30 free ideas for multimedia producers and digital storytellers
One of the first and best bits of advice I’ve ever been given has been this: write everything down.
Writing an idea down – making it physical on the page – engages your brain in imaging how that idea might happen. As the words form on the page, you think about logistics, treatments, audiences.
It also gives you the ability to vocalise and understand a problem. If a film you’re making isn’t working for some reason, try and write down why: if you can put your problem into words, you have power over it.
So for the last three years I’ve written ideas down as a matter of routine. I’ve got notebooks upon notebooks, as well as a 50 page Word document on my hard drive full of them. Many of the ideas are now redundant as I’ve moved onto other things, and following last week’s confessional, I thought I’d give some them away for free.
You never know, one person’s trash might be another person’s treasure.
A couple of disclaimers: I am fully aware most of these ideas are either lame or not original – that’s partly why I never pursued them. So I won’t be taking criticism in the comments about the quality or originality of the ideas, thank you. However, even if you don’t find any directly useful, they might fire off a spark into something else.
I’m publishing these under a Creative Commons Licence I’m calling the Call-Your-Mum-Licence (CYML 1.0). You don’t have to give any credit or anything, but if you do find a use for them, promise you’ll give your mum (or equivalent) a ring.
Right, let’s get on!
30 free ideas for digital producers
- Amazing real life stories that emerged solely from data on a spreadsheet
- Stories about items (typewriter/kodachrome) going extinct
- Stories of the glamour days of air travel (PanAm etc)
- Missed connections on Gumtree
- Profiles of people who make a living pretending to be someone else
- “My first…” directors/writers/painters talk about the pain of getting the first film/book/painting done
- “Journeys that almost killed me”
- “Scene of the crime” – take people back the place where something major happened in their life
- Is Britain tilting? (apparently it is)
- Elderly people share one piece of advice they’ve learned in their many years
- Investigate how easy it is to plant a tree in a public place (apparently not very)
- Run for MP in the next election and make a documentary about it.
- Visit every World Heritage Site in the country and document
- A website/magazine about people for whom ‘OK isn’t good enough’
- A collaborative piece where people across the country find out where their waste goes
- A website where people can fill in a box to say sorry for something they’ve done (anonymously)
- An app that lets people photograph potholes/graffiti and sends it, plus location, to their local authority. The LA can then text them directly when the problem has been fixed.
- Competitions to bring people from around the world together to solve a big problem – crowd sourcing problem solving
- A platform to show news packages from around the world..how have different countries covered the same event?
- Films about people who do a dying trade (blacksmith/wood turner etc)
- If we could build the internet from scratch, with everything we’ve learned, what would it look like?
- Repackage out-of-copyright books in a more visual and engaging way
- An app that makes it really clear what food is in season and local to you for when you go shopping
- Use splitscreen/tallscreen to show two sides to an argument
- A simple, non-technical description of how web sites are made
- A celebration of unconventional solutions to problems
- A visual rundown of all the different types of material and how long they take to decompose
- Take someone who’s in a bad place in their life on a creative journey (How to look good naked but with creativity not clothes)
- Get 15 brilliant people from completely different industries together to try and solve a problem in a weekend. Document it.
- A repository for unwanted ideas that other people can use and take inspiration from. In fact, let’s start it right now – share yours in the comments box!
UPDATE: Journalist Ben Whitelaw has added some of his spare ideas on his blog. Let me know if you do the same and I’ll link to them too.
False starts
Most of us, either through our upbringing, education or profession, have an aversion to making mistakes. Most of us too are governed in some way by a fear of failure.
Fair enough, but we live in a world, and work in an industry, where change is afoot and where innovation is desperately needed. This comes not from walking the line, but from making mistakes and experimenting.
As I start to wrap things up around here I’ve been looking back over some of the mistakes and false starts I’ve had over the last few years. There are lots of them. I hope that sharing mine will make you feel better about yours.
Here’s a quick list of some of the false starts I’ve had so far:
- I blew my first potential gig as a film-maker, a commission to make a documentary for an NGO. In my naivety and desperation to get the gig I under-sold myself and gave a very cheap quote. Sensibly, they decided to go with someone more expensive!
- I wrote an ebook of journalism skills for hyperlocal bloggers – it sold a whopping 15 copies
- Next Generation Journalist did a bit better – it made enough to justify the time I spent on it – but sold far fewer copies than I thought it would
- My Future of News Meetups in 2010 started off amazingly, but I was unable to continue them after 6 months (although others carried on the baton)
- I spent about 5 months developing an idea for a new magazine with a friend, but we both lost motivation when we couldn’t marry it to a demand in the market.
- I started a video business in January 2011 and it did really well. But when the web domain came up for renewal I decided to cancel it and end the business – not through lack of work, but all my clients were coming through me, not the business.
