How To Make A Video Without Film

Music videos have been around for a long time now.

Funny to think of them as an early form of content marketing. But that’s what they are: a band is a brand.

Music videos have a familiar problem, however: most of them look the same.

An established brand loses points for being boring. But you can’t afford to look the same if you’re a lesser brand trying to attract attention.

A recent study found that consumers respond to content that’s funny, useful, beautiful, and inspiring. I tried to incorporate those four elements in this promotional video I did for The Mustachios.

You can watch the video at full-size by clicking the YouTube icon at the lower right of the screen.

How do you make a video without shooting any film? By combining bits and pieces of illustration, caricature, animated GIFs, and vintage photographs.

The vintage photos are all copyright-free. I downloaded them from the Internet Archive Book Images, part of The Commons Project run by Flickr.

I love vintage photos. I think everyone does. They usually need some help, tho. I used Apple’s Pixelmator image-editing software to clean them up and add color. Here’s a typical before and after.

I edited all the photos to a 16:9 aspect ratio (width-height), so the video could be displayed at full-size on YouTube.

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Thoughts? I’d appreciate your feedback.