It’s all about storytelling and creating a gripping narrative

(Editor’s note: Here is an article from our archives which we think is still relevant)

What you will learn:

•   The basic structure of a decent advertisement
•   How to use “mise en scène” to convey different sets of reality
•   The basic rules of decent lighting
•   How to distribute the final product

That actress who played Wonder Woman journeys through a fantasy landscape and takes the occasional photo with a smartphone.

This is probably what most viewers will take away from Huawei‘s P20 commercial. As a consumer, the commercial tells me nothing about the phone; its technical specifications are not mentioned and it doesn’t feature a real photo taken from its camera. And Gal Gadot isn’t going to take me on a guided tour of her dreamscape, either.

Nevertheless, Huawei’s commercial is slick and well-produced; the fact that it features Hollywood-quality CGI effects and the lead actress of a blockbuster superhero film significantly boosts its brand awareness. This gives it a sort of shine that makes you feel that the company is playing in the big league — regardless of whether there have been any reviews of the advertised product.

This is the beauty — and the paradoxical nature — of advertising, of a well-crafted promotional product video. Many top consumer brands like Nike and Tag Heuer seem to buy into the belief that the less of their product they show, the more likely they will attract buyers — at least, on first glance.

But that’s not really so simple, is it? Such projects — especially ones that run in the millions of dollars — takes weeks and months to plan and shoot.

So let’s break it down into the elements that make a quality promotional product video.

Crafting the narrative, building the characters

Not all advertisements are going to look the same as the Huawei P20 commercial. Some may show even less of the product while others may attempt to win you over with seemingly impressive technical specifications. There are a thousand-and-one ways of working it.

The best advertisements are the ones that leave the deepest impressions in your mind. And it could be a positive or negative impression. Maybe it’s a video with a really cringy jingle and acting worthy of a Razzie award, or maybe one that stirs up deep empathy or triggers a visceral response.

Either way, they elicit a sharp emotional response from the viewer that sticks in their mind (as they say there is no such thing as bad publicity)

Let’s zoom out and look at what makes a good narrative for a film or a TV show. On a very basic level, you get the protagonist and he or she has embarked on a quest. Along the way, they meet obstacles and tests and maybe they experience a crisis of faith, and finally, something compels them to fulfill their journey, to defeat whatever or whoever is in their way — usually a villain — and claim their victory.

This is, in a nutshell, is the essence of the classic mythic structure as theorised by the American Professor of Literature Joseph Campbell, in his classic book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”. But is it possible to cram this set of tropes into a short 1 minute or 30 seconds video?

Perhaps we can take Apple’s iconic Super bowl commercial in 1984 as an example and see if we can apply Campbell’s theory.

In the video, we see a mass of identical-looking people watching what appears to be a propaganda broadcast. The presenter the screen is urging them to march to the beat of a “single ideology” and rally against an unseen enemy.

The audience is dressed in grey overalls and they carry a blank expression on their faces. This whole scenario is obviously a direct reference to George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is about the perils of an authoritarian state.

In the midst of this, a woman wearing orange-coloured shorts and singlet is carrying a hammer and is seen running from heavily-armed guards. She yells and swings the hammer into the screen, disrupting the broadcast and breaking the trance it had over the audience, who respond in wide-eyed shock.

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Then a text crawls up announcing Apple’s plans to introduce a new “Macintosh” computer, boldly promising that because of them, the year 1984 would not turn out to be Orwellian.

It’s a short 1-minute clip. but there are some elements from Campbell’s theory that can be extracted from it. First, it has a protagonist — the heroine, who, with her bright clothing, is dressed to stand out from the rest of the characters. Then, there’s the obstacle — the armed guards.

Finally, at the end, we find out her motive — her quest — she wants to the shatter the spell the presenter has over the audience, whose indistinguishable appearances are designed to make them look like minions (not those annoying yellow creatures from Despicable Me); she accomplishes this by bringing down the villain — the Big Brother-esque figure.

