Getting scrappy: how to create a design vision video with no budget in 10 steps

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I wrote this article for designers who want to create powerful video based communication deliverables that tell the story of their design. A lot of people don’t realize how easy this is, and over the course of this article I’m going to demystify a lot of things. First, though, about me…

Over the last 15 years I’ve written, produced, directed, filmed, edited, designed, animated and color corrected UI based ‘design vision videos’ for clients like Facebook, Xbox, MTV, HBO, Amazon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Nordstrom, Twitter, Motorola, Target, and incredible design agencies like IDEO, Frog, and Artefact.

(I’ve also created tutorial videos on this topic for you to learn how to start making these videos yourself. You can check them out here —enter the coupon ‘medium’ and take 15% off your cart. And if you want to see more awesome video examples, I’ve created a ‘Storytelling with UI’ Pinterest Board that you can check out here)

Final renders from the tutorials. Check them out here

Over the last 5 years, I’ve seen video as a design communication tool transition into a core part of the strategic communication package. Design teams at Microsoft now use video in their 3 pillar strategy — presentation deck, prototype, and video.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Being as I am unduly burdened with the curse of knowledge, let’s take the opportunity to get clear on what it is we’re talking about.

One of the more popular ‘design vision videos’ to come out recently has been the Microsoft: Productivity Future Vision video directed by Will Robbins (whom I interviewed for a follow up article and will be posting shortly).

I hired Charlie Bartlett, one of the lead compositors on this video to create tutorials on how you can add your design to any screen using video. If you want to learn how to do that, click here

If you have no filmmaking experience, it would be easy to look at this, cradle your head in your hands, and gently weep.

While certain aspects of this project required a large budget, there are delicious low hanging fruit that I am going to share with you that will make your video look awesome, and perhaps even freakishly professional.

As examples of the production value of what you can create with no budget, here are 2 vision videos that were collaborations with my friend Jennifer Darmour over at Electricfoxy.

Finally, to really get us both on the same page, I’m using the term ‘scrappy’ to mean — feisty, tenacious, determined, persistent, dogged, and aggressive. In short, not giving up and doing whatever it takes to win.

So without further ado, here are 10 opportunities to get scrappy with your design vision video.

1. Get scrappy with your budget

Now granted, you may be all, “Dude. You said NO budget.” And if you scroll back up to the top of this article and read the title, you would be 100% correct in your assertion. I’m starting here because you *might* be able to come up with something, and if you do, you’ll want to maximize every single dollar on resources that will increase your production value.

If you can, you may be able to leverage your budget into something that will provide a lot of production value. In one project, 100% of our budget ($50) was spent on a one day rental for a VERY nice 80mm Canon L Series f1.2 lens, which made our video look impressively awesome.

Getting scrappy with your budget may be fairly easy if you have zero budget. And it’s still possible that even if you have zero dollars and zero cents, you can still scrape together a few bucks. Having a budget is not critical, but even a few bucks help. If you can’t, you can’t. Don’t be trippin’ too much about your lack of budget.

Action item: scrounge a few bucks. Do what you have to do as long as it’s legal. Have a bake sale. Ask your boss for a little extra budget for the awesome video you’re about to make her. Sell your neighbors car on Craigslist (please do NOT do this). Or don’t, and jump ahead to #2…

2. Get scrappy with your script

Here’s where I see most people tank. They have no idea how to write an idea that fits the scale of their budget. I tend to think of a budget as “the resources that are available to you IF you pay for them.” If you can get something for free, then awesome. Don’t pay for what you can get for free.

(And always remember that you get what you pay for. Ha! That was mean, I know.)

That being said, think of ways to tell your story that will convey the most value to your viewer. This, naturally, would require that you get clear on who your view is. Is your video for stakeholders? Your team? Kickstarter? Viewers of your online portfolio? Once you figure this out, you can get into their world and begin to craft a narrative that will make sense for their context.

