 Good afternoon everybody and a very warm welcome to our Marketing Club webinar series. We've got a fantastic session for you today on filmmaking with Amy Bryant and Sarah Swafferton. If you've watched any of our Marketing Club webinars before, you'll know how this works, but for those joining us for the first time today, I'll very quickly give you some info about the session, how you can submit your questions for the Q&A and where to go if you want to watch the session again. So I'll be hearing from Amy and Sarah for around 45 minutes. We'll then move into a 10 to 15 minute Q&A to answer some of your questions. Please do post your questions at any time during the session by clicking on the question mark. You'll see on screen. We've circled the question mark for you, so if you're watching on a laptop, you'll find it on the right-hand side of your screen or on the top or bottom if watching on a tablet or a smartphone. Both Amy and Sarah have very kindly agreed for the slides to be available to download what's for broadcasting. So if you pop into the handout section, which looks a little like a memo icon with the top edge folded over, you can download them from there. If you want to watch the session again, it will be available on our YouTube channel shortly after the broadcast. Just head into the Marketing Club folder, which you'll find under Playlists. You'll find the entire back catalog of the Marketing Club series in there too, with sessions covering a broad range of marketing skills and personal skills, all free to access and available whenever you want. So do take a look, as we've had some fantastic sessions since the series started. If you'd like to share any thoughts about today's webinar on the socials, you can use the hashtag CIMEvents. We'd love to see your comments on the socials, so we'll pop the hashtag up again after Amy and Sarah have finished their presentations. So before we get into the presentation, I'd just quickly explain what the Marketing Club is. It was created primarily to help students get the most from the CIME accredited degree and prepare them for career in marketing. Although the Marketing Club is designed for students, CIME members and other marketing practitioners are also welcome to attend the sessions. For the uninitiated, the CIME accredited degree program enables students to gain a professional marketing qualification by taking advantage of the exemptions the accredited degree provides. So if you're a university student, you can sign up now to receive the Marketing Club newsletter. What you need to do is take a photo of the QR code on screen. Alternatively, you can hop onto our website to find the Marketing Club webpage with the qualifications drop down menu. Each edition of the newsletter will provide you with content designed to support your studies and actively manage your professional development by keeping you up to date with the latest trends, innovations and concepts in the marketing industry. So it really is worth taking a look and signing up. We'll pop the QR code up again a little later when we head into the Q&A. If you want to find out further information or sign up. OK, so I'd now like to introduce our guest speakers, Amy Bryant and Sarah Swartafine. I'll pass again things over to you, Amy, and the floor is yours when you're ready. Great, thanks very much. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. I'm Amy and my colleague, Sarah, will be coming online to speak to you shortly. And we both work for the BFI, the British Film Institute, and we're a charity and the UK's leading organisation for film and the moving image. This picture on the screen at the moment is one of the many vaults at the BFI National Archive, where we look at after one of the largest and most important collections of film and TV in the world. The films in our collection are a fascinating record of the history, culture and art of filmmaking and TV production. As well as a document of daily life in the UK from the late 19th century to today. I wanted to flag that some of the collection is available to view online and there's nearly 500 adverts, including an amazing 1942 Purcell Advertorial and a 15-second Bramston Pickle ad from 1957. I'm going to ask Leith to put the links in the chat to the Purcell and Bramston Pickle adverts because they're great and a link where you can search to view others and it's all free. I just thought I'd flag it because alongside the kind of film and TV programmes we do hold this amazing collection of adverts. I wanted to start by talking about this work to say that we do it, that it's preserved for future generations. And when I say we, what I really mean is our colleagues because I work in business development and Sara works in education. And have a much of my role and career has been in marketing and Sara is a filmmaker as well as the course director on our Chartered Institute of Marketing courses. We're both passionate about developing filmmaking skills and helping people understand what these transferable skills can help with. So we hope you'll come away from today feeling that you have either started on or moved forwards in your filmmaking journey. We're going to focus on smartphone shooting and Sara is going to invite you to have a go at some of the techniques and tips she gives you as we go along. But before I hand over to Sara to introduce herself and get stuck into today's webinar, I wanted to set the scene. Why does film and storytelling matter and why should we give it a second thought? This on the screen is a picture of Paul Mezcal and Frankie Corrio from director Charlotte Wells's film After Some. Charlotte actually won a BAFTA for outstanding debut by a British writer, director or producer last month. And after some issues, one of the many films backed by the BFI film fund with national lottery money. So if you've seen a BFI logo at the start of a film, it means that we've funded it. As a