Tome of Venue Videos

A full guide to the production of real estate and venue-feature content.

The key themes here are “refinement” and “restraint”. Think David Fincher. You want the lighting to be clean, the movement to be robotic, the audio to be crisp, the general tone to be relaxed, smooth, and wealthy.

SPECS

  • most of these will be 1080p
  • always 24 FPS
  • normally 30s-3m long
  • mastered for web
    • video: Rec 709, gamma 2.2
    • audio: -16db LKFS, max peak -2.0 or less

PREPRODUCTION - DIRECTOR

As Director, it’s your job to find and set the tone and goal for the shoot, build a creative brief and send it to the crew, find the soundtrack, and build a script in cooperation with the client, assuming they wish to speak in the video.

CREATIVE BRIEF

At a minimum you need to see the photos of the venue, and that will help you come up with the angle you want to use (if you have the budget to location scout, do that).

The “tone” you want to pick is pretty simple (unless you’ve been doing this for a while and already have your own way of finding the right vibe, in which case go for it). All you absolutely need to do is to pick one of the traits italicized above (relaxed, smooth, or wealthy) and focus on it.

  • Relaxing: this venue or property is comfortable, is warm, is a great place to come to after a long day at work and chill out.
  • Smooth: this venue is clean, is proper, is a great place to get meaningful work done, or throw a respectable party (generally this trait won’t be a priority for home listings).
  • Wealthy: this venue or property is ornate, has a lot of deep history, is well maintained, and contains all the hallmarks of old money.

You pick one of those, you build up a super short treatment with any pictures of what the building looks like, pictures of what you want the building to look like for the shoot, figure out a matching color palette, write just enough on each deck card to get this general idea across, and then send that to the crew.

I mean, it’s a treatment, and more importantly it’s a (mostly) internal treatment, not a pitch. So if you don’t know how to do this, then odds are you’ve already got someone working with you who does, and if you don’t then it’s time to panic and call me.

SCRIPTS

DO NOT LET THE CLIENT WING IT. They’re never as good at speaking as they think they are, and when the camera is pointed at them they get worse.

Scripting should focus first and foremost on the things that are going to matter to the audience: the venue, its features, it’s location, etc.. A super basic, standard script outline might be:

  1. talk about the location ("located directly in the heart of OTR,")
  2. talk about the general attributes of the property ("the Bort House is a 5,700 square foot dungeon, once used to torture political dissidents. But now it’s the perfect place for your next [party/wedding/conference/whatever].")
  3. talk about specific details ("featuring 37 individual cells, the only access being from the sewer, no utililties, and a colony of giant rats.")
  4. restate the selling proposition ("there’s no better place in Cincinnati to get hitched… to the wall… for 20 years")
  5. introduce the speaker and call to action ("I’m Dick, the hobo living here. Send a homing pidgeon with a blank check to confirm your booking today.")

CTAs should generally not be that aggressive, this is for demonstration.

Many speakers, especially realtors, will want to do step 5 before step 1. Don’t let them. You’ll have to remind them that the first 5 seconds are the most important in the entire video, and should be spent entirely on piquing the clients interest.

Revise the script a couple times, review it to make sure it’s good, and have the owner memorize it before the shoot.

SOUND

Ideally you find the song you want on some royalty free distributor long before the shoot, but at a minimum you need a general idea of songs that would go well with this vibe, so the editor has a baseline soundtrack to edit to.

PRODUCTION

REQUIREMENTS

  • 1x full frame camera with lens, on a motorized gimbal
  • 1x detail camera (mid-long lens) on a tripod w/ backup shotgun mic
  • 1x drone
  • 1x lav mic
  • 1x basic light w/ stand & softbox
  • 1x bounce
  • operators for all of the cameras, maybe a gaffer

GENERAL SHOOTING DIRECTIONS

All operators need to ETTR, while making sure that the only things that are blown out are point sources, specular reflections, and the sun. Use of Zebra stripes at 95% is encouraged. If the walls of the house are white and it’s a sunny day, you need to pay specific attention to make sure the walls aren’t overexposed and clipping.

Shoot everything at the highest quality possible, at 60 FPS (to slow in post), in the mode with the most dynamic range possible (so RAW or LOG). Know your camera well enough to know how to do that.

Unless you’re the detail camera, you should be shooting with the widest FOV/shortest focal length possible. Be careful that certain cameras will apply a crop factor when shooting at a higher resolution/frame rate (for example, my first job I shot with an a7III at 4K30FPS, without knowing that the camera applies a 1.2 crop factor when at that setting, meaning my 16mm lens was actually a 20mm. Sorry Cory).

Every camera has a specific set of shots they need to get before they can start trying out fun cinematic stuff. These are baseline essentials for creating a solid venue video, and they are non-negotiable. If it takes you the entire time to get these shots, that’s compeletely fine. If you miss them, or ignore these requirements and jump straight to experimenting, don’t expect to be invited back.

In a lot of cases you may have a lot of options in terms of distance and how much to crank a certain aspect of a shot (how wide/tight, how fast to move, etc.). Feel free to follow your personal preference, but as a general rule, less is more, but if you decide to do a lot then you should go all the way. Either be at one extreme or the other, really tight or really wide, skimming the drone just above the trees or at max altitude. When in doubt, just avoid the middle ground.

DRONE

The drone operator need to focus on limiting their shots to two degrees of motion at any given time, with no directional changes during the shot. So you approach the house from above, maintaining altitude and speed, whilst pitching the camera down to keep the house in center frame. Or you circle around the house from above, keeping a constant strafe/yaw to keep the house in center frame.

That’s also a good general rule, the house should always be center frame, and more specifically whatever feature you’re focusing on needs to stay directly center of the shot, New Hope targeting computer style. Any shaking or slight change of the position of the center frame focus (even from one window on the house to the section of wall beside it) breaks the shot.