- I worked with two great journalists on ambitious plans to create a multimedia explainer of the Eurozone crisis last winter. The topic was so big and fast changing we had to drop it over Christmas.
- I started a website called Volcano Love Stories which was going to collect love stories that emerged from the volcanic eruption in 2010. I only got one submission
- Not to mention more than 20 films that have not made the splash I wanted, a dozen web domains bought and left to rot, and the countless ideas that sit in notebooks.
The point is, every one has false starts and stumbles. Everyone falters and fails, particularly on the way to doing important work. Although each of these were disappointing and painful at the time, I learned something important from each of them.
Don’t be set back by your personal false starts. The people who make it in the end are the ones who pick themselves back up, dust themselves off and get busy again. As long as you learn something from them they haven’t been a waste of time.
What have your false starts been and what did you learn from them?
Your online video shopping list
There’s an old analogy, which I can trace back to the 1990s, that says making a film is a lot like making a meal.
It goes like this:
“You choose your recipe (subject and angle), write out a shopping list (treatment and storyboard), get some money (you need more than you think) and go shopping for the raw materials (shoot the pictures and record the sound). Then you return to the kitchen (cutting room) and start cooking (editing). The meal is made in the kitchen; the film in the cutting room.”
Harris Watts, On Camera
I like this analogy a lot, but it’s worth unpacking for 21st century video storytellers.
Choose your recipe
The big point here is you must have an idea of what your film is going to look like when its finished. You must be able to picture the opening, the closing and perhaps some key sequences in the middle. You must be able to close your eyes and hear your potential interviewees talking, imagining what kind of things they’ll say. You should have a feel for the pace of the film – is it fast or slow? Upbeat or sad?
Ultimately your story should have a theme – a controlling idea of some kind – which you can summarise in a single sentence. You wouldn’t make a risotto for the first time without knowing what one looks like would you?
Write a shopping list
This always finds its way into my workflow, and I teach it to students and clients as well. Before I start filming I mind-map all the elements and use it to plan the shoot. I draw out the key ingredients: the interview, the sequences, the scenes, the other b-roll and anything else like music and graphics. Then from each of these segments I brainstorm ideas for how each one could play out.
A “shopping list” I drew for a short documentary in 2011
So around the interview bit I come up with different ideas for where I could conduct my interviews; I think about what questions I’ll ask. It helps me anticipate any problems which might come up during the shoot. Your first idea is rarely the best, so try and come up with unique takes on each segment.
I’m running another online video basics course with journalism.co.uk in September 2012. Click here for details.
Get some money
The quote above was written for television in the 1990s with its big budgets. These days I’d say video can cost less than you think. Certainly the hurdles to creating and publishing video have fallen through the floor. If you’ve got an iPhone or a flipcam – or even a webcam – the power to tell visual stories is in your hand.
Shop for raw materials
Here’s the big thing: the shoot is like the shopping expedition. You are merely collecting items to edit later on. This isn’t to belittle the shoot and the hard work that goes into it (you can’t make a good meal with bad ingredients, after all). However, to get obsessed by equipment and spend ages on complex super-slick camera moves misses the point: the film is made in the edit. It is the combination and contrast of images that tell the story, rarely the images on their own.
The rules of a good shopping trip apply: have a shopping list, know your way around the supermarket and get in and out as quickly as possible. You want more than enough of each ingredient so you can choose the very best to include in your meal. That means shooting more b-roll than you think you need, and shooting a longer interview than you’ll use.
Start cooking
As I said the real flavours of your film won’t emerge until the edit. That’s the magic moment when you combine your ingredients to create something greater than the sum of its parts. In video we are talking about the combination of images to create an idea in the audiences’ mind. Why does that matter? Because then the story doesn’t happen on the screen, in happens in someone’s brain: they own a bit of it, and it draws them in.
Too often – especially in journalism – we take the inverted triangle approach and tell our audience everything, instead letting them figure it out for themselves.
Anyway, once you’ve stirred all your ingredients together, leave it to simmer for 20 mins and add salt to flavour. But not too much.
How to make boring things interesting in video
There’s no doubting that video is an incredible medium. It has the power to transport us to other worlds, feel other peoples’ feelings and can affect our emotions quite dramatically, when done well. Ultimately, video can move people to action.
Part of the secret to doing good video is choosing the right stories to tell with video in the first place. Read that sentence again and you get an important truth about video: it can do some stories, issues and subject matter really well. Everything else, it does badly.
What is video good at?
When I give talks, lectures or workshops about online video I usually start by laying out what video can and cannot do. This is my list of its favourite subjects:
- explosions, fire, sparks and noise (ever wondered why these always lead the news bulletins?)
- action and movement: every video must involve someone doing something
- awe-inspiringly big things like landscapes
- amazingly small things that our eyes can’t see – but also anything closeup in general
- human stories and emotion – no matter how complex
What is video bad at?
