How To Make Professional Commercial Video On Low Budget

29 Nov 2021

4 Min Read

One of the more creative areas of video making is product presentations and commercial videos. Of course, the production of these sort of videos are big and costly but this does not mean making commercial videos on a low budget is impossible. It not only is fun but also it is a good place to experiment with different ideas and put your creativity into practice.

As a result of that set of mind, we decided to do a product ad as a test and see how we can handle it. I just looked around and chose my newly bought Sennheiser headphones and set to work.

Professional Commercial On Low Budget

Setting Up The Scene For Video Shooting

Well, first things first, we had to record our footage, and since our goal is to do it on a low budget, all we used, beside the camera, was a small black thread and a single stick of light. We darkened the room to get the maximum effect from the light stick and then hung the headphones from the thread in front of the camera lens. Gotta tell you, holding the headphones like that and keeping them in focus was a huge pain, literally! Anyway, rotating the headphones in place and moving the lights around it was the main method we used. We also tried different colors but ended up sticking to white. You don’t “need” to be so methodic with light movements and colors but you still need to be careful to not get repetitive too much. It is some sort of controlled chaos.

Using Basic Materials To Present The Commercial Product In Front Of The Camera
Keep An Eye On The View Finder To Know How The Subject Looks

Editing In Premiere Pro And After Effects

After finishing the shoot, we moved all the footage into the premiere and began selecting the ones that looked good. What you might also need to do at this stage is to choose your background music. The reason is that we are going to use the beat of the music and sync our different effects based on that. For example, in our video, the screen will go dark for a second when the music pauses, and then it will come back with the music. You can also use the scale effect on the beat to create that sudden zoom in or zoom out effect. Besides the scale, the only other effects we used for this video were speed and rotation. Speed can be a great tool for adding flavor to the footage. Speeding the video up and down based on the music or the positioning of the video with regards to the upcoming transition is a great trick to keep the somewhat ordinary video, fresh and lively! Rotation can also be very fun to use in the video. Here we simply just used it in a cut and did rotate the video 45 degrees. You can also use keyframes for a more fluid effect or even add scaling to the mix for a more complex result. But since we are looking for a minimal approach, we stuck with the basic method.

image-Editing-In-Premiere-Pro-And-After-Effects
Editing In Premiere Pro And After Effects

I also need to mention that like many other video editing projects, we also used the help of after effects in this project.  Needing to use after effects is not something that is a given and based on the way you decide to shoot your video, you may end up not needing to use it but in our case, we needed to get rid of that visible thread and after effects is the best way for doing it. The process was nothing really complicated, we just masked and moved the footage, and since we used a solid color as our background, doing so was easy and fast. After finishing the process and getting rid of the thread, we moved the footage back to premiere for the finishing up the work.

Be Open Toward New Ideas

Finally, something I gotta mention is that in these sorts of videos, always be open to trying new crazy things. Worst case scenario you will not use the footage and replace it with your other ones. As you can see we did try different effects like upside-down headphones which we didn’t end up using but actually gave us the idea for the 90-degree angle frame. Or you can see these shots we took in different settings with different textures which again we later on decided is not suited for the direction we want for the video.

Tryout Different Shots and Settings Regardless Of Using Them Or Not
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Tryout Different Shots and Settings Regardless Of Using Them Or Not
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Tryout Different Shots and Settings Regardless Of Using Them Or Not
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Tryout Different Shots and Settings Regardless Of Using Them Or Not
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Tryout Different Shots and Settings Regardless Of Using Them Or Not
;
Tryout Different Shots and Settings Regardless Of Using Them Or Not
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