Ten mistakes people make filming their own product

Plan a product video for the places and offers it needs to serve. A text-free master and replaceable promotional details can give useful footage a longer working life.

Ten is reachable on a subject this narrow. Filming something you sell is a repeatable job, and repeatable jobs fail in specific ways. Every item below has a cost attached, and the cost is usually a reshoot nobody budgeted for.

Only one of the ten involves buying anything, and the thing you buy is a piece of card.

One thing this list is not: the marketplace's own image rules. Those are hard rules rather than creative choices, they differ by marketplace and category and they change, so they get checked against the live specification for your exact destination before a shoot rather than remembered. Cut-out images for marketplaces is that side of it. Everything below is the creative and production half, where the judgement is yours.

Ten ways a product shoot loses money

1. Moving the light between products

Record the lighting, camera position and reference image so the set can be rebuilt. Adjust for each product where needed, especially reflective surfaces, while matching the overall exposure, background and look.

2. No consistent position or scale

Each shot is fine on its own and the grid is chaos, because the object sits high in one frame and small in the next. A customer reads that inconsistency before they read any single image, and they also cannot compare two of your own products, so they pick whichever photographed best rather than whichever suits them. Decide one framing, mark on the surface where the object goes, and shoot everything to that mark.

3. Filming the product without ever handling it

The object sits still on a surface, the camera moves around it, and nothing in the footage tells anybody what it weighs, how the finish feels or what the lid does. Those are the signals a buyer is reading, and none of them survive a shot of a stationary object. Get hands into the frame lifting it, opening it and setting it down; "What changes when an agency holds your product" is the same gap from the other side, which is that whoever makes your video should be asking you to send them one.

4. Shooting one aspect ratio for something that needs two

Plan wide and vertical framing for the intended placements. A shared master may work if the product and action fit both crops; otherwise film a separate version while the setup is ready.

5. Burning the offer into the picture

The moment the promotion changes, a perfectly good video is unusable, and the object in it has not changed at all. You have tied the working life of the asset to the working life of the offer, which is the shortest-lived thing in the business. Keep the offer in the caption, on the landing page, or in an end card that swaps without touching anything before it; "On-screen text that answers a question" covers what belongs burned in and what does not.

6. No text-free master

This is the same fault one step earlier and it costs more. Even sensible on-screen text, the product name, the feature callouts, the sizing, means a second language, a second market or a second season is a rebuild. Ask for a graded version carrying no text at all and keep it with the project file; "Getting your project files back" is about agreeing that before the work starts rather than after.

7. Room noise on an unboxing

Record an unboxing in a quiet position with the microphone close enough to capture the paper, seal and lid. Keep essential equipment running and listen to a test before opening packaging you cannot reset.

8. Rushing the moment the box opens

The pause before the lid moves is the event. Filmed quickly it becomes a transition, so you have cut past the only part anybody came for, on the piece of content a nervous buyer studies hardest. Slow the hands down, film the opening more than once, and keep all of it including the resistance; "Unboxing videos that are not an afterthought" argues for filming it first.

9. One hook

Film several openings while the light and object are in place. Test them under comparable conditions and allow for an inconclusive result; a single underperforming advert cannot tell you which component caused it.

10. No reference card

Record a colour reference at the start and when the lighting changes. Use it to establish a consistent starting point, then check individual products against the real item and the intended display conditions.

Which two do you fix first?

The lamp position and the reference card, because both apply to every item you will ever photograph rather than to one video.

Everything else here is per shoot. Those two are per business: set them once, write down where the lamp goes, and every product you add afterwards joins a set that already matches. If you photograph a range at all, that is the best return available on an afternoon.

What is not worth doing?

Building a set. It is the thing people reach for first, and for most catalogues it is a way of spending a weekend producing something that will not match the next item you add to the shop.

Prioritise videos by the question they need to answer and their likely value. A high-volume product may come first; a costly or unfamiliar product may also need a demonstration even if it sells less often.

Work out which products those are before anything else here applies to you. Your own sales figures already know, and the answer decides how much of this list you ever need to act on.