A brand wants your video on its shop screen. Three things are true there that are false everywhere else, and they change the edit.
What the place takes away
Nobody chose to watch
Four direct consequences.
There is no possible hook: you do not capture attention that was never given, you catch it in passing.
What stops the eye is a movement, not an idea: a hand, an object being filled, a material changing.
The rhythm has to be slow, because fast editing becomes unreadable at a distance.
And the information has to be visible from the first second seen, whichever one that is.
Nobody can rewind
Three rules of construction.
Every segment has to work alone, dealt with above.
No information may appear only once: what matters is displayed at least three times per loop.
And the loop has to be short, between thirty and sixty seconds, so the message comes back while the person is still in the shop.
Nobody hears anything
Five consequences of the absence of sound.
The on-screen text carries the whole message, and it has to be readable at three metres.
Subtitles are not enough: subtitle text is too small and too fast for this context.
Gestures replace explanations: showing beats saying.
Music and voice serve no purpose, which frees up editing time.
And any video whose meaning depends on a spoken sentence is unusable as it is.
What an in-store screen changes
| Constraint | What it imposes | Why |
|---|---|---|
| No sound | Everything goes through image and text | The floor is noisy or muted |
| A short loop | 10 to 20 seconds | The passer-by stays briefly |
| Reading from afar | Large text, few words | The screen is mounted high |
What is framed differently
The product sits centre and stays large. A wide shot that works on a phone becomes unreadable on a screen seen from three metres.
What is checked with the store
The screen's aspect ratio, the loop length, the accepted file size and the orientation. Those four come from the operator, never from an assumption.
The part that is not technical
Six points to settle with the brand before delivering.
The exact screen format, which is almost never vertical: many window screens are horizontal or square, and an automatic recrop cuts out the essential.
The dead zone: the top and bottom edges can be hidden by the frame or the furniture, so nothing important goes there.
The brightness of the place, which crushes dark images and makes low contrast unreadable.
The loop length expected by the player, and the file format it accepts.
The rights: in-store publication is a distinct use, to be written into the contract, with its duration and the number of points of sale.
And the advertising disclosure, whose application in a retail space is checked with a lawyer.
One commercial note: this publication is almost always requested as an addition to an existing order, unpaid, because it looks trivial. It is priced as a use in its own right, with a duration and a number of screens, exactly like display advertising.
One last marker: a shop window video is not a shortened version of a social video, it is a different object obeying three opposite constraints. The file you deliver has to stay understandable with no sound, no beginning and no deliberate attention, and those three conditions cannot be rescued at the edit.