government arms length body alongside funding and preserving film, the BFI work with government and industry on policy and strategy, the distribution of funds, conducting research and much, much more. And we do this because society needs stories and film, TV and the moving image bring stories to life, helping us to connect and understand each other better. So what I'm saying is the BFI champion the moving image in all of its forms to create the greatest possible choice, access and opportunity for all. Because film allows us to tell stories and start conversations. And as I mentioned earlier, we want to educate and deepen public appreciation and understanding of film and the moving image. And the term moving image is deliberately used here because we all engage with different forms of content. And the move towards a digital world combined with the quality, accessibility and ease of smartphone filmmaking means we can all tell stories. Our mission at the BFI includes supporting creativity and actively seeking out the next generation of UK storytellers. And while this is people like Charlotte Wells, I mentioned earlier, this also means you. In his article, Why Filmmaking is a must-have skill in a digital world, journalist Steve Hemsley wrote that marketing directors and managers will be looking for filmmaking skills on marketers' CVs in the future. They know that in a digital world and with growing demand from consumers, the compelling video, marketing teams must be able to make the most of moving image content to serve brands and deliver results from different platforms. If you want to read that article, by the way, it's available on the Charles Sinshu Marketing's Content Hub. Lisa's going to put the link in the chat for you again. The title of the article is Why Filmmaking is a must-have in a digital world. My team delivered some training for Durham University recently and what stuck in my mind was a student that had a part-time job as a content creator said that the training got her thinking about what draws her attention and how she can channel that reflection into her work. One of the things I want to share with you was Tim Platt, who's our head of marketing at the BFI, wrote in the Chartered Institutes of Marketing's CASIS magazine that the flexibility of moving image is its strength. He said that in a crowded market, a compelling story alongside a skilled use of image and sound can deliver impacts in many areas, such as recruitment, thought leadership, infographics, events and charitable appeals to name just a few. As mentioned previously, we have a couple of courses with the Chartered Institute of Marketing, a 3.5-hour principles level filmmaking storytelling fundamentals course and a two-day intermediate course filmmaking and video production for marketers. They are both online and taught by the lovely Sarah. They're both available to search on the Charles Sinshu Marketing website if you just go to the training courses list and type in BFI, it will come up there. We may well develop new courses, so searching BFI is the best way to keep up to date. We've got the two courses. They're both taught by the lovely Sarah, so I'm going to hand you over to. Sarah is going to give you a taster of how you can start capturing high-quality smartphone content. Oh, thank you so much, Amy, for that. OK, so, yes. Hello, everyone. It's a pleasure to speak to you today on the Chartered Institute of Marketing's filmmaking for marketers webinar. As Amy said, my name is Sarah and I work for the British Film Institute. I'm a film educator and I have been teaching filmmaking and film production to children, teenagers, university students and professionals. And I've been doing this for about 10 years now. I've worked for different cultural organizations internationally. And right now, as Amy said, I also teach on a few Chartered Institute for marketing courses that I can show you now, actually. Maybe that would be nice. So we've got the we've got the three and a half hour fundamentals course and we've got the two day filmmaking and video production for marketers course that I teach online. OK, so let's get started on filmmaking then. So filmmaking can be broken down into five different stages and you would usually follow this this kind of sequence of stages. So you usually start with development. This is where you come up with ideas for your video or for your film. Then you go into pre production, which is the stage where you plan everything before you start shooting. The shooting of your video would be the production stage. Once you finished filming everything, you go into post production. So think about editing, sound mixing, color grading, adding, you know, effects, graphics, et cetera. And once everything is finalized, you finish your edit. You would then go into distribution because obviously you want to share your video, share your work with your audience and with the rest of the world. So as I said, development is a stage where you brainstorm your ideas. You come up for ideas for your videos. This is usually the stage where you do research, you collect visual material to inspire your video. You may be right, like a one liner or an outline for your video, especially if you're doing this for work. This would be the stage where you write everything up so that you can maybe pass it on to your manager who can then sign it off. But this would also be the stage in which you are thinking about the aim of your video and what kind of video would suit this aim and suit your target audience. So I think I am talking to a mixture of people. Some of you might be students, some of you might be further along in your career. So I would like you guys to think about the content strategies that either a brand that you like and know well, or the company that you work for, for example, and I just have to think about what kind of content you see out there. So content on social media, content