And, as stated before, don’t change direction or speed mid-shot. Only smooth movement.

The shots you should always try to get:

Once you have these and any other shots the director requests for this specific shoot, you can start to focus on some of the more fancy things also shown in that tutorial, such as the dirty reveal shots, the circling approaches, and whatever else you can think of. In addition, there will likely be features which deserve their own special focus, once you’ve got ythese bases covered you can focus on those.

GIMBAL WIDE (aka the “Meat Camera”)

You’re the most important camera. If all the other cameras break, but you do a good job, the video is mostly fine. If all the other cameras do great, but you fail, the video is in big trouble.

You should spend maybe 5 minutes getting the exterior, then focus on the interior shots. Like the drone, you’re focusing on smooth movement, but you’re going to have a lot more opportunity to get cinematic dirty (occluded) shots, where you pan/push the gimbal around a doorframe or over a counter to reveal a room.

There are really only two absolute shots you need to get, and that’s to cover the diagonal of each room. So you film a push in through the doorway into the bedroom, then you cross to the opposite corner and film the room from the opposite perspective, showing the doorframe and what’s beyond it. In this way you show everything that’s in the room, and help it look as wide and big and possible.

Get those shots for every room, then start getting detail shots of large items such as the appliances, a bar or tables (especially if it’s a venue shoot and not RE), any furniture being left behind, etc.. Get the backyard, any exterior features such as the garage, anything the director asks for, and from there you can start experimenting.

One thing that’s always cool to try are long tracking shots through an entire floor, space or hallway. These can be speed-ramped in post to create some really good effects if they’re smooth enough.

DETAIL CAM

By far the least important. As detail cam, you actually have two jobs.

  1. If the realtor/owner wants to talk on camera, you will film that.
  2. Any small unique features that make the building interesting, you will film those.

Neither one is essential, but together they are what sets us apart from the entire rest of the venue video market. The purpose of this camera is to really capture the vibe and feeling of the space, and to heighten the production value of the video (remember, it’s gotta look wealthy). If there’s a gargoyle beside the driveway, get a closeup of that. If it’s a bar or a winery, you’re getting a closeup of the taps and fermenters. If there are people in frame (again, supposing it’s like a bar and we want it too look comfortable and relaxed), you’re getting the closeups of their smiles.

If you are filming a speaker (RE Agent or owner/presenter) it’s up to you to make sure they’re lit properly, in most cases you’re the de-facto gaffer. If they’re outside on a sunny day, you’re setting up the mic, finding the shot, hitting record, and then hollywooding the bounce while they speak. If they’re inside and it’s dark, you’re setting up the light. If there’s an actual gaffer, be greatful the client has the budget for that.

Since this really is the “prestige” role, there isn’t anything you specifically need to get, but if you don’t get anything that’s a bad sign. You really should be the hardest working person on location if you’re doing it right.

POST PRODUCTION

EDITOR

The first part of this process is explained in the editor tome. It’s the same as ever, log the footage, make a stringout. Escalate any problems you notice to the director.

Once you get notes from the director, you follow a standard tour pattern, and any script that might have been performed. You’ll want to develop a repetitive pattern of shots for showing each area (so maybe a wide push in through the doorframe, then a detail shot, then a second wide, or whatever else makes sense) and then make sure that the sections you’re displaying are also adjacent on the floor plan (don’t go straight from the dining room to the backyard outhouse), unless the script jumps around.

As a general overall pattern, you’ll show a drone shot to start, then a slow tour with a couple shots of each room, then faster cuts showing all the special features/appliances of the house, then the realtor or owner at the end giving the CTA, if you have that. Since everything should be shot at 60 FPS and you’re exporting at 24, you should often slow things down by 40% to improve the smoothness, especially of the gimbal shots.

Feel free to add in any good fancy stuff as early as the rough cut, assuming the director has approved it. The same principals apply here as in most of the rest of the post process: you want 80% of the work done in the first 20% of our time with you.

It will also (probably) be on you to master the audio. Normalizing, adding the compressor and limiter, and maybe NR and EQ, then making sure the music isn’t too loud should be all you need to do in most cases. This won’t be a major concern until you’ve confirmed picture lock, unless the audio is completely inaudible before that happens, in which case you escalate or fix.

COLORIST

You’ll be working off of that creative brief, with the additional instruction that here at Dmedia we really like clean film looks and deep reds. Adding in that old film stock color density is always a must, we don’t want it to look like video.

The only real stipulation here is that you want to avoid getting too cinematic in the other ways. Making sure the anchors stay that way is a good move. Your job will almost always be more to correct the issues caused by crappy mixed-color-temp lighting these venues tend to have, with their tungstens and their big window, more than implementing an actual artistic vision. That’s not to say don’t have one, but it’s important to keep it reigned in so that the whites stay white, the blacks black, etc.. Going low-con, if you can pull it off, is generally also a plus on these projects, going high-con is usually a mistake.

So that may all seem kind of contradictory, cause it is. Add color density, avoid getting too artsy, correct the atrocious lighting, go low-con if you can do it in a way that doesn’t look like a student film where they shot log and forgot to convert it back. Finding the proper balance between all of those goals is why you’re here! Thank you.

You should also be provided any necessary branding materials, such as a corner watermark, and it will be important to make sure those are added into the final cut.

DELIVERY

Since these files are small, it should be no problem to simply export from the colorist and upload to frame.io, and deliver via a simple presentation link. Delivery specifics should have been worked out before the director was brought on, so if there are specfic protocols necessary, they will already be known.

Cinncinnati Filmmaking, Videography, and Post-Production.




Contact

(513) 400-3785
reese@danzermedia.com

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