Maybe you want to shoot your video in some kind of insanely cool modern designed house. Taking a step back, you can see how this location is most often about lifestyle. What other ways can you convey lifestyle without using a million dollar location?

Put another way, how can you find a location that will convey the same narrative and lifestyle without the hefty day rate and production insurance that a professional location will require?

What people most often do when they’re about to fail is to write a location in their script for a multi-million dollar home. Then they discover that they’re not going to be able to afford that location, and end up trying to create the exact same look and feel with an extremely lame location. By shifting your focus more to lifestyle, you begin to open up the conversation about what a premium lifestyle means, and this could translate into shooting at a beautiful park for free, for instance, and have your casting and styling tell the story for you.

The key concept here is that any problems you have on your shoot day or in post-production will originate with problems in your script. For example, if your script calls for a shot with some kind of high end visual effect (like light based data trails behind a person using an app — this is an actual example from a past project), make sure you can execute it before you go into your shoot. Do a high fidelity motion test and if you can’t make it happen in the motion test, cut it out of your script. In this example, after a week of trying to produce this effect, we cut it from our script and went with an effect that told the story powerfully and was simple to execute.

Action item: get to the heart of what the value is for the product in your story. Find opportunities to showcase this value in premium locations that convey lifestyle and don’t require permits and/or production insurance. Test out effects heavy concepts. Cut them if you can’t make them work. Know your audience.

3. Get scrappy with your location

This is my favorite. I absolutely love going out and finding incredible locations that don’t cost me a penny to shoot in. It really doesn’t matter where you live, there are always incredible locations that are available for free.

Here in Seattle, there is every kind of conceivable location that conveys some kind of premium lifestyle. I’ve spent a lot of time wandering around and keeping my eyes open. The best way to find great locations is to know your area well. Explore. Keep a record or mental model of all the interesting locations. Factor in time of day, time of year, and lighting options. Rooftops are my all time favorite. You can always find a rooftop, and they always look premium (especially at golden hour). Other places to consider are parks that have access to a sunset and/or sunrise, and near fountains or bodies of water. Try to find locations that are open with lots of natural light.

In this example, I shot this reel for Artefact at Discovery Park in Seattle. The park has at least 10 locations that look distinctly different. I’ve shot at least 5 projects here at different locations within the park.

Action item: explore! Take photos of cool locations in your area. Have fun. Walk around in (safe) places you don’t usually go. Keep an eye out for good natural light and spaces that allow for multiple camera angles. Find free premium public locations with open views that are southern or western facing (for sunset lighting) and eastern facing (for sunrise lighting).

4. Get scrappy with your lighting

Like location, I love getting scrappy with my lighting. Often, I see people trying to create a natural look using lights and failing miserably.

Quite simply, the general idea is that you don’t want your subject to look lit by lights. Think of soap opera lighting. It looks like they’re in a studio and it looks bad. A more premium look is created by hiring a professional Director of Photography for $5,000 a day (like my friend Scott Beardslee), or an insanely talented college student DP for whatever she will take in compensation, or doing what I do and go with 100% natural light and a bounce card.

Pretty much all you need for awesome lighting — the sun and some foam core

Action item: shoot at golden hour: before sunset or after sunrise. Word of caution — the sun moves faster than you think. Get there EARLY or you’ll miss the light. Go online and find out what time the sun sets and plan on being at your location at least 3 hours before that. Manage your risk. If the weather hoses you, have a contingency plan.

5. Get scrappy with your actors

As obvious as this sounds, cast people who look good on camera. This translates into 3 main areas for design vision videos —

1. Their physical appearance
2. Their presence
3. Their hands

Now, at the risk of sounding like a total prick, I’m going to say this: it’s your video — don’t be a nice guy when it comes to casting. You don’t have to be an ass about it, but you’re not doing anyone any favors.

