Shit. You’ve got thirty minutes between your kid’s bed time and a Skype call with your offshore dev team to record a video pitch tonight — the kind of thing accelerators, pitch events and investors increasingly ask for these days.

The past year of your work and the next few years of your startup’s life could depend on this. You don’t have the money, time or videographic friends to do a great job.

How do you do a good-enough job?

Assuming you’ve got the actual pitch written, memorised and rehearsed, here’s some practical tips for shooting it and getting a good-enough result.

Be Han Solo

You might be a team of three or four, but adding more people to your shoot makes everything vastly more complicated with lighting, shooting and sound levels. Choose your best team member and keep them in front of the camera. Don’t even be tempted to have other team members lean in and wave. It’s just too distracting for the people reviewing your business opportunity and is too prone to be funny in the wrong kind of way.

What do I shoot it on?

Having access to a great video camera, tripod and directional mic would be great but that’s unlikely to be the case and will in any case mean you spend all night importing, editing and re-editing the shoot. This is near-enough-is-good-enough time.

This is one of those times you get to congratulate yourself for going Apple: the camera in your iPhone 5, MacBook Air or MacBook Pro is going to be fine, and iMovie for OSX or iOS is good enough for editing in a title and any Keynote, PowerPoint or PDF graphics you might need to make your case.

How do I set it up?

Angle and elevation is everything: shooting yourself sitting, whispering up close to the camera on your monitor is ‘so YouTube’ and definitely not the look you need. You want to have the camera roughly at eye level or just under when you’re standing facing the camera, and you’ll need enough space to have the camera 2-3m from you, giving you enough room to keep your hands in shot when you go for the big gestures. You should leave about 20% of the vertical length of the shot clear above your head, and that should mean your upper body is in the frame down to the waist.

Assuming you don’t have a tripod adapter for your iPhone, a MacBook is a little easier to setup, since you can adjust the camera angle more easily with the MacBook’s display hinge, you can see yourself in the screen so you can setup without any help, and it’ll sit up stable on a pile of books on top of your dinner table. A MacBook also comes with more disk storage to save and edit the video.

If you’re using the iPhone, use some gaffer tape to secure it to something like a tripod or a stack of books to keep it still. Secure it in the horizontal position so you can shoot in 16:9 format. Download and install iMovie for iOS if you don’t already have it — $5 and it’ll shoot 720p at 30fps in your front-facing camera — adequate resolution for the purpose and you’ll be able to see yourself in the shot to make sure you’ve got the camera positioned correctly. 

Lighting and sound

Obviously, don’t do this in the room facing the freeway, in the same room as your room-mates playing HALO or your partner watching Game Of Thrones, or while your toddler bangs your shins with a rubber hammer. You need your mojo on and focused, and background noise will not only kill your mojo but also distract your intended audience from your message.

Try to shoot in a room without aircon hum, and with minimal flat hard surfaces on the walls (eg concrete or brick) because they create echoes and boominess. If you can hear some echo, and the rest of the building is quiet enough, try leaving the door open a little — that circulation will cut boominess a little. Or temporarily gaffer tape a rug or some beach towels on the hard surface walls (obviously not those in shot). 

Make sure the room is lit only gently from above — gaffer tape a little baking paper across those hard fluorescent lights if you need to soften them a little. Now try to add another light of about the same magnitude behind the camera, and facing you, to light your face and help you stand out from the background. A reading lamp on a flexible stalk is often great for this.

Make sure you’re standing in front of a plain background — no windows, wall hangings or pictures. Make sure what you’re wearing doesn’t clash with your complexion, and if possible, neither does your background.

Here’s a quick snap of Tony from the agency looking relaxed and comfortable in front of the camera (actually wondering why the hell he’s being asked to pose like this). Other than the fixed, uncomfortable expression, the pink shirt and the back of the office chair in shot, he’s now set up to do a good-enough-for-pitching video.

Editing

Remembering we’re aiming for a good-enough result, don’t over-edit your video. It’ll make you stand out against the other video pitches, but it’s more likely to do so in a negative than a positive way.

Shoot several takes, and cut together the best version of each key section of your pitch to make one great pitch (unless, of course, you’ve nailed it in one of your takes!). The best transition to use in your edits is a brief dissolve — you don’t want the transition itself to attract attention, and a dissolve will let the audience know you’ve edited something without calling undue attention to it.

Add a fade in from black to the beginning, and a fade out to black at the end, and don’t be tempted to add any sound or theme music. If you’re using iMovie for iOS, choose the Modern, Bright or Simple themes in Project Settings. If you feel the need to title the opening of your video, keep it low-key and simple and please, use Helvetica and not Comic Sans! ;-) 

In most pitches you’ll have the opportunity to upload your slide deck separately, so unless there’s an important concept that’s best explained visually, don’t insert slides from your deck into your video — it’s harder to do than it seems, and most visuals are hard to see if the viewer is watching in a small default player size.

What did we miss?

Disagree with our advice? Got more tips you can share from great pitch videos you’ve made? Let us know in the comments below.