webdev There’s an adage the marketing industry seems to live by (as far as production companies are concerned). This adage is “wait and hurry up” and can sometimes prove challenging to TV advert production.
Wait And Hurry Up
From our point of view as a video production company, one of the most challenging aspects of the entire production process is encouraging clients to get things organised well in advance to ensure the resulting TV advert or brand promo has the ideal incubation and delivery period. We have found it is important to spend time educating those new to video production exactly how time intense production can be. We have clients who have come from different backgrounds with in marketing – digital and print being two good examples, where the production and delivery period is much shorter. This can result in a bit of scramble to meet deadline. We recommend any client without the background in video to heed your video production company’s call to get on with it 🙂
Proper Preparation Prevents P*ss Poor Performance.
Naturally clients are incredibly busy people, with a ton of other stuff to be concerned about without having to be at the production company’s beck and whim. This can make things difficult sometimes though – with pre-production being cut right to the quick and client’s being un-contactable right up to the night before the shoot in the occasional case (no names of course)
A much more sensible way of making the process move smoothly is to maintain regular contact with the production company who are relying on you, the client, to be an excellent point person and to make the production go as seamlessly as possible.
To take the case of a TV advert, here is a short run down of each of the stages of production – to show how much time intensive work is involved in the process.
Pre-production
Depending on the scale of TV advert production, this could take between a couple of weeks to a month. The producer needs to have scripts and storyboards created. There’s plenty of time discussing concepts and ideas before the final advert is decided on. Then the advert needs to be crewed up, locations need to be decided, hotels and transport booked, then the talent casting process. Each of these elements can take a good amount of time.
Production
We’re talking in general terms of course (there are millions of variables for each production.) but the logistical behemoth which is any normal TV advert production will take at the very least a day and will probably run into several days or a week.
Post Production
Again, the variables are incredible in post, but you should count for a good few weeks to edit your new advert and have motion graphics or CG animation created for it. After this is a period or editorial revisions where you decide which parts of the draft you think are brilliant and which need more refine. In our experience we find this is another part of the process which slows things down, with various stakeholders being included in the revisions and perhaps don’t reply as quickly as we’d hope!
Clearcast And Adstream
WE have gone into the Clearcast process in some detail in this blog post, so we’ll save the lecture on this one 🙂 the final part of the puzzle for TV advert production is getting the final article uploaded to the channels via services like Adstream. Depending on the time of year this can add another day to proceedings – which is ramped up if you are in the lead up to Christmas.