(I once had to make a casting decision for an infant in a video for Amazon. I had to tell two different moms their babies didn’t make the cut i.e. their babies weren’t cute enough. That was rough.)

Simply put, your casting decision will make or break your video. The good news is that your casting doesn’t have to be perfect. It just can’t be bad. So there’s a lot of room to play. Personally, I love casting my friends. I have a few folks who I’ve evaluated for my 3 criteria (see above), and they’re fun to work with because, well, they’re my friends.

If you don’t have any friends, jump on Facebook. Friends of friends work great. Doubly so if you don’t come across like the internet stalker you are. You’ll want to develop a practice of keeping an eye out for people around you who have a great natural look and good energy. If you need multiple actors you’ll want to think in terms of curating people and locations that go together. You can always find a ton of talented (and flaky) folks on sites like Model Mayhem, where if they’re looking to create awesome portfolio pieces, they might do a trade. Craigslist is a last resort, and you’ll need to budget some time to separate the wheat from the chaff.

To cast a non-actor you’ll need to do a ‘screen test’ days before the shoot where you get your person on camera, review the footage, and decide if they will work. A word of caution — people who look good in real life do not always look good on camera and people who look good on camera do not always look good in real life. This is super weird and it fools me all the time. That’s why you need to remove the risk — do 3 screen tests for each character in your script, and go with the best person for the job.

I’m going to take a moment and talk about something personal to me regarding how our culture defines beauty. Our culture tends to represent beauty extremely narrowly and I encourage you to take this opportunity expand it. We live in a world full of beautiful people of all colors, shapes, sizes, genders, ages, orientations, and abilities. When I have the ability to exert influence in casting decisions, I have taken it upon myself to consciously challenge our narrow cultural definition beauty and stereotype.

What this looks like is if the script calls for a couple with a family, I’ll pitch a gay couple or a biracial couple. If the script calls for a programmer, I’ll pitch a black woman or a native American woman.

In the specific area of casting, we have the opportunity to make a difference in how our culture represents people and to create positive representations for youth and under represented folks in our society. I feel passionately about this, and encourage you to push the envelope in your own projects. I don’t want you getting all stoked after reading this article and casting some LA looking fake blond chick (no offense intended if I just described you, dear reader). Push the envelope. Don’t regurgitate cultural stereotypes.

Action item: be conscious and deliberate about observing the people around around you. Note their presence and hands. Make those connections and ask them to be in your project. Nearly 100% of the time they will say yes if you don’t come across like the internet stalker you are. Don’t be creepy! Push the beauty envelope. Don’t make me come over there and do it for you.

6. Get scrappy with your gear

I couldn’t write this article 5 years ago. But now the gear and software are so good and so powerful, I now feel confident in saying this — you can find the gear you need to make a professional video. Let’s examine what I mean by gear.

The gear in these videos typically falls into the following categories –

1. Camera
2. Lens
3. Lights
4. Misc camera support stuff (optional)
5. Camera movement stuff (optional)

Now I know that I’ll have people writing in an saying that I’m not mentioning all kinds of stuff. And it’s true, I’m not. We’re not talking about a professional shoot with a union crew and a budget of $50k/day. We’re talking about how scrappy you can get and make a professional looking video.

I’ve found the low hanging fruit to be your camera and lens combo. Nearly everyone knows someone who knows someone who owns a DSLR and an awesome lens. If you really don’t know a single person, find a DSLR filmmaking meetup, assist on someone’s shoot for a day in exchange for them assisting on yours and you using their camera and lens. Get. Scrappy. Do favors. Be generous. Make friends. Put your idiot phone down and go out and talk to people. If all else fails, smartphones now have insanely good cameras that shoot in full 1080p HD and up to 4k.

You most likely don’t need to monitor out (which is mostly for clients on set anyway). You also probably won’t need a matte box and focus rails and all that stuff. What you will need to do is figure out whether you’ll want to go handheld or on a tripod. You’ll also need to figure out what kind of camera movement you want (if any).

