Unboxing videos that are not an afterthought
The unboxing is the piece a customer watches most carefully, because it is the only one showing what actually arrives.
The unboxing gets made at the end. The main ad is done, somebody remembers the packaging is nice, and a box gets opened in a hurry on a kitchen worktop with a phone leaning against a mug.
Then it goes out and quietly does more work than the ad it was appended to, because it is the only piece of content answering the question a nervous buyer is actually asking. Not is this good. What turns up at my door, and will I feel stupid for having ordered it.
Treated as an afterthought, it answers that badly. Treated properly, it is one of the cheapest things you will ever film.
What is somebody actually watching for?
Confirmation that the thing is real, and a small amount of anticipation.
The pleasure of watching something be opened is built entirely on delay. The pause before the lid moves, the resistance, the moment the contents become visible: that is the event. Everything before it is setup and everything after it is inspection. So the shape of a good unboxing is slower at the front than instinct suggests.
What people are checking, meanwhile, is unglamorous and specific. Is it the size they imagined. Does it look like the photographs. Is the packaging the kind that suggests care, or the kind that suggests a warehouse. Every one of those is answered in vision, and none of them by a voiceover saying the product name.
Why is the sound doing more work than the picture?
Because most of what tells you an object is well made is audible.
Card tearing along a seal. A magnetic lid closing. Tissue paper. The dull knock of something heavy set on a wooden table. Those sounds are how a viewer decides, without deciding, whether this is a considered object or a cheap one, and the judgement happens before any claim is made.
Which produces the most useful instruction in this post. A quiet room matters more than a good camera. A phone recording in a silent kitchen beats a proper camera in a room with a fridge humming, a road outside and a laptop fan, because the phone captures the paper and the other one captures the paper underneath a wall of noise.
Turn the fridge off at the socket. Film when the road is quiet. Close the door. Take the rings off, because a ring tapping a box is louder than everything else you have recorded and cannot be removed afterwards without taking the box sound with it.
Whose hands should be in shot?
A customer's, not a presenter's.
There is a way of handling a product that is unmistakably promotional: the slow rotation towards camera, the fingertips arranged at the edges, the object presented at the end of the sentence. Everyone recognises it and nobody trusts it.
A customer opens a box differently. They use both hands. They put things down. They turn something over to look at the back, and they reach for whatever they were most curious about first, which is almost never what the brand considers most important.
Film that version. It means keeping the small hesitation, letting things be picked up in the wrong order, and resisting the urge to reshoot the moment a thumb covers a logo.
Where do unboxing videos go wrong?
Three ways, and they are the same three every time.
It is shot too fast
The whole point is the delay, and the instinct in editing is always to remove the delay. The lid comes off in a quick cut, the contents are already visible, and the moment the viewer came for has been optimised away. Slow the opening down and speed up the inspection afterwards, which is the opposite of how these usually get cut.
It cuts away at the moment
If there is one shot the video exists for, it is the contents becoming visible. A cut in the middle of it, however well matched, removes the thing that made it satisfying, because part of what is satisfying is that it is continuous. Hold the shot. If you must cut, cut before or after, not through.
The lighting hides the texture
Flat, bright, even light makes packaging look like a photograph of packaging. Texture appears when light comes from one side and rakes across a surface, which is what makes embossing, grain, matte card and brushed finishes look like themselves. Put your light off to one side rather than behind the camera, and let one side of the box fall darker.
What do you set up before you press record?
Four things, none of which cost anything.
Get a second unit if you possibly can, because you only open a box once and the first attempt is always the rehearsal. Clear the surface, since the worktop behind your product is in the advert whether you meant it to be or not. Decide before you start which single moment the film is built around. And do a silent take of the room first, then listen back on headphones, which tells you what you are actually recording rather than what you think you are.
Where does this sit in an ad account?
Alongside the social proof, not below it.
In this studio an unboxing or packaging video is treated as carrying as much weight as a well built social proof carousel, and neither of them can be written from a specification sheet. They do different halves of the same job: the carousel tells a nervous buyer that other people were pleased, and the unboxing shows them what being pleased will look like when it arrives on their own table.
Which puts a straightforward question in front of you. If somebody is deciding whether to trust you with money, do you have anything at all that shows them what turns up. Most brands do not, and the material for it is sitting in the stockroom.
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