on YouTube, content on TV and cinemas. What style is this video in? Is it a professional and slick video? Or is it more an authentic and accessible video? Is it more like a short form video or a long advert, for example? So there's lots of different video content strategies that marketers use. And I've put two of them here on the screen. So on the left, we see thought leadership, which is basically the strategy where you want to showcase yourself as an expert and as an authority in your field or in your industry. Whereas on the right, we've got social proof. And this is where you want to get others. You can get your customers, your employees, your team members to show how great you are. So, as I said, if you work in marketing or if you study marketing, these might be familiar to you. But these two strategies work really well with video content. And if you're starting out with video marketing, these are really, really good strategies to start out with because the videos that I put underneath in the bullet points, the examples, they're easy to produce, they're quick to produce. And, yeah, really doable if you're starting out, especially, you know, you can just get your smartphone out and start filming some thought leadership videos, you can start filming some positive brand sentiment videos, etc. I just wanted to show you a couple of statistics that are compelling about video marketing. Obviously, video content in marketing has become content that is the most consumed and most engaged with by consumers and by your audience. Reportedly, the world watches a billion hours of video social content per day, a billion hours, can you imagine? And this is only on YouTube as well. So if you can't cut up all the other platforms, it's obviously more. And this is just because not only is video an engaging medium, but it can also unpack a lot of information in a short period of time. So obviously, if you think about videos that you watch on TikTok, for example, these are all really, you know, most of them are really short videos, you know, 10, 15 seconds long. And in that 15 seconds, you can tell a whole story, right? So this is why video is used a lot within marketing because it's useful and it's an engaging content. I've got these statistics from a few different sources, by the way. So from HubSpot, from Forbes and also from DemandSage, which is a business intelligence platform. So in 2023, online video is expected to account for 82 and a half percent of all web traffic. So this is this makes it the most popular kind of content and information that we see online. It's also reported that 95 percent of consumers retain information that is communicated by video compared to 10 percent who retain information by reading. And I think this is so true because I remember I was teaching a course three years ago, a similar course to this or a course on video marketing. And one of the students showed me a video of an advert of a product that they wanted to share because they really liked it. And to this day, I still remember what the brand was. I still remember what they were selling and the story that was sold within that advert, within that, I think 30 seconds advert. And that's crazy. I mean, that's three years ago. I can't remember anything that I read yesterday, for example. You know, word for word, I can't remember that. But I can remember a video that I watched three years ago. So this just kind of shows how what a great medium video is. Ninety percent of consumers have indicated that product videos inform their the purchasing decisions directly. This content is usually viewed on smartphones. Seventy five percent of video viewing worldwide happens on smartphones. So that's that's quite a big statistic, isn't it? And then ninety two percent of those videos viewed on their smartphones are shared compared to other ways of viewing video. So this is quite an important statistic to keep in mind, because if you're making your videos and you know this fact, this number, this data, then obviously you want to make sure that your video would suit, you know, the smartphone viewing and smartphone sharing. So what does that mean? Does does that mean that you you might need to make a video or vertical video instead of one that's in landscape, one that's horizontal, for example? Ninety two percent of video marketers reported that video gives them a positive return on investment. Again, a really, really high statistic. And then the last stat here is ninety four percent of marketers claim that video has improved customer knowledge of their goods or services. So it's a really nice medium to engage with your audience and build relationships with your customers. OK, so now that we've kind of we've thought about the aim of our video, we have an idea of what we want to film. Then you go into the next stage, which is pre-production. This is the stage where you prepare everything that you need before you start filming. It's really, really important that when you that you actually plan your shoot because if you don't have a plan in advance, you end up wasting quite a bit of time and resources. Just think about, you know, if you're, let's say, you know, you know that on Thursday, second of March, I'm going to film something. You turn up on that day and, you know, you need to spend some time on location thinking about what you're what you're going to do and where you're going to set up the camera, etc. So that's going to cost a lot of time. And especially if you have, let's say, people helping you with your shoot, you're wasting their time as well. Maybe, you know, you have to pay them for the day to come and help then you're wasting your money as well. Some of you might have to do ad hoc filming in their work. For example, if you say you work for a company and there's an event or whatever, and you have to capture that event on video, for example, you might think, oh, you know, well, I can't plan for that