I will say that the fancier you make it, the more of a pain in the ass not having a budget will become. If you want nice smooth dolly shots and all you have is a skateboard, you’ll need to do a few takes. If you want some really clean pan and tilt shots, there’s no way you can do this without a professional tripod sticks and head. Don’t even try. I had a no budget shoot that required about 50 takes to nail a smooth dolly shot because we didn’t have the right tripod.

I like shooting hand held. The movement provides a ton of energy. If your video is for execs, you probably want to go more conservative. Know your audience. You can make a hand held DLSR camera rig that will take some of the shake out of the camera and look pro.

Regarding lenses, make sure you get what’s called a ‘fast’ lens with a very low F Stop like 1.2 or at the very least a 2.8. The term fast just means that it lets in lot of light and means you can shoot with a lower ISO which means your footage will be less grainy. It also gives a shallow depth of field that will make your footage sexy as hell.

Action item: get scrappy. Get the best gear you can for free. Do favors, offer a trade. Make it happen. Plan your camera movement by first knowing your audience. Avoid complicated shots. Go light with your camera and avoid all the extra add ons. If you want sexy, go with a fast lens.

7. Get scrappy with your time

Look I know how tempting it is to go overboard with this. I’ll make it simple for you — make it a one day shoot. No more. Spend the majority of your time on pre-production and post-production. Take a few days getting your storyboards and shots 100% dialed in.

Do not shoot until you know precisely what shots you need.

Build an animatic with your voice reading the voiceover (if you have VO) using whatever mic you have (like on your phone). Take photos of your hand drawn frames, photograph them with your phone, email them to yourself and drop them into an edit in Premiere with placeholder music under your VO (also called a ‘scratch track’). Record you reading the script on your phone and email it to yourself. Get. Scrappy. Your shoot should have no more than 3–5 locations. Maximum. Five locations is honestly a little nuts and you’ll need to do that over 2 days. Maximum. Do whatever you can in the script to get those locations down to 1–3.

Action item: cut down the number of filming locations. Get all your footage in 1 day. Spend the majority of your time in pre-production and post-production.

8. Get scrappy with your crew

I personally collaborate heavily with whomever is involved in the shoot. I get input from everyone, including my actors, hair/makeup people, everyone. There are just too many things to watch out for in your frame, and the smallest missed detail can completely hose your shot. I also try to go as absolutely lean as possible. Have folks wearing different hats.

It’s critical that people know what they are doing and who’s accountable for what. A corner you cannot cut is the hair/makeup person. All this person has to do is watch the actor on frame and make sure there’s nothing obviously wrong with their clothing or hair. Have them get the actors ‘camera ready’ which means having face powder and putting it on actors faces before shooting so they aren’t shiny.

Critical roles include (and are not limited to the following) —

1. Producer — is the person everyone goes to if they have a question
2. Director — directs the actors
3. Director of Photography — the person holding the camera while it is recording, makes sure the frame is good and the lighting is good
4. Camera tech — the person wrangling all the camera related things like lenses, memory cards, any camera related attachments
5. Hair/makeup/warddrobe — the person watching the frame to make sure the model doesn’t have any glaring presentation issues
6. Prop master — Dumb name, but this person handles the devices and makes sure they are free of fingerprints and smudges
7. Post-production supervisor — watches what the camera sees to make sure everything is doable for the post-production when it comes to adding graphics and/or replacing screens

Now keep in mind you can do a shoot with a two person crew that handles all these things. It’s not difficult when you have a simple creative concept and you’re using natural light.

Action step: thread the needle of making sure everyone on the shoot has clearly defined roles and accountabilities, while keeping collaboration front and center.

9. Get scrappy with your shoot

Ok you’re finally shooting! Congratulations. First, get the shots you need.

