.png)
Tips and inspiration for your next video project
Keep it short
How short? There's not one "right" answer. A computer science professor researching MOOCs back in 2013 at the University of Rochester found 3 to 5 minutes is optimal, and more recent studies still conclude there is a significant drop off in viewership after 6 minutes. I always recommend keeping it under 10 minutes when possible. Today, it’s often argued Tiktok, YouTube Shorts, and Facebook and Instagram Reels have shortened attention spans even more. But that doesn’t mean you need to throw out great content — just chunk it! Break up longer recordings into smaller, standalone videos. This grocery store tour, organized in a playlist, is a great example.
Create suspense or a need to know
It can be tempting to plan a video project like you would an academic paper: start with an overview, cover key terms, and then get to the case study. Instead, make sure you give someone a reason to watch. You could pose a question, show something relatable, or start at a particularly interesting point in a case study.
Instead of framing their video as a tour of the University of Minnesota’s Veterinary Diagnostic Lab, the poultry team wisely started with something relatable to their key audience that piqued their interest, creating a desire to know what is recommended in this scenario. This ultimately met the team’s goal to help backyard chicken farmers feel comfortable accessing the Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory when needed.
Keep content fresh
Did you have any teachers growing up that showed the same old videos (or film strips) for decades? Did dated hairstyles, old slang, or the obsolete equipment used to play it keep you from taking the video's content seriously? Keep your material fresh to build trust and support engagement.
Even the best website, course, or video needs a little freshening up every once in a while. The Parents Forever team is reviewing its gold standard course for divorce education and making a few tweaks. They wanted to streamline a few terms used in one of their primary videos. Given the video dated back to 2014, it was a great opportunity to give it an updated look, strengthening its branding while using (mostly) University-supported tools.
Check out this before/after video showing the visual transformation (top left = before; bottom right = after):
Illustrate your key messages
Bullet pointed slides and academic-style charts and graphs are overwhelming and don’t clearly and easily convey a message to the viewer of a video. Remember, you can no longer predict where or how people will watch your video. Keep the person watching on a smartphone while riding in a bus in the back of your mind and let those walls of text go. Think instead about illustrating your principle concepts with photos, demonstrations, animations, etc.Here's an example of a very typical academic slide. It's a perfectly good slide. But for a novice audience, it's not immediately clear what you're supposed to be looking at as the researcher speaks. When the researcher shared her data with me, I could recreate the chart in a way that is easier for the general public to understand. It gave me the opportunity to make it fit better into our branding as well. With the new chart format and just a bit of animation in WeVideo, it's much easier to connect the narrative to what you're seeing on the screen.
Show up as an authentic person
Be on screen and show up as yourself. Speak the way you would when you’re talking to friends and family. Wear work-appropriate clothes you feel comfortable in, but don’t take yourself too seriously or try to “look the part.” Just be yourself.
Stephanie Liffland did this beautifully in the following video which was created to explain the work of graduate student polymer scientists for youth, to support the hands-on curriculum the educators were developing in partnership with the Center for Sustainable Polymers.
Comments
Post a Comment