Creative Strategy: Working with a Videographer in Calgary

When you’re working with a videographer in Calgary, you’re looking to create videos that tell your company’s story and engage your audience. It’s essential to capture the right shots for a polished final product, but it’s equally important to create a fantastic video that aligns perfectly with your initial goals and vision.

At Studio Spero, our video production process emphasizes collaboration from the start. Read on to find out how you can work with videographers in Calgary to produce amazing corporate videos.

What Do Videographers Do?

Creating an engaging, entertaining, and informative video is about a lot more than just pointing a camera and shooting. Video production is a carefully planned and thought-out process, and the early stages are just as important as what happens when the cameras are rolling.

Our video production process has five steps, and collaboration is key to each of them. Involving videographers early in the process can ensure that money isn’t wasted and that the entire creative strategy is aligned. That results in an incredible final product.

Here’s how our process works:

  • Discovery: Here’s where the Calgary videographers at Studio Spero dive into your business to learn about your marketing goals, brand, and vision for your video.
  • Creative: Story-finding and concept creation happen during the creative stage, where our Calgary videographers collaborate with your team to determine the direction of your video.
  • Pre-production: This is when shot lists, storyboards, and scripts are created, and work is done scouting locations and coordinating schedules.
  • Production: Professional film crews bring the vision for your corporate video to life.
  • Post-production: Once shooting is complete, our team does sound design, colour grading, adds visual elements, edits, and puts the final touches on your video.

The process is complex, with many moving parts. Hiring a videographer in Calgary and working with them from the very early stages to develop a creative strategy means all those pieces can move in the same direction and towards the same goal.

Why Bring Videographers Into the Creative Process Early?

One videographer holds a lighting apparatus while another discusses the next scene of a corporate video.

Shooting a professional video is more complicated than posting a reel on Instagram. Shots need to flow together coherently, and everything, from locations to actors to scripts, can make a huge difference in the final product.

While you might be able to hand a videographer in Calgary a list of shots you want, it won’t yield the same result as bringing them into the process to ensure that the project’s creative vision is aligned.

Here are a few reasons why you want to bring videographers into the creative process early:

  • Allows for storyboarding and scripting, ensuring that schedules and locations can be coordinated so that everything can be shot simultaneously during production.
  • Re-shoots can be costly, especially if actors or others involved in production need to be flown in again, so the work done during pre-production by Calgary videographers is crucial.
  • By communicating early with videographers in Calgary, you can find a story and write scripts that convey your brand goals and match its tone, while targeting the specific audience you’re looking to engage with.
  • The more information videographers in Calgary have about your brand and its goals for a project, the more they can help align the creative vision of that video.

How Videographers Help Align Creative Vision

When you’re looking for videographers in Calgary, they must be fully committed to bringing your creative vision to life. It’s useful, of course, for them to provide input and collaborate on how that will happen, but the final product should align as closely as possible to the initial creative vision you had at the start of the project.

Not receiving revisions or feedback quickly during post-production can affect the turnaround timeline, so it’s essential to maintain open lines of communication throughout the project.

To do that, you must bring a team together to work toward the same goal. From scripting to shooting to final edits, our professional videographers in Calgary ensure everyone is on the same page and working toward the same goal.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

By bringing videographers into the creative process early, you’ll avoid common mistakes like: 

Unclear Direction

Having a creative vision is important for creative video productions. Everything should be aligned, so it’s important that your company understands what it is looking to achieve with its corporate video.

How to avoid: Studio Spero can absolutely help when it gets involved early in the creative process. In the discovery stage, we can work with your team to identify goals, priorities, and craft a direction for your video that aligns. 

Over-Prescribed Scripts

Experience counts in any field. You learn what works and what doesn’t, and that’s just as true in videography as anywhere else.

It can be detrimental, though, to bring an over-prescribed script to the production process. Creating a successful corporate video takes a lot of work, and just because words look good on a page, that doesn’t mean they’ll translate into engaging video content. 

How to avoid: Professional videographers in Calgary will help you craft a script that meets your goals.

Last-Minute Asks

When you’re working with a videographer in Calgary and are getting close to the production date, there’s a lot of work that has likely already been done on scheduling and location scouting. It can be difficult and potentially even costly to change those things around last minute. 

How to avoid: That’s a big part of why it’s so important to collaborate throughout the early stages of the production process so that you, as a client, can communicate exactly what you need for your corporate video, and work can be done in advance to accommodate every request.

Some of Our Favourite Collaborations

Heckya

A crowd of people at the Strathmore Stampede gathers near a stage.

The Strathmore Stampede is famous in Alberta for its incredible, family-friendly Western vibes where attendees can let loose and have some fun. When they hosted a huge outdoor concert with country superstar Gordon Bamford, Studio Spero was brought in to create a video that captured the incredible energy of the night.

Their video required shots not only of the band playing their hits on-stage, but of the crowd dancing and singing along, as well as the food, games, and everything else that went into the evening’s festivities.

By collaborating with Studio Spero’s videographers early, the client, Heckya, was able to articulate their vision, and everyone was able to get set up well in advance to get the dozens of shots that were required.

Cedarglen Living

A person smiles at the camera during a corporate video shoot with a videographer in Calgary.

When Cedarglen Living was launching Mintoft Place, they wanted to showcase their new development with a promotional video. They collaborated with our team to create a dynamic video that highlighted the natural beauty of the location, the units in the development, and more.

By collaborating early with our Calgary-based videographers, we were able to script and storyboard a video that was not only visually stunning but also informative and engaging.

View the Cedarglen Living project here.

Create an Incredible Corporate Video

At Studio Spero, our team of videographers in Calgary is devoted to collaborating with our clients through every step of the creative process. The goals, needs, and brand identity of our collaborators inform every step of our work as we develop a creative strategy and execute on corporate videos that engage their target audiences.

For more information on how we can help your company create incredible corporate videos, fill out our contact form or call us at (403) 837-9588.