One would definitely think that. But it's often far from reality. If you're a fan of older movies, be it Star Trek, Poltergeist, Ghost Busters, or the older Doctor Who series, you have definitely seen some rather horrendous special effects. In case of these movies, of course, the problematic quality is understandable and forgivable based on the time the movies came out. However, even now, in 2019, there are a number of movies with somewhat high overall budgets (think $50 millions) that still seems to have taken their special effects from the 80s movies. Or at least seem to have used the same software for creating them.

I was just recently watching Sylvester Stallone's Escape Plan 2: Hades. It was a pretty bad movie from the start, which was a bit surprising considering the first Escape Plan was actually quite decent. According to IMDB the estimated budget for the movie was $45,000,000. But if you watch that movie, and see the explosion in there, you'll understand the problem with it.

Here are some other pretty hilarious fails from other movies:


However, it's not only the movies that can leave a bad/laughable impression because of their special effects or editing or whatever else. The same applies for any kind of advertisements, any kind of promotional videos. And I guess when it comes to promotional videos, it's can be even sadder when they are really, really bad. You decide to create a video to promote yourself, your product, or your service, you create the video by yourself or pay someone else to do it, only to see the end results being so bad that it could rather hurt your product or your business than actually help it. And it's even worse if you don't think the end result is bad and you actually decide to run it. To see what I'm talking about, you could check out these kickstarter videos which are bad for different reasons, from using all the possible cheesy webcam effects to having simply terrible audio.

And then of course, then there's this:


It's not that difficult to put together a proper promotional video. Okay, it actually is. It takes time to come up with a good idea, make a plan on how to turn the idea into something that might actually do something good for you. But it is easy to avoid the simple mistakes. And those mistakes can start even before you take out the camera. Things like not having a clear objective for the video, not focusing on your target audience, cramming too much information in one short clip, deciding to do everything yourself without using a company specializing in video production services although you know you're not capable of doing it right yourself. Remember - your promotional video will work only if done right. Badly planned, badly produced, badly...whatever...video can do more harm than good to your company.