Preparing for a shoot day
Most of what a filming day for a deep tech company should be decided in the weeks leading up to it, and should be given almost more attention than the filming itself. The way to prepare for a deep tech video shoot is perhaps a little unglamorous, a brief, a list of audiences, some phone calls and a walk around the building, but it is the difference between coming home with one general video and coming home with a library.
What to film once the day arrives is covered separately in how to get the most from a deep tech filming day, and the two are halves of the same argument.
One sentence per video
Start by writing a single sentence for every video you want to come away with: what it is for, who it is aimed at, and what that person should do after watching it. A filled-in version looks something like this: a two minute video for corporate innovation leads that shows the technology running in a real environment, so they feel safe booking a technical call.
That sentence tells the crew what to shoot, because a video aimed at a procurement audience needs different coverage from one aimed at investors, and it tells you whether the video should exist at all. When the sentence will not fill in, when you cannot say who it is for or what they should do next, you have found a video that is not ready to be made, and finding that out before the shoot costs nothing. Most corporate video underperforms for exactly this reason, nobody agreed what it was for before the cameras came out, and no edit can rescue a video that never had a job.
Pick the audiences before the day
An investor, a technical evaluator, a potential hire and a corporate buyer all need different things from the same material, and the week before the shoot is when that gets decided, not in the edit. A crew that knows you want four cutdowns shoots differently from one making a single video, gathering extra coverage, asking the same question two ways, keeping answers self-contained so they can be cut apart later.
Write the audience list with your commercial team in the room, because they know which conversations keep stalling and which questions they answer in every single meeting. If part of your sale involves one contact convincing a committee you never meet, plan cutdowns for the roles inside that committee too, a numbers-focused cut for the finance lead, an integration cut for the evaluators. The reasoning behind those committee assets sits in how to sell to a deep tech buying committee.
While you are listing audiences, decide where each video will live, because the destination changes the format. A homepage video can be widescreen and ninety seconds, LinkedIn wants shorter cuts that work as vertical or square crops and still make sense with the sound off, and a video sent ahead of a sales meeting can run longer because the viewer has chosen to watch it. Telling the crew the destinations in advance means they frame shots so a vertical crop exists inside the wide one, which is the kind of decision that cannot be retrofitted.
Questions, not scripts
For every person being filmed, write three to five questions specific to their role and the technology, and resist the urge to write anyone a script. People answering questions about their own work sound like themselves, people reciting lines sound like people reciting lines, and the gap between the two is obvious to every viewer. Phrase the questions so the answers stand alone, asking what surprised you in scale-up rather than did scale-up surprise you, because an answer that contains its own context can become a clip without the question attached.
Send the questions to each person a few days ahead so they can think, with a note saying not to write answers out, and the full approach to getting natural performances from reluctant people is in how we film founders who hate being on camera.
Walk the building before the shoot
A ten minute phone video walking through your building answers most of the questions that otherwise eat the first two hours of a shoot day. Where the power is, which rooms hum with extraction and air handling, where the natural light falls and at what time, which spaces are big enough to light, and what would need moving before anything looks presentable.
Do the confidentiality sweep on the same walk. Note anything that cannot appear on camera, client-identifiable equipment, whiteboards with live project detail, screens, labelled samples, anything under NDA, and agree the no-film zones with the crew in advance. Most professional crews will sign your NDA as a matter of routine, and a written list protects you far better than hoping somebody notices a sensitive logo on the day. The same walk is the moment to flag what should deliberately stay in frame, because safety equipment and the ordinary clutter of real work are part of what makes the footage credible.
Prep your team early
Tell everyone being filmed well in advance, make it voluntary, and schedule each person a slot of thirty to forty five minutes rather than asking the whole team to hover all day. People are better on camera when they have not been waiting around for three hours, the lab keeps running, and the person who dreads it has time to get used to the idea instead of being ambushed by a camera at their bench.