Always get ‘coverage’. Coverage is 3 things: a wide shot, a medium shot, and a close up shot. These shots give you the ability in the edit to get the results you want.

Always get ‘cutaway’ shots. This is commonly called BRoll, but it doesn’t matter what you call it. They’re generally close up detail shots of something in the environment or a person’s hand, or something visually interesting that allows you to cut away from your actor.

Always get what are called ‘reaction’ shots where you shoot the actor’s face reacting to what’s happening. If you get those shots, you’re pretty much golden.

Know that it’ll take a ton of time to get your very first shot. Just be patient. I budget several hours just to get set up for the first shot. After that, you’re in the groove.

Audio and lighting are the two big time hogs. If you don’t have any dialogue that actors are speaking and you are using 100% natural light, you can crank through your shots fairly quickly.

Action item: Get full coverage (wide, medium, close), BRoll, and reaction shots. Budget lots of time for your first shot. Be patient. And watch the clock and the light.

9. Get scrappy with your post-production

Keep it simple. Use Adobe Premiere to edit your video. Use Adobe After Effects to add graphics and UI to your footage. Use Mocha (comes with After Effects) to do most of your tracking. Mocha is awesome and you can learn it really fast with the tutorials I created called Screen Replacement Mastery. These tutorials I created specifically for this purpose cover pretty much everything you need to know to track and add graphics into your shot.

You can grab these tutorials here — https://www.uxinmotion.com

Seriously, don’t re-invent the wheel here. I don’t get paid by Adobe in any way. Use Adobe’s tools. They tools work.

Here’s a snapshot of how the post production workflow works — after the footage is shot (or ideally while the footage is being shot on set), you cut the edit together in Premiere using the music you selected or a reference. Once you get the edit approved with the music (and scratch track if you have VO), then you send the clips over to get graphics added in After Effects. Go for the low hanging fruit first and then work your way up to the harder shots. Get scrappy. Tell the story. Less is more.

One thing I learned was to have an edit drivin video, meaning more shots with more cuts. This does two things. It keeps the energy up and it means there isn’t a ton of time to transition the UI’s opening and closing. This is great because you can just cut to the UI being there and it won’t look weird. This saves a ton of time in the post-production.

Action step: buy my tutorials (ha!) — enter the coupon ‘medium’ and take 15% off your cart, learn how to add UI graphics to any shot using After Effects. Keep your post production lean.

10. Get scrappy with your audio

If this is a deeply internal project that will never see the light of day, you can use any copyrighted music you want. It may not be legal, but nobody will ever know and if only 3 people are going to see this, I’m pretty sure the music gods (and their lawyers) won’t flip out. If your video has a wider audience either internally or externally, or lives live online, you have 3 options —

1. Write the music yourself or have a friend do it
2. Find an awesome track on a free music website like Free Music Archive (double check the usage rights)
3. Purchase stock music from a stock site

In the past, I’ve done all 3. I’ve had a friend produce a professional piece of music for IDEO which was awesome and cost almost nothing. I’ve found absolutely amazing tracks on Free Music Archive, and I’ve purchased great music from stock sites. Get scrappy. Make it happen. Just make it good. You want something that has some energy to it. If you do have a VO track you want to make sure your music doesn’t have vocals or horns or anything that will compete with the VO.

Action item: get scrappy (and legal) with your audio. Either write the music, find free music, or purchase from a stock site. If only a handful of people will ever see this once and it will NOT live online, use whatever music you want.

In conclusion

Get in the video game. After interviewing William Robbins (director of the Microsoft 2015 Productivity Future Vision Video), he shared that video is now one of the 3 pillars for teams working at Microsoft – deck, prototype, video. 5 years ago, this was not the case. In this time, everything has gotten insanely better and in terms of telling your story to your client, team, or stakeholders, video is one of the most powerful tools you have.

I hope you got some value from this and I look forward to seeing what amazing design videos you come up with. Now go forth and be scrappy!