Chris Lavigne is head of production at Wistia, the video marketing platform. He’s spent three decades making video — from linear tape editing as a kid to building production workflows for B2B software teams — and he brings a rare combination of craft knowledge and practical marketing sense to the topic.
In this session, Chris shared a two-hour video workflow designed to get marketers out of analysis paralysis and actually making content, including the specific tools, gear, and AI techniques he uses himself.
Stop trying to go viral. Go helpful instead.
According to Wistia’s 2026 State of Video report, 57% of marketers stall at the make-it phase and never even get to promoting what they’ve created. The pull of trying to make something great can become the thing that stops you making anything at all.
Chris’s reframe is simple: don’t go viral, go helpful. The videos that earn their keep aren’t the flashy ones. They’re the small, hardworking videos that answer a question someone is already asking, and keep answering it on repeat, long after you’ve moved on to something else.
His go-to starting point: find one question your support team, sales team, or customers ask more than twice a week. That’s your video. It might feel boring to you. If a customer is asking it, it’s gold to them.
The two-hour workflow
Chris breaks the process into five steps, with rough time allocations to keep things moving.
Find your question (10 minutes). Pick something that’s genuinely repeated. For software teams, that’s probably a product FAQ. For service businesses, it could be an onboarding question. Chris even applies this at his wife’s orthodontist practice, where videos made for internal onboarding have ended up working as social content too.
Search for inspiration (10 minutes). Before you write anything, find a video you want to emulate. Not copy, emulate. Chris scrolls his YouTube feed or browses Apple Music’s video tab looking for structure, pacing, and the interplay between a talking head and on-screen text. You’re not stealing the idea, you’re borrowing the shape.
Write a script using AI (15 minutes). This is where having a custom skill in Claude or ChatGPT makes a real difference. Chris has built a skill using transcripts from Wistia videos that performed well, combined with guidance on his brand voice and tone. When he feeds in rough notes or a brief, he gets something that’s 90 to 95% of the way there. Without a skill, you’ll still get something faster than writing from scratch, but the skill means the output actually sounds like you.
Shoot it (30 minutes). Your phone and your webcam are probably good enough. That’s Chris’s actual position, not a hedge. The one investment worth making is in audio, not video. An external mic like the Hollyland Lark 2 (around £60) or a USB desktop mic like the Elgato Wave 3 will do more for how professional your video feels than any camera upgrade. Face a window instead of sitting with one behind you. Get your camera at eye level. That’s most of the work.
Edit it (45 minutes). CapCut is a solid starting point if you’re new to editing. If you’re already in the Adobe ecosystem, Premiere isn’t as steep a learning curve as it looks. Wistia’s agentic editor lets you drag in a recording and prompt it to create a two-minute cut, add captions, or switch to vertical, which is worth knowing about if you’re working with longer footage. A useful rule of thumb from Chris: if editing is taking twice as long as shooting, change your tool.
One video, three jobs
The reason this workflow is worth building a habit around isn’t just efficiency. A single well-made support video does three things at once.
It scales your team’s time. The example Chris shared from Wistia’s own support docs is a one-minute video about using their editor. It’s had 1,200 plays and 18 hours of watch time, which is 18 hours of a support person’s time that didn’t need to be spent on a call or a ticket. That compounds quietly over months.
It feeds your social content. Clips from internal or FAQ-style videos can go directly to LinkedIn. Wistia’s 2026 data found that 81% of B2B teams now name LinkedIn as their number one video channel, which Chris admitted surprised even him.
And it lets you walk before you run. These aren’t the videos you put £1,000 of paid media behind. They’re the ones where you figure out what works, build your confidence on camera, and prove the value of video without needing a big budget to justify it.
The gear worth buying (and what you can skip)
For anyone who wants a specific kit list, Chris’s approved setup for talking head and screen-record video is pretty lean. A Belkin MagSafe mount (around £25) lets you clip your iPhone onto your laptop screen and use it as a webcam via Apple’s Continuity Camera feature. The Hollyland Lark 2 wireless lavs are around £60 and connect via USB-C. The Elgato Wave 3 desktop mic is around £120 and sits just out of frame.
Lights are optional. A window does the job most of the time. If you do want to invest, look for dimmable panels with a high CRI (colour rendering index) and position them off to one side rather than straight-on.
On shooting for multiple platforms: if you have a newer iPhone, the front-facing camera now has a square sensor, which means you can record in landscape or portrait without changing how you’re holding the phone. For everyone else, shooting in 4K and cropping in post gives you enough flexibility to make both a landscape and a vertical cut from the same footage, as long as you’re not too zoomed in to start with.
The thing that keeps people from starting
There’s a version of this conversation that’s really about permission. Permission to use the phone that’s already in your pocket. Permission to record something that isn’t polished. Permission to start with a boring question instead of a big idea.
Chris’s take, built from a career that started with VHS cameras and tape-to-tape editing, is that the low-fi human video is becoming a differentiator again. At a time when generative AI can produce a convincing spokesperson on a spaceship in seconds, the thing that stands out is an actual person with bags under their eyes and a genuine opinion. That’s harder to fake than it sounds.
So the question isn’t really whether you have the right gear or the right budget. It’s whether you’ve blocked two hours in your calendar to try it. If you’re answering the same question for the fifth time this week, that’s your script.
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