Wardrobe guidance is worth sending even though it feels fussy: plain clothing in solid mid-tone colours, normal workwear and PPE where the job calls for it, no fine stripes or small checks because they shimmer on camera, and no other companies’ logos because they date the footage or cause permission headaches in the edit. One line in an email saves three conversations on the morning.
Things to prep for the edit
Edits stall for weeks waiting on things that could have been collected before the shoot, so put them in one folder in advance: logo files, brand colours and fonts, any product renders or CAD animations, data visuals, old footage worth reusing, and the names and titles of everyone appearing, spelled the way they want them spelled. If a customer or partner is named anywhere, confirm in writing that they are happy to be named, because chasing that approval after the edit is cut is the single most common reason a finished video sits unpublished for a month.
Get photography taken on the same day
The crew is already in the building and the lighting is already up, so an extra hour of stills gets you a set of real images for the website, decks and LinkedIn at close to no marginal cost. Technical buyers clock stock photography instantly, and a real image of your actual facility does more work than a perfect image of someone else’s. Ask for four groups, wide frames of the facility, close detail of the material or process, people working, and portraits, and the method behind each is in the lab photography piece.
The parts only you can do
A decent chunk of this preparation is work a good crew does with you, the walkthrough, the wardrobe note, the shot planning, and if whoever you have booked has asked for none of it, that silence is worth reading as information about what kind of day you are going to get. The parts nobody can do for you are the first two: what each video is for, and who it needs to reach. Those are commercial decisions, they come from inside your company, and a crew arriving to find them unmade will default to the thing crews default to, a nice general video about the company.
The other preparation that only you can do is deciding whether to film at all yet. If the positioning might change this year, if the company you would describe on camera is about to stop existing, postpone the shoot and spend the money after the story settles, because a video describing last year’s strategy is worse than no video.
The checklist
Everything above fits on one sheet: a one-sentence brief per video, the audience and cutdown list with destinations, question lists for each person, the walkthrough video and the no-film list, the schedule of interview slots, the wardrobe note, the edit folder, and photography booked into the day. None of it needs us, any crew can work from it, and most of it is an afternoon’s work for whoever owns marketing.
Once you treat that week as part of the shoot itself, deciding what each video is for, who it reaches and what else the day can produce while the crew is there, the same day and the same budget come back with videos, cutdowns and a photo library your commercial team is still drawing on next year, rather than one general video that tries to speak to everyone and lands with no one.
How we run this kind of day, and what it costs, sits under video and photography, and if you want a straight answer on whether your company would get a library or just a video out of a day, a 20 minute call will tell you, including if the answer is to wait.
How far in advance should you prepare for a video shoot?
The brief, what each video is for and who it is aimed at, should be settled before you book anything, because it decides how many days you need. The practical preparation, question lists, the location walkthrough, scheduling people and gathering brand assets, fits comfortably into the week before the shoot.
What should you send a video crew before filming?
The one-sentence brief for each video, your audience and cutdown list, the interview question lists, a phone walkthrough of the location, your brand files and any existing footage or renders the edit will use, and a note of anything that cannot appear on camera. A crew with that in hand spends the day filming rather than working out what you want.
What should employees wear for a filming day?
Plain clothing in solid mid-tone colours, with normal workwear and PPE where the job requires it, because that is part of the authenticity. Avoid fine stripes and small checks, which shimmer on camera, and avoid logos belonging to other companies, which either date the footage or create permissions problems in the edit.
How long should each person be scheduled on a filming day?
Give each interviewee a slot of thirty to forty five minutes and schedule them through the day rather than asking everyone to be available throughout. People are better on camera when they have not been waiting around for three hours, and the lab keeps running.
What if our facility contains confidential equipment?
Walk the space before the shoot and agree what cannot be filmed: client-identifiable equipment, whiteboards, screens, anything covered by an NDA. Most professional crews will sign your NDA as a matter of routine, and a clear list of no-film zones agreed in advance protects you far better than hoping someone notices on the day.
