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What Goes in a Great Corporate Video Portfolio?
Today’s corporate video landscape is a competitive, high-stakes field. Brands’ spending and expectations regarding their video content are higher than ever before, as they respond to escalating audience demand.
This rising pressure means there are plenty of roles available for skilled, knowledgeable video professionals. It also means hopeful video creators will have to work hard to stand out from the pack and prove they’re the right choice for a particular project.
The video creator portfolio is where these aspiring professionals can truly prove themselves, showing off their skills rather than just telling about them. So, whether you’re a creator seeking to showcase your work or a corporate marketing director wondering what to look for when reviewing video creation applications, it’s worth understanding what makes a great online video portfolio.
Populating a Professional Video Creator Portfolio
A video portfolio isn’t just a collection of the best-looking videos a professional has a hand in. It’s a reflection of that person’s specific skill set and interests, pointing to the kinds of future projects they want to take on through the lens of their past work.
Advice on the construction of video portfolios, from publications like Backstage and members of the LinkedIn video creator community, yields a few consistent messages about what to include and how to showcase it.
In short, when creating an online portfolio site, a professional should:
- Include clear stylistic guideposts: Videographers who mostly want to film a certain type of content — TV commercials, C-suite interviews, explainers, social media clips — should make that clear through what they include in their portfolio. By the same token, a creator primarily interested in animation should showcase that interest first and foremost.
- Flex artistic and technical skill: The clips chosen for an online video portfolio should also bring together a great creative sensibility and technical acumen. Videos that don’t measure up to a creator’s best work probably shouldn’t make it to the portfolio site. A small collection of impressive examples is likely more compelling than an overstuffed grab-bag of less appealing videos.
- Describe client outcomes: Beyond the videos themselves, a creator’s online portfolio can include blurbs about the circumstances behind each project and the impact on the target audience. Since a potential client will hire a video professional to achieve a specific business objective, they’ll want to see what other companies have accomplished with this professional’s help.
- Create a good viewing experience: Whether they’re hosting on a specialty service, using a video-uploading site or creating a bespoke video portfolio website, it’s important for a video creator to find a way to present their work in a suitable setting. This means pleasing aesthetics, as well as a lack of potentially distracting tech problems.
With these ideas in mind, creatives from throughout the production process — from videographers and directors of photography to editors, animators and more — can match their skills with any potential client eager to put them to work.
Assembling a Skilled Corporate Video Crew
Of course, only a fraction of ambitious corporate video projects are manageable by a lone videographer. Rather than just choosing one professional for a job, companies will need to build out full teams of specialists to achieve their ambitions.
In today’s highly decoupled media landscape, there’s more freedom than ever to try out different combinations of personnel. A company can hire a professional video crew for on-location shooting while managing its video editing and post production in house, or take the opposite approach, outsourcing final polish to an external company.
Whether building a full in-house video department, hiring a full-service video production company or mixing and matching to achieve a perfect balance, video clients need to create a crew that combines:
- Video technology acumen.
- Regional knowledge and insights.
- Diverse perspectives and backgrounds.
- Experience and professionalism.
- Adaptability to fit the assignment.
With these traits on board, a company can proceed confidently with its video production strategy, focusing on business goals rather than getting bogged down in a drawn-out process.
Teaming Up with Top Video Professionals
Finding the right combination of skills for a given video production job is the No. 1 key to getting great results, because no matter how advanced technology becomes, video creation is ultimately accomplished by people. Those prospects’ portfolios will tell what role they can play for their clients.
In some cases, those creatives will stay consistent from one job to the next, whether that means creating an internal video department or hiring the same production company repeatedly. In other cases, it’s worth changing things up between each shoot, especially when a new video needs a drastically different style or is meant for a new target audience.
Read our ebook to learn about working with top corporate video professionals.
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