Product Videos Shot on a Phone

What the photographs leave out

A good product page has photographs from the front, the side and close up. Buyers still ask the same questions: how big is it really, how loud is it, what does it feel like, how does it fold.

Those answers live in the showroom, where someone can pick the thing up. A short video carries them to the page.

It does not need a film crew. A phone bought in the last couple of years shoots video more than good enough for a product page, and light and a steady hand matter far more than the camera.

What a photograph cannot show

• Size against a person, a hand or a familiar object.
• Sound, such as a motor, a hinge or a click.
• Texture and give, like fabric, foam or a finish.
• Movement: folding, opening, adjusting or assembling.
• The product in use, from start to finish.
• Light, such as how a finish changes as you walk past.

The fourth is the one photographs fail at most. A row of stills of a folding mechanism leaves the buyer guessing at the steps in between, and ten seconds of video does not.

One question per video

Each video should answer one question. How it folds. How loud it is. How big it looks beside a person. Fifteen to sixty seconds is usually enough.

Start with the product already in frame. Skip the music, the logo animation and the introduction; the visitor pressed play to see the thing.

Several short clips serve better than one long tour, because each can sit beside the photograph it explains.

Light, sound and a steady hand

Film in daylight, near a large window or outdoors on a bright overcast day. Keep the window beside or behind you, never behind the product, or the product turns into a silhouette.

Switch off the radio and the fan. The phone's microphone picks up everything in the room, and a product's own sound is often the point of the clip.

Hold the phone sideways with both hands and elbows tucked in, or rest it on something solid. Wipe the lens first; a thumbprint softens every frame.

Showing scale

Size is the question video answers best, but only if something familiar is in the frame. A hand, a person or a coffee mug tells the viewer more than a measurement.

Move around the product rather than zooming. A slow walk past it shows depth that a fixed shot flattens.

A worked example

A tiny home builder working from a shop on a rural property builds homes on trailers in three standard layouts, plus custom versions.

Its website showed each layout in wide-angle photographs, the kind that make small rooms look larger than they are.

Buyers who drove out for a viewing often said, within a minute of stepping inside, that it was smaller than they had expected.

Others emailed to ask how steep the loft stairs were and whether you could sit up in the loft.

The wide lens stretched every room, and still photographs could not show what it is like to walk from the door to the back wall or climb into the loft.

So the builder filmed each layout on a phone. One unbroken walk from the door to the far wall, at eye height and an ordinary pace. Someone climbing to the loft and sitting up under the roof.

The drawers built into the stairs pulling out, and the heat pump running long enough to hear it. Each clip is under a minute and sits beneath the photographs of its layout, with a sentence saying what it shows.

People who arrive for a viewing have now walked through the layout once already, at its real size.

Placing the clip

Put the video with the photographs, not at the bottom of the page. It belongs where the buyer's eyes are when the question comes up.

Choose a still frame that shows the product clearly, and write a caption saying what the clip shows and how long it runs: the loft ladder, forty seconds.

Do not make it play by itself with sound. Let the visitor choose, and state the key facts in text as well, for anyone who never presses play.

Hosting the file

The usual route is to upload the clip to YouTube and embed it on the page. YouTube sends each viewer a version suited to their screen and connection, and an unlisted clip can be embedded without appearing in public searches.

Video files placed directly on the site should be MP4, which every current browser plays, kept small, and set to load only when someone presses play.

When the product changes, reshoot the clip. A video showing last year's version misleads as surely as an old price.

Captions and the sound-off viewer

Many viewers keep the sound off, in an open office or on public transit. If someone speaks in the video, add captions.

WCAG 2.0, the usual yardstick for web accessibility, asks for captions on recorded video with speech. A sentence of text beside each clip also helps search engines, which cannot watch it.

The counter-case

Not every product needs video. Things that do not move, make a sound or change with the light, such as prints or books, are well served by good photographs.

A dark, shaky clip is worse than none, because it makes the product look worse than the photographs do. And a professionally made film still has its place on the home page or at a product launch.

For the questions buyers actually ask, though, short phone clips shot in good light do the job, and they can be made this week.

The first three clips

1. List the questions buyers ask in person.
2. Pick the three photographs cannot answer.
3. Film each in daylight, under a minute.
4. Keep something familiar in frame for scale.
5. Place each clip beside its photographs.
6. Write a caption saying what it shows.
7. Add captions wherever someone speaks.

Step one is where most product videos go wrong. A clip filmed to show off the product often answers nothing, while one filmed to answer a real question earns its place on the page.

Videos age like any other content, as covered in old blog posts with out-of-date advice.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.