Bold Content How To Create An Educational Promo Video For Your School

Video is the most powerful communication tool you can use to sell your school. This is because video is able to convey emotion more effectively than any other medium. We all know that consumers make the majority of their purchase decisions based on emotion and that’s no different when parents are considering where to send their child to school.

A good promotional video will sell the atmosphere, ethos, feeling and emotion of a school. This goes far beyond the features and benefits that are usually listed in the school’s corporate brochure and goes the heart of why that University is uniquely qualified to deliver a top class education.

Developing A Creative Concept For Your Video

The starting point in coming up with a creative concept for your promotional video should always be the intended action that you want the audience to take when they have finished watching the video along with the emotion that you want them to feel.

If you want them to feel like the school is a safe, friendly and stimulating place to study or to send their child to, then to fill out an online enquiry form; you can work backwards from that. How do you intend to draw that emotion out of people? It has to be more than just showing the fact that the school is a safe place to be. It goes beyond showing the stimulating experiments they will perform and it can’t be just a collection of children with smiling faces. You need to consider the narrative structure that the promo will take. What information will you deliver and when? How can the music work with the visuals to elicit emotion.

Storyboarding Your Concept

Using storyboard is often the best way to plan out your ideas. You can use your storyboard to start thinking about how to juxtapose various shots to create a montage of images that will build up to an emotional reaction within the viewer. Storyboards can be drawn out in a very simple, rough format, as long as you know what they represent. It can help you build up a picture in your mind’s-eye and allow your imagination to run through how the shots will cut together.

Showcasing The School’s USP

A video is a great way to demonstrate a school’s USP (Unique Selling Proposition). For example, we recently shot a promo for a Jewish school that taught Hebrew as part of the curriculum. By highlighting the many unique features that a Jewish school has, the video allowed parents to see demonstrations of factors that would be important in their decision of where to send their child.

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Establishing Your Budget

Budgets for school promos vary from small scale productions that allow enough time for a single person shooter to capture shots of the school over the course of half a day or they can range to big budget films that allow for animation, special effects and creative camera shots. If this is your first school promo and you want to dip your toe into the water I would recommend you request a quote for a two person crew to shoot for a day and four days of editing to allow for you to have several rounds of input into the final video.

Reaching Foreign Markets

Attracting students from foreign markets has become an increasingly important part of many schools business model. We can translate and subtitle films into foreign languages in order for you to effectively promote your school to important foreign language markets. Another option is to create a film which has no dialogue which makes catering to foreign language markets more cost-effective.

Delivering Authentic Performances

Authenticity is key in creating a school promo video and getting a natural performance out of a non-actor child is a difficult task. You either have to spend many hours searching for young people that can perform well naturally or you film material in a documentary style and capture natural performances because the young people forget they are being filmed. Either way it is a time-consuming but important part of school promo creation so getting it right is worth the effort.

Release forms should be sought specific to the production, irrespective of whether the school has a blanket license to use the images of pupils in promotional material. A patient crew and a director who works well with children are a massive bonus when trying to capture authentic, natural performances.

 

If you need a promotional video for a school, or would just like some advice about your options, then we would love to talk to you.

Call us on 0203 637 1467 or use the contact form below.

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