Promoting a Restaurant

This tutorial is a great example of how difficult it becomes when you take footage without a plan and with poor camera work, meaning a lot of shaking, irrelevant clips and everything else that goes into making a bad video.

If you’re thinking about shooting video for a business, in this case to promote a restaurant, this video will show you mostly how not to do it and the subsequent time it takes to produce something of any quality, especially if you’re wanting to charge the business for it.

If you think for a moment how you’d go about taking video to produce something that is going to promote a business, in this case a restaurant, how would you go about it?

Ideally you’d want a good outside shot of the premises. Maybe just the premises itself or you might want to include it with surrounding premises or landmarks that make it’s location more easily identifiable.

A good inside shot.
Good shots of the staff if required.
Shots of food and food being prepared.
Maybe a copy of the menu.
And possibly a map.

Ok so I’ve got a bunch of clips, mostly bad, plus some other clips that may or may not work in with promoting this restaurant.

Either way it’s good to have a collection of clips that may not seem relevant at the time but may work in well with a completely irrelevant video down the track. Especially if you have some dialogue that you need some backing video for.

For me personally there’s nothing more amateurish and frustrating to listen and read the same thing at the same time. I can read and I can listen. I don’t need to do both at the same time and I’d rather watch “something” even if it’s not relevant to the video, so long as it’s visually interesting than watch cue cards with the spoken dialogue like this.

For example a fountain or nice scene or something unusual.  So it pays to build a collection of such clips to be used when you need “filler” clips.

In this example I’ve included a few clips that I may use as fillers or more importantly, there may be a scene in the clip that I can take a snap shot of that I can use.

So from here on in it’s a matter of working through the clips, trying to find those parts that have been shot well enough to use.

In cases like this where most of the video is shot badly it’s quite often easier to make a series of snap or still shots and use them.

Remembering, that at the end of the day we’re trying to produce a promotional video that one, we can charge money for and two that is of sufficient quality to do a good job promoting the business.

A poor quality video is going to do neither and will not do your reputation any good in trying to garner further business and your career in this kind of work.

So sit back, look and learn how difficult it is, when all you have to work with is bad video.

And start to think about the techniques and requirements to produce good video clips that will ultimately result in a high quality promotional video for businesses.