Human emotions are probably the most complex things out there but video can convey them better than any other medium. When it comes to other complex issues however, video is out of its depth:
- Politics and meetings: much of it happens behind closed doors, is polemic and involves little physical movement
- Business, economics and theory: similarly non-visual at first glance
- Statistics, numbers and data: video and data journalism don’t sit side by side
- Interviews (yes, really): video is not designed for people sitting down and talking
However, almost everyone involved in video finds themselves working on the latter a lot of the time. The nightly news has to cover politics and the economy. A management accountancy firm has to make videos about management accountancy. We all have to run interviews (…do we?)
So the question then is: how do we make this shit interesting?
“There’s no such thing as boring knowledge. Only boring presentation.”
Dan Roam
I start with this quote in mind. Although I’m putting down business, politics and data as video subjects, there is no denying they are hugely interesting subjects in and of themselves. But to make them work on video we have to put in some extra work.There are some tested techniques filmmakers use to inject interest into potentially dry stories – many of these you will recognise from television, where programme makers face this challenge regularly.
In other cases, we are still struggling to make it interesting – so there’s potential for disruption from brave new film makers (that’s you).
.01 humanise
Tell a real human story as access into the issue. Ever wondered why news packages about gas price rises always start with an old lady filling up her kettle and worrying about her winter fuel allowance? That’s how journalists try to get people to care about a story that is actually about oil prices and Russian diplomacy.
This, incidentally is the secret behind great films that promote either non-profits or business. Duckrabbit’s TV campaign for Oxfam uses the real story of a donor to make us care; this series by Phos Pictures uses the same device to advertise -wait for it: a gym. It almost made me sign up, and I live 4,000 miles away.
.02 visualise
If every story should be human, it must also be visual. Video, like photography, graphic design and web design is about using images to convey the message – not words. A common crime of directors is to rely on dialogue, voice over and interviews to tell the story when ideally people should get it with the sound turned off.
At its most simple: if you’re filming an interview with an IT specialist for your website, don’t just film a straight interview. Make it visual: film them at work, going for a walk, cycling to work, eating lunch, playing squash whatever – it’s the eye-candy video is made for. Done well, visually led films can turn an interview with a blogger (snore…) into something quite wonderful.
.03 surprise
Amy O’Leary makes the point in this talk that surprise is a key element to a successful story. We love surprises because they release happy chemicals into our brains. You can hook your viewers on the surprise drug in two ways: you can be clever with your narrative to create a set-up and punchline throughout a piece (difficult) or you can smack them in the face with a wet fish.
For example, if your bread and butter is a weekly video interview with a leader in your field, why not do the interview while they’re getting their haircut? I’m serious. Find an amicable barber and you’ve got something easily set up, that fills its purpose and is visual at the same time…all while sticking annoyingly in your audiences mind. (If you manage to pull it off in your organisation, let me know!)
UPDATE: jump down to the comments section to see how Reuters do this effectively with a strand of their videos
.04 be useful
If you can’t be interesting then at least make sure your video is useful. Some people will sit through a 20 minute panel discussion if they know the information is important to them.
If you can’t even be useful, then for the love of God…
.05 be short
Some people say videos on the web shouldn’t be longer than two minutes. You can definitely tell a good story in less than this. While I don’t think there is a hard and fast rule, I do believe anything longer than five minutes is a result of laziness or ego (please note: I am regularly guilty of both of these).
Does your video have an upside down flying rhino in it? If not, it probably doesn’t warrant being longer than two minutes.
That said, if you’ve got a great human story, that you’re telling visually and is packed full of surprise: then please, I will give you hours of my attention.
So in summary: if you can’t be interesting, useful or concise, you’ve picked the wrong medium.
The video decision workflow
To help you out I’ve designed this video decision workflow which puts all the above points into place. Start at the top and hopefully it will help you decide whether or not to tell your next story in video. As well as journalists and documentarians, it is also designed very much with commercial factual video in mind too. I know there are a lot of B2B magazines, agencies or industry websites out there wanting to use video but doing it ineffectively.
Please note: although the image has a © symbol on it, I am releasing it under a Creative Commons Licence for attribution. Please takeaway and use, but give credit if you publish it elsewhere.
Click to enlarge
On dialogue
It is well acknowledged in cinema that the purest form of visual storytelling contains no dialogue.
I say well acknowledged: I’ve seen it said by film makers like David Mamet and Andrew Stanton, but hardly ever applied. It might explain the success of The Artist in this year’s Oscar rout, but that is one of only a handful of silent homages made since the 1940s.
What makes it so ‘pure’? Well, without any dialogue to explain the narrative, how a character is feeling, or backstory, the film maker has to rely solely on the pictures to do the work. It is visual storytelling and visual storytelling alone. The earliest film makers made huge ground on establishing a visual language for film because they had to.