because, you know, I'm going to an event, I'll just see what happens in our film. But I think if you have an idea, even just like a really rough idea written down or even just in your head of what the shots are that you need to capture to make sure that you can sell a good story in your video, it will really, really help you. Because I think video is all about storytelling. So if you have an idea of what the story should be and what kind of images, what kind of clips you need to tell that story, it will really help make your video better and it will elevate it. So what do you need to plan your shoot? You might have some kind of scripts. You know, this is, it's not like for every time that you need a script. For example, if you're doing an event video, you might not need some kind of script. But maybe you're doing an interview video that needs a little bit of scripting, needs a little bit of like question prep, that kind of stuff. You might need a shot list. So this is what I was talking about earlier with the thinking about the shots that you need to tell your story. Having a shot list prepared is really, really helpful. You might want to draw some storyboards as well. You know, a list of locations that you need to film your video. Things like a list of props, your costumes. You know, if you're filming something that's around let's say cricket and teaching a course for cricketer. So cricket is the only example I can think of right now. But let's say you're filming something around cricket, then you might want, you know, to have someone play a bit of cricket. So you might need a cricket bat and a ball as your props. And then a list of people that you have involved in your shoot, when they need to be present, you know, what their roles are, what they need to bring, et cetera. You might also want to prepare your equipment as well and just make sure that you have enough like power and storage because you don't want to be on location and then your phone dies or something. Or you don't have enough. Yeah, you don't have enough memory on your phone or your SD card. So once you have a plan and you've done your pre-production, we go into the next stage, which is the production stage. So yeah, so you can start shooting your video. I put some tips here on the screen. So let's just go through them one by one. So make sure that your shots are as stable and as smooth as you can get them. So you might want to invest in like a tripod or a gimbal if your budget allows for it, for example, but it would just help you. Yeah, it would just help you stabilize your shots. You can turn on your grid lines on your smartphone if you're shooting on your smartphone to help you with composition. And I'll talk a little bit more about this in the next slide. Make sure that your framing is correct. So use the correct shot sizes and try not to cut off people's limbs awkwardly. So don't try, you know, don't cut them off by their feet, for example. Make sure that you just go a little bit further to show the feet or go a little bit closer to cut off at the knees, for example, which is the next correct shot size. Try to avoid using your zoom function, especially if you're filming on your smartphone, because this will reduce the quality of your image and make the video look more pixelated. So if you need to get a close up shot, just move your camera closer to the subject or get the subject to move closer to you, for example. Pay attention to your location and your set. So is, you know, just things like is the lighting OK? Is there a lot of background noise? Can you move somewhere else, you know, where it's a little bit quiet? So is there anything messy and distracting in the background? I think that's a really important one. Yeah, so try to get the background and your set to enhance your story as well, if it's possible, you know. So, for example, if you're filming an interview video with a painter and artist, maybe film the interview at the studio so that the audience can become really immersed in the topic of the video. And it's just nice to see, you know, to see something that's relevant to that topic as well. So I would actually like to invite you to pick up your smartphone now if you haven't done this and just try one thing with me, which is to turn on your grid lines. So you should be able to go if you have an iPhone, you should be able to go to your settings and then look for a camera. Underneath the composition, you'll see something called grids and you can turn that on. And when you go back to your camera app, you should see these lines like you see on the screen. On other phones, I think you should be able to do the same. It would be either in settings or within your camera app that you can turn on the grid lines. But basically why why I'm asking you to do this is because the grid lines will help you with your composition, as I said, following a rule called the rule of thirds. So I think, you know, most of you might know about this or not. But with the rule of thirds, what you're doing is you divide your frame into nine rectangles using two vertical and then two horizontal lines. And what you want to do is you want to place the subject of your shot, which in this shot is for Mascall. And you want to make sure that you place that subject of your shot or whatever you want your audience to pay attention to around these intersecting points or where the vertical and the horizontal lines intersect. This is just because this is a very old rule, I think from like Renaissance painting. But basically our eyes are automatically drawn to those intersecting points. So yeah, so you can see we've got this intersecting point and just really close by it is his eyes. And again, if you're framing a subject, if you're framing a person, sorry, you want to make sure you want to keep in mind that the eyes of a person are the most important thing. So if, for example, you want your audience to relate to