In a highly visual world, video content is king. For businesses, it has quickly become part and parcel of marketing strategies due to its effectiveness in lead generation and high appeal for clients. Recent stats show that 87% of video creators attribute increased website traffic to their video content and 80% say it has directly contributed to increased sales.

Whether you are creating a film, a marketing or educational video, the success of your endeavor is pegged on the production team you choose. But assembling a production team can be a Herculean task, especially the first time around. Because the stakes are higher for videos as compared to other mediums, quality should be a key factor throughout the production process. Any misses and the final product will be unsatisfying, leading to low client engagement which won’t justify the cost and effort you put into the production.

For your video to be successful, you need to hire people with extensive experience creating video content, who are not only going to bring your vision to life but also do so without breaking the bank. This is what puts freelancers in the running to be part of your production team. And digital marketplaces like Ureed.com have made it easy to hire professionals at the snap of a finger, without the need for scouting agencies or tedious interview processes.

In this blog post, we’ll give you a detailed guide to using freelancers for your video campaign, to make your production journey is as hassle-free as possible.

1. Hire the right freelancers

On Ureed.com, there are over 2K professionals dealing with a wide variety of video production aspects. And although this means you have the luxury of choice, it can also translate to extensive amounts of time spent combing through the site trying to decide which of the glowing profiles you’ll choose for your production. So to save on time, it helps if you have an idea about what you want your video to entail. This way, you’ll be sure of the type of professionals you need on your team. 

You can start by hiring a freelancer who works in content creation to help you develop a brief. Then you can go ahead and assemble your production team depending on your needs. Here are some of the video production freelancers you can hire on Ureed.com:

• 3D animators
• Voice over artists
• Short video creators
• Video editors
• Audio producers and mixers
• Live-action video editors
• Scriptwriters

Each of these categories has hundreds of profiles that you can scroll through to make your selection.

2. Pre-production

The precursor to a good production is the planning and strategy phase. The video brief you prepare ahead of time that contains your objectives, insights, and target audience should act as a guide as you develop general concepts for your video. Work closely with your freelancers to decide the objectives of your content as well as the scale of your production depending on your target audience and budget. This helps you come up with interesting ways to present your core message that meets your objectives and ensures maximum engagement for your audience. Bouncing ideas off your production team will also help you have a feel of what works and ensures that all of you are on the same page to avoid any conflicts.

Here are the key steps in pre-production:

• Write a script

After developing your video concept, the next stage is writing a script that matches it. Although you may be welling with ideas, you must hire a seasoned scriptwriter apt at storytelling to write your script, which will be the blueprint of your video.

• Create a storyboard

Although this isn’t essential in most cases, it helps to visualize the shooting of your video. Your freelancers may use stock footage and images or drawings to bring your ideas to life and give you a feel of how your video will turn out in terms of lighting, coloring, framing, and transitioning.

• Plan your shoot

If your video isn’t animated, you’ll need to pick a location where your video will be shot. This is the last stage of pre-production and involves organizing and scheduling everything in preparation for the actual filming.

• Production

On the day of the shoot, whether you’re using actors as the characters or just voice over artists, you’ll need a director to instruct them. Again, you must rely on professionals at this stage of production because it ensures that nothing is left to chance. This will relieve the stress and anxiety of the production on you, and ensure that your production team has enough room to let their expertise shine through.

• Post-production

After shooting the video, you need to review it to fine-tune the content and ensure all your objectives have been met. Here’s what your freelancers will do post-production:

• Edit the video

The editor will examine all the footage you shot and choose the best takes to add to the final film. Your participation here is very important to guide the editor to include all the information that is essential to the message that you want to convey. If the video is for marketing, adding a call-to-action at this point is also essential.

When choosing your editor, you can scroll through their portfolio on Ureed.com to check whether their style aligns with your vision for your video. 

• Add graphics and special effects

This gives your video a professional feel and will make it even more appealing to your audience.

• Audio mixing and soundtracks

All great videos have the right background music to set the mood and tone of the content. You can find hundreds of experienced sound engineers and audio mixers on Ureed.com.

5. Distribution

After the production phase, it’s time to share your creation with your audience. Your freelance content strategist can help you roll out your videos in a way that creates as much buzz as possible and gets your target audience excited about you and your brand. But before it is shared, your video has to be formatted then optimized so it can be viewed from different devices and shared with ease. 

How you roll out your content also has a great bearing on how effective it will be at engaging your audience.

Final Thoughts

Although video production is a meticulous process, it can be made easier with the help of seasoned freelancers. This is because they make it easy to scale the size of your production, and give you creative control over your content without running you bankrupt. 

When assembling your production team,  you should include different professionals with niche expertise to make your content as appealing to your audience as possible.