Most landscaping ads fail before the editor opens the file. The footage is wrong, the before shot is missing, or somebody filmed the whole job in landscape with a phone that's been living in a cup holder.
That's the question this post answers. What to film for landscaping ads, in what order, and what to leave alone. Three shots. One rule that beats every other rule. A handful of things to skip so you stop wasting battery on clips no editor can use.
Phone footage is fine. We're going to keep saying that, because most owners assume they need a videographer before they can start. They don't. They need a routine and a phone they remember to clean.
The three shots that always work
Three shots. Same three on every job. They cover ninety percent of what we need to build a real ad.
1. The wide before.
Frame the whole job site, not just the patch you're working on. Whatever the homeowner sees standing on the kerb. The dead lawn, the cracked driveway, the weed garden, the crooked fence. Five to ten seconds. Hold the camera steady. Walk the line if it's long, but mostly just stand still and let it sit.
If you skip this and start filming once the wheelbarrow's already on the lawn, the ad has nothing to compare against. The whole format collapses. There's no version of "before and after" without the before, and the before is gone the second the trowel hits the gravel.
2. The close-up during.
This is the proof shot. A trowel pulling a paver tight to a string line. Gravel filling a trench. Edging being driven down with a rubber mallet. Polymeric sand being swept into joints. The hands, the tool, the material, doing the actual work.
Two to three seconds of each. We're not filming a tutorial. We're filming texture. Each clip is one moment, then cut. A ten-second wide shot of someone raking is dead time on a Facebook feed. Five two-second close-ups stitched together is rhythm.
Aim for three or four of these per job. More is fine. Less and the middle of the ad goes flat.
3. The wide after.
Same angle as the before. Ideally identical. Walk the kerb back to the spot you stood in for the wide before, hold up the phone, hit record. Same framing, same height. Now the lawn's green or the pavers are laid or the fence is up. The viewer's brain does the rest.
Bonus shot if you can get it: the homeowner's reaction. A nod, a smile, a "that's perfect." One real second of that beats a hundred captions about quality.
What to skip on every job
Most of what gets filmed on a job site shouldn't be filmed. Not because it's bad. Because it doesn't sell.
- Mid-job phone-in-the-air clips. You started recording when the wheelbarrow was already loaded. There's no before, no transformation, just labour. Skip it.
- Drone establishing shots. They look great in a YouTube intro. They don't sell paver patios. Homeowners stop scrolling for transformation, not aerial geometry.
- Slow-motion at 240fps of the lawn mower starting. It's a cool feature on a $1,200 phone. It is not what makes a Facebook ad work.
- Tool close-ups with no work happening. A photo of a wheelbarrow is not content. A wheelbarrow being pushed full of base material across a yard is.
- The yard from the truck before you've started. Almost. This is fine if it's the wide before. Otherwise it's just a yard.
- Anything in landscape orientation. More on this in a minute. It's the biggest one.
A general filter: if a clip doesn't show the before, doesn't show transformation, or doesn't show the work in motion, it's probably not usable for a paid ad. Save it anyway. We've turned worse into something. But film the three shots first.
Phone settings most owners get wrong
Phone footage is the default. The settings on the phone matter more than most owners realise.
- Highest resolution available. 4K if your phone offers it. 1080p as a minimum. The setting is buried in Camera or Settings depending on the phone, but it's there. Lower-resolution footage can't be cropped or zoomed in editing without falling apart.
- Lock the orientation. Both the phone's overall lock (so it doesn't rotate to landscape mid-clip) and, on iPhone, the Camera setting that prevents accidental horizontal video. This is the single setting that stops bad clips creeping into your library.
- Clean the lens. This sounds insulting until you check the lens on a working phone after a day on a job site. It's covered in dust, grass, and what we'll politely call finger residue. Wipe it on a t-shirt corner before each clip.
- Bright, even light. Midday is fine. Overcast is fine. Avoid filming directly into the sun and avoid framing a shaded lawn next to a sunlit driveway in the same shot. The phone's auto-exposure can't decide and you get a clip that's half blown out, half pitch black.
