howto.tv

The best videos tell a story. They can educate, entertain, engage, and enlighten viewers. Mediocre videos often suffer from two main problems: They’re too long or they lose their message. Good organization and focus while you shoot and before you edit can help ensure that your video accomplishes exactly what you want. Use this checklist to help guide you through your next web video project.

Determine What Message You Hope to Communicate

Deciding this crucial element early helps focus you throughout your project. Ask yourself the basic questions:

• What’s the purpose of this video?
• Why am I making it?
• Who will see it?
• What do I want my audience to take away from it?

These questions will direct you toward the type of video you want to produce—whether it’s instructional, commercial, viral, or personal. Even a home movie of your three-year-old son at the zoo contains a message—whether it’s to show him off to your parents in Milwaukee or just to capture your little boy at that particular moment in his life.

Making these determinations can also guide you in deciding what footage to shoot, what images to include, and which other elements to feature. Let’s say a nonprofit wants to raise awareness of an issue that it’s tackling. The video they produce will look much different than a fundraising video making a direct appeal to donors.

Develop a Narrative through Storyboards and Outlines

Once you determine the story you want to tell, start establishing its plot, setting, and characters. Creating an outline can help, especially with directing the flow of the action. Even if you’re producing a simple video interview with someone, you’ll most likely want their comments to hit points in a particular order—even if you didn’t shoot them in that sequence.

Sketch out the order of events, concentrating on how each element relates to the one before and after it. The more logically each scene interrelates with the others and the whole, the better the flow, and the more effective the message you’re trying to relate. Pay particular attention to the introductory scenes because they are crucial to establishing the mood and tone of the piece and engaging the audience. Fail this and you’ll lose your audience quickly.

Once you’ve finished your first, rough outline, step away from it: Grab some lunch or run an errand. When you come back to it, try to find any piece that seems extraneous or that deviates from your central message. Removing these pieces now will save valuable time and agony later.

Some video producers take one step beyond a simple outline and map out their scenes with storyboards, which can resemble panels in a comic book or graphic novel. You don’t have to have (or be) an accomplished graphic artist to create an effective storyboard; simple sketches or even stick figures will serve nicely. One handy tip is to employ a whiteboard, chalkboard, bulletin board, or even a blank wall and pin or tape index cards or sticky notes to it representing each scene. This way, you can more easily rearrange the order of your scenes as you refine the logical flow of your video.

Organize the Elements of Your Project

Once you’re satisfied—at least temporarily—with your outline, collect and arrange the different elements that will comprise your project and make sure they match with each scene. These can include some, but not necessarily all, of the following:

• Shot footage: This includes interviews you’ve shot, b-roll (or secondary footage of a subject or topic that’s often used for cutaways from an interview subject), and stock footage.
• Stills: Like b-roll or stock footage, you can use still pictures to cutaway visually from an interviewee so that you can break up long scenes or midsentence edits. You can also use these elements as transitions between interviews or topics.
• Music: Including music adds another, richer dimension to your video. Just be aware of copyright issues for popular and some commercial music. Also use caution when using some royalty-free commercial instrumental music because that particular track might easily pop up in other videos.
• Titles and credits: Write out what textual elements you need, including the title of the video, any brief explanations of scenes, the name and position of the people you’ve interviewed (with correct spelling), and any credits or information you’d like to add at the end.

Review Your Clips and Select Prime Sound Bites'

One particular element can easily sink a video: the interview. Nothing can get more tedious than even one straight minute of hearing even the most animated subject talk. Professional production houses often hire someone to transcribe the video. From that script, the producer selects the sound bites he wants and runs through the tape for the time codes to annotate beside the choice remarks. It can be a time consuming process.

You can simply play the footage and take notes, just like in class. Highlight the salient points you want to feature from your outline. Then, when you load the full interview into your editor, just start going through and cutting everything but the scenes you want to include.