At last, people here in South Africa are waking up to the wide world of web content, where everything is constantly changing, and it’s no longer enough to have one long corporate video on a DVD, that you occasionally show in presentations. More and more, we are being called in to shoot in series – creating a number of short, youtube-friendly videos that can be rolled out on social media.

That obviously means change for our industry as well – and change is never a comfortable thing. It means we video production companies have to sit down and rethink our pricing and the way we do costings, because the kind of volume that this short video work creates is just not the same as the old 3-day corporate shoot schedule. We have found that we have to be much more flexible, both with scheduling and pricing, and be willing to tackle challenges more creatively.

Fortunately for us here at Summertime Productions, we love novelty! It’s good fun to work on these quick in, quick out projects, where the content and the people are always changing. It also gives us the opportunity to expand our portfolio in different sectors and circumstances, and that reflects well on us in the long run.

This year, we have come up with ways to create these kinds of web series at low budgets that put meaningful social media content within the reach of SME’s, or make bigger projects possible for cash-strapped marketing departments in South Africa’s current economic climate. And we’re having fun while we’re doing it!