- No filters, no slow-mo, no portrait mode. Plain camera, plain video setting. The editor adds the polish later.
You don't need a tripod. You don't need a gimbal. Handheld actually performs better in this format because it reads as real instead of staged. The only piece of kit worth thinking about is a $20 microfibre cloth, and it lives in the truck.
The one rule that beats every other rule
Film vertical. Never landscape.
This is the only rule that, if you ignored everything else in this post and got this one right, your footage would still be usable. Get this one wrong and the rest doesn't matter much.
The reason is plain. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok run their ads as 9:16 and 4:5 short-form vertical video. That's the format that performs in 2026. Footage shot horizontally has to be cropped, zoomed, or letterboxed to fit. Cropping kills resolution. Zooming makes everything blurry. Letterboxing leaves black bars and looks cheap. None of those options are good, and we have to pick one of them every time someone sends us horizontal footage.
So hold the phone the way you'd type a text. Lock the rotation in your phone's settings. Never tilt it sideways because it "looks more cinematic." It looks more cinematic on a TV. The ads don't run on TVs. They run on a homeowner's iPhone in bed at 9pm.
If a crew member films something horizontally, it's not the end of the world. We'll work with it. But every horizontal clip costs us quality, and most of the time the cropped version cuts off exactly the part of the work that matters. The pavers we wanted to see, the edge of the lawn, the trowel hitting the joint. Gone, because someone tilted the phone.
If a client only remembers one filming rule from this whole post, this is the one.
The 60-second filming routine for every job
Same routine, every job. Pin it to the dashboard or the toolbox lid until it's automatic.
- First minute on site. Phone out, vertical, walk the kerb, film the wide before. Five to ten seconds. Then put the phone away and start the work.
- Mid-job. Whoever's not knee-deep in something pulls out the phone for two-second close-ups. Tool, material, hands. Three or four moments, max. Don't direct the crew. Just film what's already happening.
- Last 30 seconds. Same angle as the before, wide after. If the homeowner's around, ask if you can film their reaction. Most of them say yes.
That's the whole thing. Less than two minutes of total filming spread across a multi-hour job. The crew barely notices it once it's a habit. The footage stacks up fast. After three weeks, owners go from "I don't have any footage" to having more than they know what to do with.
The footage you've already got is probably wrong (here's the polite version)
Most owners we onboard arrive with a phone full of footage. Hundreds of clips. They've been filming jobs for months. We open the camera roll and a third of it is horizontal, a third of it is mid-job with no before, and a third of it is artistic close-ups of one paver being lifted by a gloved hand in golden hour light. We can use the artistic close-ups. The rest is for the family album.
It's a common pattern. Some are doing genuinely good work and just need to be told what to film. Some haven't realised that "lots of footage" isn't the same as "usable footage." (We see this so often it's basically the onboarding ritual. Open the camera roll, scroll for a minute, give the news as kindly as we can.)
The good news: once the three shots and the vertical rule click, the next month of footage is a different category of asset. We've had clients turn around in two weeks. They were already filming every job. They just needed someone to tell them what counted.
The bad news: nobody's coming back to refilm last month's job. The before is gone the second the work starts.
Start tomorrow. Three shots. Vertical. Phone in the truck.
Once you've got 10 jobs filmed properly
Once your phone has footage from ten jobs filmed the way this post describes, the next problem is the ad itself. Campaign objective, audience, budget, what to expect month one through three. We covered all of that in the pillar guide on running Facebook video ads for landscaping.
The order matters: filming first, ads second. We don't onboard clients who don't have footage yet. We tell them to spend three weeks filming, then come back. The ads are the easy part. The asset is the work.
If you'd rather not learn the filming rules and the ad platform at the same time, our video marketing package handles the editing and ad management end of it. You film. We do the rest.
Either way, get the phone out of the cup holder. The rest is admin.