The promotional video is a form of marketing which will advertise the collection of products over various platforms such as social media, the Kontor website, and on television.
A multi-channel marketing approach is vital as it is a persuasion method to entice consumers to purchase the home office furniture collection. Video’s are a highly beneficial form of marketing as it is a business channel that persuades and engages customers as it is the method that is the most memorable (GoAnimate, 2012).
87% of online marketers use video content, this method proves successful as 1/3 of online activity is spent watching video’s (Lister, 2017). Moreover, I believe video marketing is a successful tool, and have implemented this for Kontor.
I wanted to follow the style of video shown in my ‘photo shoot’ post, which talks about the the story board and camera movements which I have followed for the making of this video.
For the music however, I decided to look at royalty free music in order to maintain the professional feel of the product and further maintain Kontor’s brand image and identity.
I looked at various pieces of music on sound cloud, however was unsuccessful as to gain free music, a lot had audio watermarks, therefore not professional and not free. I looked further from creative commons but was unsuccessful as the music I found did not fit the style of the video and brand.
Finally found a few songs on a website called Epidemic Sound, and further found a few songs to compare:
- ‘Up To You’ by Windshield
- ‘Those Who Arrived’ by Daniel Gunnarsson
- ‘I Will Be Ok’ by Daniel Aldenmark
Song I chose was the 4th one, fitted the video sequence the best, also had an ‘uplifting’ theme which is appropriate to attract potential consumers.
I used Adobe After effects in order to create a logo animation which would make up the start of the video, introducing people to the brand straight away for them to remember the brand throughout the video, and further it appears at the end to hone in what the brand is and where consumers are able to find it. Please see below the animation I created:
To add to the animation, I felt it was vital to show the products of the Kontor collection in situ. Therefore, I created camera movements in the Blender file, consisting of 4 cameras and 5 different shots following the camera script, to show the variety of products in ‘the scene’. When I started rendering this, I was rending at 32 samples, 2 bounces (max, min, diffuse, glossy, and transmissive), had reflective and refractive caustics on, ambient occlusion, and rendered at 50%. I then realised that this was the not best rendering settings to obtain a maximum, professional and aesthetically pleasing animation. So I canceled the render and changed my settings. I features I changes was turning off reflective and refractive caustics, and increased the samples to 512. Turning off the caustics mean that the rendering would speed up, however, increasing the samples would take longer, but produce a higher quality look. I set this rendering at 7pm, and came back to it at 10am the next day to see that it had only rendered 126 frames out of 415. Therefore, it took 16 hours to render 126 frames; therefore, 7.9 frames were rendered in one hour. This timing was incorrect for 415 to be rendered out, therefore once again I canceled the render and changed the settings. I realised that denoising had been turned off, therefore, `i turned that back on in order to maximise the quality of ‘the scene’. Denoising is a unique and smart tool which reduces the number of ‘fireflies’ in the scene. Furthermore, I reduces the samples back down to 32 as I read some articles saying you are still able to get a good quality animation from this number. As well as the usual settings, I reduces ‘compression’ to 0, which mean that Blender wasn’t worked extra hard to compress the file. When I rendered this animation out, it took approximately 9.5 hours, using the CPU rather than the GPU.
Please see below for the final rendered animation, along with the logo animation, and additional information surrounding what the collection is:
Final video:
Bibliography:
Epidemic Sound (2017) Uplifting Royalty Free Music. Epidemic Sound. Available at https://player.epidemicsound.com/#/browse/?&moods=Moods.Glamorous&moods=Moods.Peaceful&fatherGenres=Acoustic&moods=Moods.Laid%20Back&active=moods&activeFilter=energy [accessed 8 December 2017].
GoAnimate (2012) 5 Reasons Promo Videos Can Be So Persuasive. GoAnimate. Available form https://resources.goanimate.com/5-reasons-promo-videos-can-be-so-persuasive [accessed 10 December 2017].
Lister, M. (2017) 37 Staggering Video Marketing Statistics for 2017. The WordStream Blog. Available from http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/03/08/video-marketing-statistics [accessed 10 December 2017].