One of the best examples of a marketing video for a look book or catalog is the announcement video for the Michaels Stores 2013 video catalog. It has just the right amount of animation to keep the viewer's attention while highlighting the main craft projects and decor items featured in the holiday catalog.

The home based craft business, which doesn't have the advertising budget of a large company like Michaels^R Stores, can get the same results with a little hard work and Apple Motion software. The first step is to analyze each animation, or scene, in this holiday marketing video. This will give us a good idea of how this type of marketing video is produced and what images we will need to prepare for the project.

Opening Scene

I really like the method used to tell the audience that this video is about a holiday catalog. The scene begins with an animation of small items randomly popping up on the screen. As they do, the viewer realizes that the animation is building the holiday tree on the catalog cover. To prepare the image for this animation, you will want to start with a complete catalog cover image in a resolution large enough for the 1920 x 1280 pixels video screen. From there you can isolate each object from within the tree on to a separate layer in Photoshop. This layered Photoshop image will be imported into Apple Motion. Another option is to only use the complete cover image and create the pop-up animation for each item in the tree using masking in Motion.

Once the tree animation is complete, a transition reveals a 3D mockup of the catalog cover. For this, you would want to create a second image of the complete catalog as a 3D mockup. There are many Photoshop actions that can be used for this task, including some free actions at PSDCovers.com.

Of course, not all catalog covers will have a layout that lends itself to this exact animation. Try to visualize how you would animate your client's catalog cover.

In this same opening, Michaels includes a hint about the reason for the catalog, by their choice of background music. Of course, if your client's catalog features the newest wedding stationary, you would perhaps choose a background audio that suggests a party or wedding.

Another point to consider is your client's brand recognition. Michaels Stores has very good brand recognition of the "Michaels" text and tagline that make up their logo. In the video opening, the logo is at the top of the catalog cover. But if your client's brand is less familiar, you might want to add a "brought to you by" lower third to the opening scene. This might be created in Motion using the text tool or you could import the company logo image.