The message of the commercial is very clear: Apple is appealing to the viewer to stand out from the crowd, to walk away from the all-seeing authority; to be a distinct and independent individual, free to express their thoughts.

The commercial paints Apple as this cool- kid-on-the-block, but its development was far from plain sailing. Steve Jobs clashed with the board of directors on the concept.

Ultimately, Jobs managed to get it aired, and, as history showed, Jobs’ intuition proved right; Apple has had made plenty of amazing TV advertisements since then but this 1984 commercial still stands as its most groundbreaking piece.

The perplexing thing about it is, Apple only mentions Macintosh once. Not once does it say why Macintosh is supposed to be this earth-shattering piece of tech that will supposedly change the world.

No technical details are mentioned, there isn’t even an image of the computer. Oh, and Jobs obviously put a lot of faith in American audiences knowing the context of “1984”. You can understand why it was a big risk to take.

The technique

Apple’s 1984 commercial was directed by British film director Ridley Scott, who had then directed two would-be classic Sci-fi films: Alien and Blade Runner (which was probably why he was picked for the job). To really dissect his cinematography technique would take an entire 1-hour lecture, but there are some quick pointers to extract from the video.

First, contrast. With only seconds of screen time, the audience needs to identify the protagonist very quickly, they need to know who they should be rooting for.

Scott did this by having the heroine dressed in bright athletic clothes, which stands in stark contrast from the guards’ full body armour and the minions’ dreary uniform overalls. It also helped that she had a head full of blonde orange hair.

Against the backdrop of the drab industrial interiors, she also clearly stands out. Scott is very careful in crafting in what is known as the “mise en scène”, which in French means “putting into the scene”.

According to David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s book, Film Art: An introduction 8th edition), mise en scène is the staging of several elements to create a representation of reality. These include: “the settings, lighting, costume and the behaviour of figures.”

Directors can use mise en scène to convey different sets of reality. In Scott’s 1984 commercial, it was to convey a claustrophobic, fascist future. Let’s examine the video again.

Much of the video is shot using low-key lighting. Its tight corridors or halls are dimly lit, and the minions are cast in heavy shadows — this is to accentuate the bleakness of the setting. The heroine is, however, cast in vivid light, so we can clearly register the fiery passion on her face when she swings her hammer into the screen.

Take a look at the performance of the characters as well. The minions walk in slow, shuffling motions, their eyes expressing neither pleasure nor pain; in contrast, the heroine lets loose an unadulterated yell.

When it comes to positioning the camera, Scott is also careful to frame the heroine at the centre of the shot as she runs down the hall. When she hurls the hammer at the end, he frames her at a low angle to make her look powerful.

Editing plays a strong role, too. We see shots of the heroine running intercut with the minions watching the presenter drone on. Once again, this emphasizes the contrast between her and the minions. All these elements, and the buildup towards it that makes the scene all the more impactful.

There are some basic rules of good lighting to take note — and this can be applied for a simple product shoot as well — and that is the classic three-point lighting. Basically, you want to have a backlight, which lights the subject from behind; the fill light, which is positioned at the side near the camera; and the key light to illuminate the front part of the subject.

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You can position the three lights however you see fit, but in general, these all you need to create good lighting (of course, the colour and the intensity of the lights play a big factor as well). Check out Rembrandt lighting techniques too if you want to understand how to light your characters as if they come from a painting.

For more conventional product shoots that focus heavily on the product itself, it helps to have high-key lighting because it coats the object with an even layer of soft, glowing light, making it pleasing to the eye. Especially important if you want to show off every part of the product.

Not that the opposite, low-key illumination, is less desirable, though. Low-key lighting with its emphasis on sharp contrasts between dark and light regions can make the object look more “mysterious”. Sometimes, it’s nice to tease the audience a little.

