Filming a Kratom Video
A few years back we here at the I Love Kratom forum produced an industry beneficial commercial which was on YouTube for a while. At the time we owned a domain name for a non-profit designed to educate and bring awareness of this great new supplement. It was called Kratom Helps. We no longer own it, so don’t worry about searching it. The link above takes you to the Way Back Engine where you can see it when we owned it.
Before we start, this Kratom commercial is located at the bottom of this article.
I got the idea to do this project when I realized that all of the videos regarding Kratom were either, very poorly, produced or sending the wrong message. So the journey began for us to help improve its image and educate the public.
Myself and two friends started the casting and production. Luckily we had another friend that was a video editor and we had one good camera available.
The next step was story boarding the commercial, writing the script, which was adapted from 100’s of Kratom customers and their testimonials.
Once we selected the testimonials, we reached out to the people who had sent them in and got their permission to adapt them in our commercial.
We originally wanted to cast the testimonial providers, but they were located all over the US and it was too expensive to pay for flights and lodging. We decided to hire actors from California to read their testimonials on camera. Again, with permission of the testimonial owners.
Then we did several days of casting calls which encompassed posting the project, selecting actors and scheduling the casting call. We selected over 30 actors to appear. It was a great experience and we cast 7 actors out of the applicants.
The next step was finding a location to film at. We began searching for a retro looking office building interior, but that wasn’t as easy to find as you might think. Luckily, the person who sold the camera to us recommended a company in Santa Ana that had a small film studio and provided a freshly painted set and lights.
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Next, we scheduled the date, got our story boards together and met the actors at the lot location around 9am to select their outfits, and get them ready. A good friend of mine did wardrobe, hair and makeup in LA and did us a huge favor by taking on that responsibility. Things couldn’t have been better. We kept the set simple, utilized 3 cameras to capture the testimonials, and the editor acting as a second pair of eyes with camera direction and depth. We recorded each actor read the testimonials 3 times in a row and captured several angles.
Next, we broke for lunch, fed the actors and crew and finished up the shots. Everyone was professional and we had a wonderful experience producing this. We also had 7 new Kratom people to introduce to the industry,
We filmed the project in this way as to be independent from any one Kratom company and produce a piece of art and work that benefited the entire industry as a whole.
The following day we met up and went into post production and editing. We needed to find a nice music sample, so I purchased a license from Envato’s Audio Jungle collection and once the editing was complete, we matched it to the video and published the work.
It was only up on Youtube for a short time before someone had flagged the commercial and it became a huge hassle, so we took it down.
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This is why we’re re-posting it now. I always felt that Kratom was important enough to hundreds of thousands of people or more in the US and this video project was a great entry point to help people begin to learn about the product on their own.
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