Should I use actors in my video?
Unless you have a solid storyline for your video, actors aren’t really needed for a business video production. Now let’s go under the premises that you will need people to act in your video. Should you hire actors? Maybe. It depends on how much true acting needs to be done, your budget and who your target audience is.
If not a lot of acting, but mainly ‘placeholders’ in your video, then anyone who will follow direction will do. If your target audience is other employees at work, then maybe you can use employees as actors. Of course there are budget considerations, which we’ll get into in the next section.
Hiring actors for your video production
If you decide to use actors for your video production there are several sources to get good talent without breaking the bank. Some of those sources include the drama departments at schools, theater companies, and placing an ad in Craigslist. If you want to go with a talent agency, I’d recommend making sure that the actors are non-union. Otherwise, you may have to deal with a lot of red tape and expense that you can probably live without.
We always use a non-union talent agency. They either send us headshots or we look at their online portfolio of actors. You always get a huge choice of actors to consider when using a talent agency. Here’s an example of one of our videos with a storyline and actors:
Audition your actors
Make sure to audition your actors. Send them a few lines from the script and have them come in to audition. Get them on video if possible too. But make sure they know they’ll be filmed before they come in to avoid any uncomfortable conversations when they see a camera setup.
Professional voiceovers for your video production
If you have a voiceover need for your video, you can try finding someone with a good voice and intonation at your company, but it’s generally always best to hire a professional voiceover talent. Since audio is one half of an audio/visual presentation (which is video), then it really needs to be done well. Few things detract from a video more than bad audio. Similar to the actors, audition them. Give them a portion of the voice over to read and compare a few different voices.
– – – – – – – – – – – – –
