Preparing for a Video Shoot

Get some sun tan lotion, work out clothes, and a few participants and we’ll have fun!

Our videos aim to show your the lifestyle offered by your “product.” It is our aim to bring as much LIFE to the product as possible and to create a rather entertaining video tour that will hold the attention of the viewers for 2 – 3 minutes.

We request your marketing collateral, which should ideally have a list of amenities, a community map and if you’ve been creative — a bit of flowery text that allows us to understand your marketing angle and presentation.

We create a shoot list, a script, and our ideas on what scenes will constitute your video. We will present this list before the shoot and ask for two big things:

#1) Participants

Apartment Communities, Hotels and Single Family Home Communities share many similarities. All will have amenities for residents or guests, and as such we want to show those amenities as they were intended — being used.

We’ll ask for participation from leasing or sales staff — and help from them to enlist residents, home buyers and even pets — thus avoiding additional fees for ‘actors’ and allowing the client to have more control over the image of the people in their presentation.

If you have a tennis court, let’s arrange for two people in proper attire to be playing a heated match. If you have a swimming pool, we’ll ask for some brave volunteers to have poolside fun. Is it a pet friendly community? Everyone loves seeing a dog having a run!

We love telling a story, so we will always ask to arrange a scene wherein a leasing agent / sales associate / concierge shows a man and a woman (presumably a couple in the video) a short tour that lasts 5 short scenes.

We’ve had the pleasure of shooting spas, volleyball games, tanning rooms, dog parks, motorboats and golfers and even rollercoasters. Surprise us!

#2) Prepping & Staging

Here’s where we ask the world of our clients. Get everything looking nice. We’ll do our part – we’ll move trash cans, we’ll straighten deck chairs, we’ll even sweep a floor if we have to. But there are some things that we won’t do!

Landscaping – Schedule your shoot when your landscaping is looking its best. Consider investing in some blooms to add color and “new-ness” to the exterior of your model, clubhouse or hotel exterior. Also consider your monument sign. $30 at Home Depot and a call to your maintenance team can yield surprising results. Additionally, make sure that any leaves are swept, lawns are mowed, volleyball courts are raked, and obscene graffiti is painted over off the side of your buildings and playgrounds (and yes, that’s happened).
Pool Monsters - We recommend that dead bugs, pool cleaning supplies, broken deck chairs and dirty umbrellas be replaced or removed. Again, you might be buying your maintenance guys a steak dinner after out shoot.
Light Bulbs – Make sure that all of your light bulbs work. We’ll be kind to you and swap light bulbs around if we have to, but we’ll likely leaving a maintenance request when we leave.
Christmas Party Memories – This generally applies only to apartment communities and really creative home builders. We’re sensitive to how much you love your residents, but we don’t want to show them in your video. It’s awesome when a community has collages of seasonal parties hanging on their clubhouse walls — but they need to come down before the video. We don’t want to do this for you as it feels incredibly rude to ask where you want us to hide your memories.
The Gourmet Kitchen and the Big Feast Thereafter
(Fruit, Cakes, Cheeses, Lemonade, Hand Towels, Cook Books and Flowers) – You may do this whenever the boss comes into town. Pretend he’s coming the day of our shoot. Any kitchen area – in hotel rooms, homes, apartments or clubhouses — is going to look 10x better with a pop of color and something delicious. Add a pitcher of lemonade on the counter and some towels to the door of your oven and the image will look just like home. Add a few cook books and it’s a gourmet’s kitchen. A few tips — if you’re going all out, get something that you and your staff will want to eat when we’re done. Get creative – perhaps the flowers can end up in your home afterwards. This may set you back $50 if you shop smart, but it’ll add value to your images and your staff will hate you for gaining 5lbs in cake and cheese. For multi-property shoots, fake food might be a better investment

Anything Else

Prepare for us. We’ll be at your location, courteous to your residents / guests / prospects. We are polite and professional. We understand that you are busy, so we will do our best to work around your schedule.

We will ask questions when needed, and we will need to arrange access to your amenities. It will be in your best interest to have a staff member ready to assist us, because ultimately, we are providing you with the highest quality marketing materials that we can possibly create – and the best shoots have come from having a great synergy* with our clients.

(Synergy = Buzz word for working together. Most commonly used in business seminars in from 2000 – 2010, now most commonly used in conjunction with a silly grin).