you, make sure that they can actually see your eyes in your video. So yeah, so in this shot, we've got his eyes close to that intersecting point. And what we've also got is we've got him placed on the left line in this image. And we've got him looking kind of towards his left or towards our right. And what we've got is we've got quite we've got an empty space here. We call this the looking space. So he's looking this way and that space that he's looking into is called the looking space. You want to make sure that you keep the looking space free. If, for example, you decide to place him on this side of the frame, but he's still looking the same way. So he's still looking towards our right and looking outside of the frame. What you've got here is you've got dead space and you want to avoid that. You want to make sure that everything in your shot contributes to telling your story. So if you do decide to put him on this side, make sure that he's looking towards his looking space. Or if he's looking that way towards his right still and we've got space behind him. You can do that as long as it has some kind of narrative function. So if something else is happening behind him, then of course you can put him on this side and make him look outside of the frame. OK, so I just wanted to quickly chat about shooting on your smartphone. So when you're shooting a video, whether on your smartphone or on your DSLR, actually, the more control you have over the technical aspects of the camera, the better the image will look. So technical aspects that you can keep in mind are things like your aperture. So your aperture is basically how big the opening is of your lens. So if you're using DSLR, obviously, you have a proper lens. If you're using a smartphone, the lens is already built in, so you can't really change that much about the aperture. But on some newer smartphones, you can see that you can kind of control it and it's expressed in like f-stop. So it will say f 2.8 or f 3.5 or whatever. So play around with that if your if your phone does have that function. You can also keep your shutter speed in mind. Things like your ISO or your gain. So these are all things that kind of control the exposure of your image. So how bright or how dark the image looks. Another kind of technical aspect that's really, really helpful to understand is your white balance. White balance is basically how the basically controlling the color temperature within your image. So if again, if your camera or your phone has that function, most DSLRs have that function anyway, you can play around with it. What you basically want is you want the whites in the image on your screen to be the same white as same color white as you see in real life. So play around with with the white balance. And then another thing that you can practice doing as well is things is your focus. So most of you probably use autofocus or probably have used autofocus. Try using the manual focus as well, especially if you're using a DSLR camera or a mirrorless camera with a detachable lens. Play around with your manual focus and see if you can experiment with depth of field. Depth of field is basically how much of your subject is in focus and how much of your background is autofocus. So I think what makes an image look really cinematic is to have that kind of blurry background that depth of field. So play around with the manual focus if you can. Another thing that I would like you to think about as well when you're shooting your videos is just to know where you are and what the light is like. So if you're shooting in daytime, make as much use of natural lighting as possible because, you know, natural light is the strongest light. Obviously the sun is the brightest light that there is. So try using using that sunlight as your main source of light. You want you want the subject to be placed in the spill of the natural light and you don't want your you don't want to shoot with your camera facing the light directly so you don't want the sun directly in front of the camera. You want to be either on its side or like behind it. So play around with with this stuff. You know, you can practice with maybe if there's someone living in your house place them, you know, against against the window or close to the window and see what what it looks like if you if you put your camera, you know, on its side by the window, if you place it or if you have your back against the window, just see what that looks like and see what what suits your aesthetic choices as well. If you're shooting in nighttime without extra lights, see if you can use things like table lamps to illuminate your subject as well. Obviously, you can also invest in some light as well if you're planning to use them a lot in your work. OK, so we've what we've got here is just a slide of a few short sizes. There's there's more short sizes out there, but these are, I would say, the most common ones and the the useful ones that you would use in your work. I'm not going to go through all of them, but I think what I want to what I want to point out is that every what you think about film film is a visual medium. So every every choice that you make, everything that you put in your frame, how you position your subjects, where you place the camera in relation to your subject has a meaning, even though you might not know it. But because we've all grown up looking at images, whether it's photographs or whether it's films, we are all familiar with this kind of film language or the meaning behind different shots and and and and and an image. So, for example, if I were to use this very long shot in my narrative film and I want to introduce my main character with this very long shot, I might want to say, OK, well, you know, they're really, really small in the shot. Maybe I want to say that they're feeling quite overwhelmed by the world. They're lonely because, you know, this this location is quite barren, quite