5 tips for producing a budget Kickstarter video

Photo credits: Scott Beale

One of the greatest challenges in the presentation of any Kickstarter campaign is probably the campaign video.

With our Kickstarter campaign planned for a late October launch, we started sourcing for video production studios as early as April to help us produce a video that will get our backers eager to click on the “pledge” button.

We were inspired by some successful campaign videos such as Exploding Kitten and Zombicide and wanted our video to look as cool as theirs.

However, the price tags in producing these videos were quoted at a hefty S$5,000 to 10,000 (US$3,550 to 7,110) for a three-minute video due to the amount of animation involved. We even ventured to Malaysia to look for a quote given that the Ringgit has fallen to a record low during 2015. However, the business savvy Malaysian studios decided to quote in US dollars rather than in Ringgit.

We initially thought that the high price tag is due to the fact that we identify ourselves as a Singaporean company. So, we asked our Malaysian friends to help us check out the prices using similar specifications. Our hopes were dashed when the price turns out to be the same.

We found video production houses which do not specialize in animation to charge a more reasonable amount of S$2,000 to 3,000 (US$1,420 to 3,120). But there will be minimal animation with mostly live footage, which we can probably produce ourselves anyway.

We asked ourselves: will an expensive video that cost nearly the same as our campaign goal bring in more money? We are after all a small independent games studio bootstrapped by a couple of co-founders and have no access to corporate sponsors or VC funding to churn out expensive marketing materials.

We had an extensive debate on this issue and decided to produce the video in-house. We felt that the spirit of Kickstarter is to help small independent creators to launch their dreams and a self-produced video will no doubt give an indie feel. In any case, video production is a useful skill which will benefit us in the long run (YouTube videos, here we come!)

The first video we produced was 3:22 minutes long, which we thought was a satisfactory length for a Kickstarter video. Kickstarter has an utility that tracks the amount of video plays and the percentage of people watching the full video.

Our first 900 video plays only netted 29 percent completion, which is pretty low. This is pretty bad meaning that most of the readers did not reach our pleads for funding at the end of the video. There were also comments that our video lack the human touch as the game designer did not appear on screen to share his personal experience.

We revamped the entire video and reduced the length to 1:18 minutes and included a sharing session by the game designer and that seems to work well. Completion rate jumped to 50 percent. However, we received feedback that after we chopped the video, people didn’t know it’s about a board game.

Back to the drawing board again: