Showing Off the Beauty of Your Product in Your Corporate Video
Beauty is one of the important elements, which needs to be incorporated into a corporate video. Beauty imbues an object with attractiveness. In the same way as viewers are attracted to unique content, viewers are also attracted to beautiful content. Finding beautiful content to present to the public is a unique challenge for every industry, because each industry has beauty in a different form. Locating the beauty in your company and presenting it, will greatly enhance the appeal of your corporate video to the public.
Locating that which is most beautiful in a given industry is not always so obvious. In a company, which provides large above ground containers for volatile fuel, for example, a photo of the production plant with row after row of these large steely containers sitting in a lot waiting to be delivered has beauty in symmetry. A video made for an environmental group, has a much more obvious source of beauty, and it will serve to prove my point.
The environmental corporate video by Edward Wallace can be found at http://vimeo.com/3217927 . The Canadian environmental protection organization that produced this video has a very conspicuous source of beauty. It is important to point out, that this corporate video has not merely thrown beautiful scenes into the video, to attract attention. The beauty of untrammeled nature relates directly to the purpose of their organization, which is to preserve these wild pristine places. This is essential. The video is not merely using the beautiful images to attract views so it can then deliver its message. Rather, in a very real sense, the beauty is the message. In that sense, and in this usage the video illustrates the famous poetic adage that “Beauty is Truth and Truth is Beauty.”
The incorporation of beauty into a corporate video, may not always be done so appropriately. At times beautiful scenes, which are merely tangential to the main thrust of the video, are thrown in as attention grabbers. For example, a watch company has used scenes of a breathtaking climb to the summit of a mountain. The captivating beauty, which stretches out beyond the precipitous drop, is merely tangential to the fact that the watch keeps ticking despite the beating it took on the climb to the summit. The sturdiness of the watch, in fact, is one of its minor feature compared to the beautiful intricacy of its dials, wheels and or digital circuitry, which never miss a beat and keep accurate time for years.
In the mountain video, beauty is transferred from another source and applied by juxtaposition to the object actually featured in the footage. Such a tactic can work at times, but it can also backfire as the viewer is secretly thinking, “You mean you have nothing intrinsically beautiful about your product to show me?”
On the other hand, when the featured beauty and the message of the video line up together, as we see in the environmental video, then the beauty and message work to strengthen each other and enhance the effectiveness of the video. The beautiful imagery, furthermore, imbues the video with a certain degree of sincerity and even passion. People watching the images of the environmental are moved to want to save the environment as they see the morning sunlight glistening through the trees, and here birds singing t morning songs and watch as a herd of elks standing shyly in a broad shallow creek, turn to look, with mild concern, at the humans filming them from a distance.
