Making more content with less on smart, scrappy commercial productions
The Challenge
We hear it all the time: “Can you deliver vertical versions? Social cutdowns? Photos, too?”
Brands are looking to squeeze every frame of content possible from their production budgets… especially in the retail and startup spaces. We couldn’t agree more. If we’re going to all the trouble of filming, editing and animating your content, we want to maximize the results.
When you plan for maximum value from the start, a clever production company will find ways to double the output of a shoot. Maybe triple.
New drink, new opportunity
Not Beer is making a splash in the fiercely competitive sparking water world, with the likes of Liquid Death and Thirst Trap. Their cheeky packaging brings an attitude to an otherwise dull market, and fans are going wild for it.
They hired Heck to create a new campaign of assets to launch their Cherry and Lime flavors, with a mix of video and stills that would become paid social content, Amazon product page and website assets.
Smart, not cheap
A demanding client will expect more for less. But a savvy client will plan their content to be streamlined to capture, and versatile to deliver. Because for a small or emerging brand like Not Beer, every marketing dollar counts. While the major players of the beverage world are spending hundreds of millions (San Pellegrino) or billions (Pepsi) on marketing each year, newcomers like Not Beer are competing for the same grocery store shelves with a fraction of that, usually well below $1 million per year.
Heck planned a detailed scope that would give the client a library of options, while being a win-win for production profits, too. There’s never been a better time to get premium-looking content at prices that won’t make CMOs dizzy.
We’re talking highly custom, complex assets that AI could never make. So Heck coordinated a 2-day San Francisco shoot with a skeleton crew to capture all the narrative content at a single home, then all the product work in a small studio.
The key to succeed: multi-format filming
Working backwards from the checklist of final assets, we planned a shooting schedule that efficiently generated the right raw assets, then dispatched them to Heck’s post-production artists to make the most of them. We lived by these rules:
Film for reframing: erring on the wide side, we planned shots that would work equally well for horizontal or vertical placements, without the unsightly compromises that happen when cropping happens after-the-fact.
Heroes and sidekicks: the content was planned as a collection of mini vignettes, that would also be assembled into a main video. Then a shorter cutdown of each was planned, and shots were deigned to loop. No waste, no single-use footage.
Hire a one-stop-shop: because Heck offers video, photo and post all in-house, the same small crew smoothly transitioned from one phase to the next, with no handoffs or creative translations.
It takes every trick in the book to get this kind of bang for the buck: props, green screen, VFX and compositing, and solid remote workflows for editing and feedback.
Dillon Dandurand, CEO @ Not Beer
“I know this may have been a smaller project on your end, but for us it was a significant investment. It was great to collaborate, and I’m excited to put the content to good use!”
One shoot, many possibilities
By throwing all of Heck’s offerings into an efficient scope of work, this client got a library of hard-to-get assets that can be used in endless ways as the brand experiments with ad placements, social content, packaging and graphics.
Brand’s don’t need to spin up complicated photo shoots, video shoots and edit lists… they just need a clever team with a streamlined plan to make the most of the opportunity.
Delivered
This little two-day shoot resulted in a big batch of content, perfect for launching their new flavors quickly:
1 Hero video (:30), horizontal and vertical
6 cutdown scenes (:15)
3 looping clips (:10)
16 composited product stills
6 narrative stills
Library of raw assets for future use
Watch here.
Check out some of the finished spots. You’ll be thirsty.