Micro Video Content On Micro Budgets: How It Works

For this week’s Sport Chek #WeGotNow activation in Toronto, we (Notch Video) were tasked with creating some same-day video content that could be used across their social networks.

The budget? “As small as possible”

The results? 4 videos shot, cut, & uploaded throughout the day; they’re not highly polished but their timeliness & authenticity plays well on social channels. Here’s a quick look at how it worked.

1. Just be there

As long as an marketing activation is happening, you can make a video. But someone’s gotta be there capturing footage. In this case, it meant a 4am call time to start shooting as 1891 balls were loaded onto trucks to be dispersed throughout the city. I used a GoPro Hero 3+ to shoot (slightly better in the low light); synced the footage to my phone through the GoPro app; then cut the video using the iMovie app. I had also preloaded my phone with a few stock music tracks. The vidwas sent to the North Strategic social team who had it posted right as people were waking up:

2. Work with what you’ve got

Next stop was to capture the sunrise. We built a stack of balls specifically so we could capture the light coming up w/ the CN Tower in the background. I shot this using the native time lapse function on my phone along w/ an Olloclip wide angle lens. I used the Slow/Fast app to speed it up, then cut it on iMovie (adding text, music, & a filter). Done!

3. Take advantage of the channels

On Instagram, the autoplay & looping features allow you to create really tiny videos that can be quite engaging. For this video I shot a quick clip, sped it up using Slow/Fast, then reversed the clip (again in Slow/Fast… an awesome feature). I put the two clips back to back in iMovie, added music & a filter, and voila: a hypnotic, looping video ← watch it on IG for full looping effect.

4. Make sure to tell the whole story

Once the activation was done (at about 10:30am), I went back through all the footage to try to capture the full story. This edit took a bit longer but again was cut entirely on iMovie on my phone. A couple of key learnings: if you have time, create a logo treatment beforehand so you can just import into your editing program on your phone. Also, when you’re running & gunning you probably don’t have time to get waivers signed by everyone so make sure you’re not capturing faces! Here’s the final video:

It was especially satisfying to see that final video get more FB Likes than the beautiful but (no doubt) more expensive TV spot… reaffirming that low-budget, quick turnaround video content can be just as effective on social channels.

So yeah… it can be a challenge to create effective, inexpensive video content on the fly but it’s certainly not impossible!