gray. And yeah, they might be a little bit sad, right? Whereas if I decide to use this big close up, I might want to say, OK, this is a very dramatic moment. There's nothing else in the frame that distracts my audience from apart from the main characters. So the only thing they can see is this character's face. So that means that I want to draw all the attention onto this character. We want the audience to be right in the characters in a world. They might, you know, I can see every kind of facial expression, every emotion, every wrinkle or whatever on her face. So I might use this shot, you know, in in a moment of in a moment of heightened drama or just to show my character's emotion. So all of this, yeah, as I said, that's a really important thing to remember, anything that you put in frame from color to where your character is, to what the location is, to whether it's night time or daytime, everything of this, what we call Misan Sen has a meaning and can really contribute to your storytelling. OK, and then so you filmed everything and now you are ready for your post production. So you're going to edit your video. I think it's really important that when you're when you're planning and when you're shooting your video, you're already thinking of thinking ahead, thinking about your edits. So what I mean by that is when you're planning your video, for example, you're making your shot list, make sure that you you think about your edit in terms of maybe if you're filming a shot of the same person or the same subject, maybe get get a few different angles or a few different, you know, shot sizes of the same subject. Just so it gives you more choice when you're editing, but also make your film more engaging for the audience because they can see different sides of the same scene and different perspectives of the same scene. It will also make your film look more professional. It's also important to think about B-roll footage before you start shooting. So what I mean with B-roll is basically extra footage. So so you don't necessarily need the B-roll footage to tell your story, but it is really, really useful. So B-roll footage can help you set the tone of your video. It can illustrate things that are being said in the video. So thinking back to my video about the artist, my interview video about the artist, my B-roll footage could be some shots of her, maybe an action, maybe she's painting or maybe some shots of, I don't know, a gallery where we can see her works being displayed, for example. So these are not necessarily things that you need because the interview would be the thing that you need to tell your story, but it just helps, it just, you know, it just gives the audience a bit more excitement as well to see, you know, this other kind of footage rather than just someone talking to camera. And ultimately, it helps you so much with editing as well, because sometimes you'll realize that maybe, you know, when you're editing and you actually think, oh, these cuts seem really jarring, or maybe you've made a mistake in continuity or something. If you have that B-roll, what you can do is you can hide that mistake by overlaying that footage on top of your primary footage and essentially you're hiding that cut or that jarring cut. It can also help you pad your edit and get your pacing right. So instead of just having someone talk to you for 10 minutes or for five minutes, you can, you know, give the audience a bit of a break and maybe get, you know, just show them a little bit of the scenery, show them a bit of the sky or, you know, some trees or whatever, just to give them a break, a pause in their concentration. Having a neat and well-paced edit will make your video more engaging to your audience. It will make your video look more professional as well. So I teach Adobe Premiere Pro on the two-day course that we mentioned at the start. This is the industry-grade software, but otherwise there are tons of free editing software that you can try out. I really like DaVinci Resolve because it's free and it's a really good one, especially if you want to learn a lot about color grading, that's a really good software. And what I have on my phone, I have a few free stuff on my phone as well. I usually use iMovie or an app called OpenShot, but there's tons out there. If you have some experience in editing, by the way, using any kind of software and you want to learn a new software, such as, for example, Premiere Pro, please don't be discouraged by like, you know, or overwhelmed by the interface of the software because once you actually know the editing principles, once you've learned editing on one software, you can always transfer these skills to any kind of software. The only thing that you would need to learn is just like the buttons and where everything is and the interface. So I think if you have experience in editing, you're already, yeah, it's already really, really good. Okay, so then the last stage is your distribution stage. Obviously you've created your video and now you want to share it with your audience. You don't want to keep it to yourself. You want to share it with the world. And a really good way to do this, obviously, is through social media. There's obviously lots of social media platforms. Some, maybe, you know, if you work for a company, you might have a few different accounts on different social media platforms. I think because there are so many, the ideal practice is to repurpose your video for each platform. So you might record one kind of like master video and edit that into one master video that's quite long. And then what you could do is you can edit, you can create different versions of that master video so that it's repurposeable for a specific social media platform because I think it's a known fact that people, users expect and consume videos differently on each platform depending on what they're using. So it's like things like length of the video, things