Equipment

Scott probably rented out high-end Hollywood-grade film cameras that cost in the high range of seven figures to shoot the Apple commercial. But it doesn’t mean you have to break the bank and take out a mortgage on your house to create a great product commercial! Good filmmaking is all about creative thinking.

Many consumer range cameras are perfectly suited for the job. A digital single-lens reflex camera (DSLR) can go for as low as US$400 (or maybe even cheaper if you try the second-hand market) and they are all capable of shooting in at least 720p high definition.

Don’t have a few grand to buy these lighting kits? Check out the IKEA store or even DIY one using unused bulbs you have in storage.

Don’t have a tripod head and slider or a dolly to do one of these tracking shots? See if you can find an abandoned shopping cart lying around and strap your camera onto it. Otherwise, once again, head down to a DIY shop and purchase some wheels and other parts and MacGyver yourself a similar piece of equipment on the cheap. The possibilities are endless.

Awesome looking videos can even be shot on a smartphone; check out this one shot on an iPhone 8 Plus, for example. It’s pretty wild how far phone cameras have evolved! (note: this article is no way sponsored by Apple. Personally, I use an Android-powered smartphone).

Optimising for web and mobile

A great product video might earn you a place at the Cannes Lions, but it’s not really of much use if no one but a bunch of industry critics view it. Ultimately, you want people to watch your video so they would remember their product and hopefully buy them.

First, think about the channels of distribution. Will you be showing it at a cinema or for the web and mobile?

If it’s for the big screen, I guess you can make it as long as you want (within reasonable length) since audiences have no choice but to watch it anyway. But if you are optimising it for online platforms, then it’s a different ball game altogether.

According to HubSpot, videos that attracted the most engagement on YouTube were on average two minutes long; on Facebook, it was a minute; while those on Instagram ran for just 25 seconds. With the web being a gargantuan clutter of information, it’s easy to see why viewers would have an attention span of a goldfish, there are just too many distractions.

But before you go on taking HubSpot’s statistics as gospel, keep in mind HubSpot did not specify whether they were sampling just video advertisements or what industry these ads fell under.

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A finding last year by marketing analytics company Nanigans was more specific. It discovered that “for e-commerce advertisers, the 16- to 20-second length boasted the best conversion rate, but longer video ads weren’t far behind”.

Additionally, according to HubSpot findings, viewers who watched more than three seconds of the video were more likely to finish it, so that’s another important metric to note.

The best way to work out the optimal length for your video to do plenty of A/B testing and evaluate your own findings. It might also be useful to conduct small focus groups to figure out what parts of the videos worked and what parts didn’t.

Beyond that you might want to encode the video in a format that is friendly for mobile viewing, considering they outnumber desktop web users. According to video content company Clipchamp, “small file size trumps resolution, bit rate and visible quality to a certain extent.

In other words, you don’t want to have the viewer wait for your video to buffer. There is a more pertinent problem in emerging markets where a sizeable number of consumers may not have access to reliable 4G networks.

Conclusion

While a great story and a well-produced video certainly bring prestige to a brand, in the era of web and viral videos, there is no clear playbook. Two videos might follow the same filming technique and narrative but one may be more successful than the other.

Why? It could be a wide range of factors, maybe their search engine optimization (SEO) was better, maybe the presenter in the video had a more calming voice. Maybe one has a lot of wit and swagger, like this Dollar Shave Club video.

Or perhaps, like the recent Nike advertisement narrated by Colin Kaepernick, it was able to tap into the zeitgeist of the times. There are a million and one factors to consider.

Heck, you may not even have to create a video yourself, look at this video of a mother wearing a Chewbecca mask, sometimes, it’s the consumers themselves who can best advertise your product.

Ultimately, you choose how you want to tell your brand or product’s story; you decide what narrative best encapsulates your company’s core vision. If you are earnest about and walk the talk (and by that time it may mean your product does what your company claims) consumers will take the leap of faith.

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Image Credit by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

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