How did we get to grips with a completely different style of filmmaking?
A little lighter than our usual camera rigs…
When you’re approached by a new client who make high-end Star Wars lightsabers, you start drooling before they’ve even finished introducing themselves. At least, we did.
But when it turned out they wanted us to make some chaotic, meme-filled YouTube vlogs chronicling the construction of their new Star Wars-inspired warehouse, we realised we had to switch up our usual approach.
Like with any new genre of filmmaking, we knew we had what it takes, but we needed to make sure we could demonstrate that we were ready to produce the videos our client wanted. Dave and Jamie have teamed up to run through five key things we changed, on set and in the edit, to fit the new brief:
1. Just shooting
Filming on an active building site can be tricky, but we made it into a positive. We showed up to location and started shooting within minutes - no time for prep or overthinking. The kind of spontaneity that this fostered allowed us to find the humour in the moment.
2. Rough and ready filmmaking
Usually, a finished video that gels together well is the result of a far more complex shooting day. Elements must be planned for in advance and filmed in sections in order to make sure everything slots together. For these vlogs, however, we let go of traditional filmmaking procedures and let instinct take over, by shooting handheld, and reacting with zooms when items of interest were mentioned.
3. Hard Cuts
In the world of editing there’s a common agreement that hard cuts don’t belong in a professional video. Normally, hard cuts will make a video feel messy, and jolty, and cause your eyes to bleed. So it’s good editing practice to avoid these at all times, letting the video breathe and giving it a steady pace. But since our vlogs would be going on YouTube, we needed to have engagement at the forefront of our minds to avoid viewers clicking away. Introducing hard cuts into the video’s style allowed us to create a snappy pace which would increase viewers' engagement and quickly deliver information in dialogue-heavy moments.
4. Talking during the take
Easily the biggest rule we broke! We wanted to create an informal tone and allow the audience to get to know all the people involved, even those hiding behind the camera, so it became a task for the videographer to actually throw curveballs at the host when he was speaking!
5. Humour
Although these vlogs were mainly informative, our client still wanted to keep them lighthearted and entertaining. To achieve this, we inserted short snappy clips from popular culture. Since these were going on the internet it made perfect sense to lean into the bizarre style of humour that you might find deep within a subreddit page. We embraced the silliness of our client's ideas, focusing less on making things look perfect, and instead leaning into the very rough and ready style of editing that online videos have adopted over recent years. So what if that explosion doesn’t look real? It’s funny.
(yes, we really did add explosions to a video tour of a warehouse)
In life there are always rules that, if followed, are supposed to make things better. In the world of editing, 99% of the time these rules will help to increase the quality of the video! This time however, we were firmly a part of the 1%.
At the end of the day, the fundamentals of filmmaking remain the same - it’s how we make it different for each client that matters.
~ Jamie Pitt & Dave Litchfield, Long Story Short Productions.
“Jamie and the team at Long Story Short have been a pleasure to work with. Looking forward to creating even more great content in the future! Highly recommend.”