like the video dimension. So is it a vertical video, is it a horizontal video, et cetera? These can really vary from platform to platform. I've put here some ideal lengths for your video. I've got this from Hootsuite. Obviously, you can like deviate a little bit from these lengths, but it's good to keep these in mind when you're editing your video for those specific social media platforms. And then just finally, a few tips to make your video stand out. So tell stories. I think I mentioned that a few times during this webinar. Yeah, tell a story in your video. Even if it's a five second video, 10 second video, try to tell some kind of story because it makes your audience remember your message and it makes your audience remember your brand better as well. Like the example that I said of the student who showed me something three years ago, I can still remember what is in that video because there was a story. Save the best for the first. Obviously, you go on a company social media platform and you want the users to see the best stuff first. That's why you can pin some videos on your Instagram or on your TikTok. Include a call to action. I think that makes sense. You want to direct your audience to something else. You want them to do something else after they've finished watching your video. Know how it's selling. So keeping things really authentic. Making the selling quite subtle is really, really helpful and doesn't put your audience off as well. And then adding captions is quite useful as well just to make your video a bit more accessible. Okay, and we've come to the end of my bit. So, I'm going to go ahead and show you So, we have made a really useful how-to video, how to get started with video marketing. So if you want to watch that, you can search BFI how-to video marketing in Google and you'll find it. It's on the BFI website. You can also sign up to our training if you want to learn more about this. You can just go to the cim.co.uk forward slash training and look for BFI on there. And yeah, just let us know what your thoughts are on this webinar. You can email the email address that's on the screen there. And I think, yeah, Amy mentioned this at the beginning. The BFI is a charity. So the more attractive our courses are, the more we can help fund our charitable activities as well, such as the education stuff that I do. So people who attend our courses are helping to support learning, training, and funding across film and the moving image. So thank you for listening. And I think we've got the Q&A now. That was really excellent. Thank you, Saran, and thank you, Amy. Yes, we are going to move into a Q&A session. So we've got quite a few questions that have come in, Saran and Amy, a lot of technical ones. So where do I start? Let's have a look. Yeah, somebody has asked what equipment would you recommend investing in as a standard kit for filming? Okay, so it really depends if you were thinking of purchasing a camera or just keeping, or just filming on your smartphone. I would say, yeah, so make a decision about that. If you do decide to purchase a camera, going for a mirrorless or DSLR camera is really good. You don't have to think about a 4K camera or proper film camera. Just have something that's compact that you can take with you to different locations. And then I think the most important things are things like maybe like a microphone if you're doing a lot of interviews. So investing in like a lapel mic or something like that is really, really useful. So the camera, tripod, and then maybe a set of LED lights so that you can control the lighting a little bit more. You don't have to rely on natural light all the time because in the UK it's quite difficult to rely on lights. Yeah. Okay, great. There are questions around editing. So could you please repeat the name of the editing towards you mentioned other than iMovie? Yeah, so on the phone, I also have OpenShot, which is a free editing app. And then the other one that I mentioned, the free one for your computer is the Vinci Resolve. Right, okay, thank you. Okay, so there's a couple of questions relating to the length of video. So first of all, what tactics can you use to get viewers engaged with your video content for longer? In a world of TikTok where short form is popular, do you think there's still a place for long form? I mean, I think so. I think what I see a lot on TikTok is the way that they grab the viewer's attention is to start, even like to start with the punchline, I guess. I get a lot of food videos, get a lot of recipe videos. So they usually show the final product first, the final dish, and then they go back and tell you how the dish is made. So I think thinking about these kind of tactics would be good to keep someone's attention because they already know, it's kind of strange, they know what's coming, but it makes people want to watch and see how it's done. What do you think, Amy? You have to say I agree. Like I think that there is a balance, isn't there, between we know that people are expecting quick engagement, quick answers to questions, and there is definitely, I don't know, think about like with John Lewis ads, how impactful they are and how people do really connect. And then that's because of the story. So I think if you have a story that's worth telling, then absolutely it can connect. But suppose it's always trying to find the most effective, compelling way to tell that story and not to just take longer for the sake of it. If you can tell that story well in a shorter length of time, then absolutely do it. Yeah, definitely. Just, yeah, select what is really, really necessary to tell your story and otherwise cut all the fluff out. Thank you. Some more technical questions. What's the best directional mic or lapel mic, would you suggest? I think anything by road, road is a really good brand for microphones. Yeah, that's my suggestion. You can get more affordable ones on Amazon, which