brand’s message? We always list a number of possibilities we see fit. Here's an example of creating the soundscape, we did these for Musicore:

You can start to see how sound can influence the perception of visuals. In fact in an interesting study when people were playing crunchy sounds they rated the same potato chips as tastier than without sound.

This can show us how our sense of visual perception is influenced by our other senses. And sound like smell is often not afforded enough importance - even though it may be significantly more present than we think.

Even though we’re visual creatures there’s more to it than that. All of your senses work together in tandem to create your sense of reality. So don’t neglect sound design.

Case Study: How to templatize a brand for bulk video production

Client: TCGlobal, a global education platform.

Its main focus is education for young students wanting to study across the globe.

First thoughts that come into our mind: study, university, travel, flying, globe, friends, community, young students, happy vibe, freedom, culture, science.

About the autonomy of the individual. Unique opportunities. The ability to do something that is life-changing. And with this, we have a starting point for brainstorming other ideas.