How to Give Better Feedback

Corporate Video Production is a highly collaborative endeavour. Many pairs of hands will contribute to the end result you see on your screens. From writers, production crew, editors, even the on-set caterers have a hand in the success of your video. But when it comes to giving feedback to your video team, there are a few simple things to remember to keep the process as efficient as possible.

It can be difficult to give feedback on a topic you may not be an expert on, but there are ways to approach constructive criticism that works well for all parties.

Work Together On a Brief

It’s very difficult to provide feedback if you haven’t got an end goal in mind. Before you begin production, you need to work with your video team to create a clear outline on what you want to achieve with the video.

 

What is the main message and who will it be targeted towards? How will you distribute the video? What is you brand’s “voice”?

 

What type of video would you like? Interviews, animated or will you need an actor or presenters? These are all questions you need to have at least considered before you set out on creating a plan. If you don’t know all the answers, your video team will help by showing you some videos in a few different styles to see what you think will work for your company.

 

Set Some Deadlines

When videos are created with no deadline in mind, progress can be a lot slower than it should be. Even if the deadlines are completely arbitrary, they will at least give you some structure and guidelines to keep the production machine rolling. You should also set out the number of revisions permitted in the budget. A good starting place is three revisions, a rough first cut to get a good idea of the content filmed and how it looks and sounds. A second draft to remove or add anything missing, adding some more structure and titles to the video. And a third draft to add final polish to the video, animations and sound mixing and colour grading.

 

That’s why it’s important to give clear, concise feedback, as when the process drags out with small adjustments after small adjustments, the overall product gets diluted and loses its impact. It’s also wise to give your feedback promptly when you receive each draft, as this will make your editors happy and you will end up with your finished video much faster.

 

Too Many Cooks Spoil the Feedback

It’s important to have input from your collaborators along the way, but there needs to be clear communication between the video team and a designated contact. If there are 10 people all putting in their two cents on what the video should be, you will end up with an uneven video with no clear direction. Ultimately there should only be one person in charge of collecting the feedback and communicating with the editing team. When more than two people are all communicating independently with the editors, it creates a lot of confusion and conflicting feedback. This also applies when passing your feedback along in the edit, the communication needs to be clear. Use timestamps (e.g at 1.21 remove the shot of the man in the blue shirt)  and be as descriptive as possible as to what you want instead.

It’s a Matter of Trust

It sounds obvious enough but you have to work with a production company that you trust, especially if you are new to the video production process. The feedback process is a two-way street, sometimes the production team will come back to you with a counter suggestion if they think it will detract from your brief or if some of the changes just won’t work in the context of the video. They will have a lot of experience in creating videos, so you need to trust that they know what will work.
Video production requires a team of professionals you can trust, if you’re looking for a reliable video production team with many year of experience, contact Dream Engine today.