The Crowd Supply Guide: Campaign Photography: Creating Stills and Videos


You’ll need to provide high quality stills and videos to demonstrate your project in action, solving users’ problems. This section will help you create high quality visual assets that tell your story.

Video

Your campaign video is one of the first things your potential backers will see. It needs to pique their interest by telling the story of your project in an engaging, pithy manner. You don’t need to include every detail or function, you just need the broad strokes of why you think your project can help people.

Before Shooting

You’ll want to create a script and storyboard to plan out your shot list. The simpler you can make your video, the better it will be. Keep it short and on task - ideally under a minute. Refer back to the exercises you completed in Milestone One to help you stay on mesage. Make sure your video addresses the points you made there and explains how your project can solve real problems your potential users have.

Using in-video text rather than voice-overs is overall cleaner, easier to follow, and more usable for international viewers. Your Crowd Supply team will provide feedback on your outline and help you polish it.

Here’s a simple, well-tested outline for a crowdfunding campaign video:

Outline

  1. Intro: Start with a simple shot of your item. Provide some intro text and a teaser. People should know within first 10-15 seconds what it's called, what it does, why it does that, and for whom.
  2. Top Features: Highlight how the most important features can uniquely solve your users' problems. An actual demo of the project over several scenes works best for this.
  3. Use Cases: this can be a mix of demos and examples that highlight how your project helps users. Make sure you cover at least some of the use cases you came up with in Milestone One.
  4. Features/Specs List: what else is interesting? Functional details, size, power, speed, etc.
  5. Outro: Include a "call to action" to encourage viewers to learn more by signing up for campaign updates.

See examples of well-contstructed videos

Shooting Tips

While Editing

Example Videos

Check out the μArt project page: https://www.crowdsupply.com/pylo/muart

Check out the USB Armory project page: https://www.crowdsupply.com/inverse-path/usb-armory

Still Photography

High quality product photography is very important. Images are a great way to show off your product and help tell your story while building confidence in your campaign. A well balanced campaign should have a combination of detailed product shots on a plain white background along with lifestyle/demo shots showing off the product in use in the real world with real users.

Crowd Supply also offers product photography on a project by project basis.

Image Requirements

Avoid using in-image text, like the below:

In-image text has no SEO value, isn’t searchable or selectable by the viewer, would rarely be used by online media, and hurts the user experience, as it does not scale well to smaller devices such as tablets and phones. In addition, in-image text violates best practices for web design for accessibility; text in a graphic is inaccessible to sight-impaired and other users who access the web with screen readers. It’s also less than ideal for non-English speakers.

Note that we do not support GIF images. Their file size is unwieldy, especially for "animated" GIFs, and better image quality can be realized with PNG or JPEG. If you need moving pictures, you’ll get far better results using an actual video format (e.g., MP4).


Question not answered here? Contact us to see how we can help.


The Crowd Supply Guide: Table of Contents

For Everyone

For Backers

For Creators

Getting Started

Before Your Campaign Launches

During Your Campaign

After Your Campaign Concludes


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