Webinar Recap: Pre Production & Planning
Hosted by Peter Norris, Creative Director and Alice Sunday, Senior Producer at Vox Pops International
In the first of the webinar series designed to equip you with the knowledge and best practices for video production, this session takes you through the key elements that drive the success of video content.
Step 1: Building the brief
For a vox pops shoot, we typically work with the client to write questions that reveal the answers they are ideally looking for, while leaving room for reframing, probes, and follow-up questions that draw more out of participants.
Step 2: Choosing the right location
We look for places that are busy enough to offer a range of voices, but calm enough to allow people to stop and think. The right environment helps people relax and speak naturally, which is where the best insights come from.
Step 3: Creating a filming setup
Our filming setup is deliberately simple and lightweight, but still visibly professional so people trust who we are and what we are doing. Keeping things light allows us to move easily and be less intimidating for participants.
Step 4: Finding the right voices
Approaching people takes confidence, patience, and judgement. Not every voice is right for every question, and not every conversation will make the final edit. People will let you know if they do not want to be approached, and it is important to listen to those signals.
Step 5: Interviewing people
Once you have a respondent who has been briefed and been mic’d up, it helps to start with a few simple questions to warm up. Run a quick test to check audio and positioning in frame. Let people speak, listen closely, and respond.
1. Why Use Video?
We kicked off with a question that is easy to overlook when video is everywhere these days: why use it?
Two main reasons stood out:
Message retention. People retain far more from video than from written text. So if your goal is for a message to land (and stick), video gives you a head start.
Emotional connection. In a world where AI can generate endless content, interview-led video still does something machines struggle to replicate: make humans connect. Video does not just transfer information; it tells stories, changes moods, shifts opinions, and drives change.
2. The Six Must Knows
We laid out the six things that must be answered before starting a video project:
1. Audience
2. Aims
3. Duration
4. Criteria
5. Budget
6. Deadline
If you can’t answer these, your video partner cannot design the right approach. And internally, you cannot align stakeholders because you don’t know what success is meant to look like.
If you take one thing from the session, it’s this: start with the six.
3. Your Audience Matters
Different audiences need different messaging and production value.
What your customers see and what your colleagues see are two different things.
We gave an example of a client whose training films were self-shot on phones, largely unedited, with colleagues acting out scenarios. Engagement was low, not because the topic was unimportant, but because the production signalled that the organisation didn’t take the training seriously enough.
The solution was to raise the bar: bring in actors, invest in production value, and with that, the audience response improved.
4. What’s Video Without a Way to Watch It
The next key consideration is the end platform: where will your audience watch the video?
If they’re on an intranet or internal portal, the chances are, they’re already locked in and know what they’re looking for.
Whereas in a presentation, your audience probably wants to be ‘wowed’ – so don’t bury the video at the very end. Use short clips throughout to keep them engaged.
If you’re designing video for social, you need to know the platforms inside out. They have different optimal formats, aspect ratios, durations, and file sizes – most of which influence how you shoot and edit video.
5. The Interview Ratio
This was one of the most useful concepts in the session.
The interview ratio is a measure of how much content you capture vs. how much ends up in the final cut.
Say you’re looking to gather insights from interviewing people, and you want an hour with 6 different people. That’s 360 minutes of footage and a 120:1 interview ratio.
Once you see it that way, you can decide whether 30 seconds per person is enough, whether you need fewer people and more depth, or a longer film to give the topic justice.
The point is not to reduce interviews and filming altogether, but to be intentional, so you don’t film hours of material you never needed.
6. Allow Time to Find the Right Voices
Recruitment is a core part of pre production.
It’s largely based on criteria, but it’s more personal than that. You need to be completely honest and transparent on what you need from participants or talent. And on some occasions, you may want to assess how someone comes across on camera.
And the absolute non-negotiable: consent. You need to be clear on where the footage will be used, how long for, and cover any foreseeable use cases.
7. Beg, Steal, and Borrow
Cross usage is a great way to make budgets go further.
We shared how projects often end up being used across multiple departments and if planned ahead, you can easily spread costs and increase the value of what you make.
8. The Production Triangle
Production value is often determined by budget.
A higher production value typically feels more polished, more filmic or docustyle; and it might involve more crew, equipment, shoot time, and editing time.
A lower production value could involve self-filmed content, footage that’s less polished, or produced quicker.
The production triangle helps everyone agree what is optimised.
Is it good and cheap, cheap and quick, or good and quick?
9. Stories Need Drama
We circled back to a point that everyone deserves to hear:
Storytelling needs drama.
We explained this with a simple comparison:
A promo says we are great, buy this. Whereas a story says there was a problem, something resisted change, and we overcame it.
10. What Next?
If you are looking to start a video project, consider the following:
– Decide on audience and end platform early
– Sense check the interview ratio
– Plan recruitment and consent properly
– Use the production triangle
– If you want storytelling, create drama.