are also quite good quality though. But yeah, road is a really good brand. Okay, so that sounds so lighting. Is there a cheap portable way to bounce natural light? Yes, actually. Well, you can buy a set of reflectors again through Amazon or any other online shop for, I think 50 pounds where you get different kinds of reflectors and stuff. But if you want to just sort of try it out first, I've done this before, actually, you can just get a piece of cardboard from a package that you've received or whatever and wrap it in tinfoil and then it becomes a reflector as well. Or if you have a mirror that you can move around, that can be a reflector as well. Okay, lenses next. Would you recommend lens filters, EG, ND or polarizing filters? How can you adapt these to work on mobile devices? Okay, so yeah, so if you have a DSLR or a mirrorless camera and you know that you're going to shoot outside a lot, I think getting an ND filter is really, really helpful. If you're shooting on your smartphone, I would say, yeah, you can get it, but because your smartphone, I think it's easier to control things like the exposure and stuff, you don't necessarily need to get a filter for it, but you can if you want and you can play around with that as well. Storage, video takes up so much storage, where and how do you store your footage? Okay, so I have a hard drive, so that's where I have all my footage and then for my phone, I pay for extra storage. So annoying, I pay for the iCloud storage thing, so I pay, what is it? I think it's only like one pound a month, so it's not too bad, but yeah, I do pay for extra storage. Having a hard drive is really helpful though, just to save all of your, if you have lots of projects going on, having that hard drive is really helpful. I don't trust my laptop. So coming from a, you are really interesting, thanks. Any tips on music for video? As in like, where to find music, do you think? I guess, or the types of middle, do you want to overlay the video with music? So I guess there's some implications around copyright with that as well isn't there? Yeah, yeah, so just yeah, making sure that the music is copyright free or if you want to get a specific song that you like, obviously you can pay for the license, but there's loads of royalty free music websites on the internet. My favorite is to go to like, if you have a Google account, you can go to YouTube studio and then in there there's an option called audio library and there's loads of royalty free music that doesn't sound very royalty free-ish, so that's the one that I like to use. I know that Sarah often covers, or like when she's sort of teaching editing, that editing to the beat just to address this kind of side of it is a kind of a good skill to develop as an editor is understanding how your music should interact with the edit. And I'm sure it's also one of the things that if you start to notice it when you watch either TV or film or adverts or things you see on social media, if you pay attention to the music, you then start to pick up like how people are making deliberate editing choices to interact with the music. Definitely. Yeah, it really, yeah. Because this is the, again, this is the great thing about film is that there's so many different dimensions that can help with your storytelling. So you've got the image, but then you've got the sound and the music, you can add text to it, you can have movement in it as well. There's lots of, yeah. So thinking about the music and how it can contribute to your story is really, really important. Thanks. We've got loads and loads of questions left, but we've actually really only got time for maybe one or two more. This next one is really, I guess, a hot topic currently. What are your thoughts on AI-generated videos? There seems to be several AI tools out there where there is no need for production anymore. Well, I don't think there's no need for production anymore. I'm scared like that. I think there is still need for a human, for a human kind of aspect to whatever art there is, right? This can go into a really long discussion, but yeah, I think there's always need for community and a human touch to everything that we interact with. What do you think, Amy? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's going to be, as professionals, both as a marketer or a filmmaker, it's going to be, I'm sure there is going to be change about how we can interact with different softwares and stuff, but it's still always going to require, as Sarah is saying, that human eye, that human touch to do something that appears, we can all, at the moment, at least, most of the time, tell if something has been written by a bot or if something has been, and that is, I'm sure, going to get harder, but I think it's about how I don't think AI makes us useless. It just means that maybe the way that we in the future learn to basically show our value in that, as Sarah said, it's the most human thing to tell stories and to have that kind of community and interaction. Well, Sarah and I, at least, I hope that's the case. Yeah, I totally agree. So I think that's probably a good point on which to end today. So thank you very much for that. That's a great Q&A session. Really, really useful presentation overall as well. Unfortunately, that's all the time we got for our webinar today. I'd just like to thank both Amy and Sarah for the fantastic presentation, as I say, and we do hope you've enjoyed the session and found it interesting and worthwhile. We'll be back with our next Marketing Club webinar on Wednesday 29th with CIM's very own content marketing manager, Stuart Thomas. You'll find further details listed on the events and marketing club pages on our website. We can also register for the session. Thank you again to Sarah and to Amy and to all of you for joining us today and we hope you've enjoyed the webinar. Take care everyone and we look forward to seeing you again soon.