If it sounds difficult, it is because it is. But when done well it is captivating. I have blogged about Kristoffer Borgli’s brilliant short I Expect No-one before and watched it a dozen times. Here it is again: watch how the tension, reveal and punchline ending are all conveyed visually.
But enough about movies. What about video journalism?
I think factual video suffers because as journalists, when we start a story, our first instinct is to set up interviews and write the voice over script. After all, we have a lot of facts to get across, some of them complicated.
It means the dialogue is down before the pictures are, and what that eventually creates is wallpapering: the sin of just pasting shots over long stretches of interview to make it look a bit interesting, but with no visual meaning at all. It might as well be radio.
I’m sure you’ve seen the question coming already: is there a way online video storytellers can make a documentary without a line of dialogue in it? How would we go about making one?
I honestly don’t have an answer to these questions – but maybe you guys do.
Possible? Impossible? Pointless? Hit me up in the comments.
And speaking of storytelling….
Thanks to all of you who got in touch about possible collaborations. I heard from some really exciting and talented producers & film makers. I’ve got all your details and I’ve been looking through your work. I’ll be in touch in due course!
Meanwhile, production on Inside the Story: A masterclass in digital storytelling from the people who do it best is well underway with the book almost entirely laid out. It’s looking fantastic and I’m excited to announce the book will be available in German, Catalan and Spanish a few weeks after the English version is published, thanks to the efforts of three talented translators.
It’s honestly a book like no other: it’s cuts straight to the heart of how to tell remarkable stories, and remember, every penny will be donated to Kiva. Become a part of the Facebook page to get more info!
10 quick hits to make your videos better right now
It’s an inevitable frustration when a film you’ve spent days, weeks or months working on hits the internet only to come off looking amateurish. It’s accepted the cat flushing the toilet will always get more views, but it sucks doubly when toilet-cat actually is better.
The storytelling and journalism aside, it’s often down to mistakes that could be corrected in an instant. I do a lot of video training and lecturing and I’ve noticed that these mistakes are often technical ones: video is a complicated medium and the language of codecs, bit rates and colour correction put people off.
No more! Here are ten things you can do right away that will have a near instant improvement on your videos.
A quick caveat: implementing all of these won’t rescue poor storytelling – that always rules supreme. If you want to get good at storytelling, make sure you know about this new book project.
.01 Use a tripod
A really common mistake for beginner filmmakers make is to ignore the tripod. Seriously, there is no quicker way to turn an amateur shot into a professional one than putting the camera on some sticks. As VJ expert Michael Rosenblum says: DNMTFC! Handheld has its place of course, either for effect or out of necessity, but as cameras get smaller & lighter they get more prone to shake. In my experience, anything from a DSLR down to an iPhone needs proper stabilisation.
Right away: Buy a cheap tripod (don’t worry about fluid head ones if you’re a beginner) and take it everywhere.
.02 Shoot closer
The other big mistake committed during the shooting process is to shoot too wide. Shots meander from a wide shot to a mid shot and then back out to a wide shot. Yawn.
The real interest for viewers is in the detail, so get close to your subjects and shoot lots of closeups.
Closeups have an added advantage of getting you out of continuity errors in the edit. But the real reason for more closeups than anything is this: online, most of your audience will be watching on Youtube or Vimeo – through a window about 640 pixels wide. At this size even a medium-close-up (the standard framing for interviews) is too wide for us to see the details we need to see.
Never be afraid to get close to your subject. Here I used a macro lens adaptor to get the shot I needed.
Right away: whenever you’re filming from now on look for closeups and get at least 5 from each scene.
.03 Start strong
I’ve written before about the importance of the first 10 seconds of your video. Audiences will leave if you haven’t hooked them by then. So put a lot of effort into a strong opening for your film when you’re editing.
If you’re stuck for inspiration, use your best shot – the shot that tells the story – and your strongest piece of audio.
Right away: Consciously look for the telling shot, the image that sums up the whole story, or the most explosive or intriguing image to start the piece, and use that at the start.
.04 Control the thumbnail
This one is so simple, it makes me sad to see it overlooked. The thumbnail is the still frame that displays when your video is first loaded (and before you click play). Sometimes it’s referred to as a poster frame and it is effectively an advertisement for your video: so make it good. I see so many videos where the author has just left the default picture up. If it’s on Youtube, that’ll be the frame right in the middle of the video.
As well as potentially being boring, blurry or out of focus, the thumbnail often catches people mid-blink, or with their mouth gawping open. Vimeo also gives you the option to upload your own image, so there’s great potential to create a distinctive and enticing poster-frame for your video.
Vimeo offers more control over your video thumbnails
Right away: if you’re using Youtube, go to the Video Manager, click ‘edit’ on the video you’re changing, and scroll down to ‘Video Thumbnail’ to select the best one. If you’re on Vimeo, you’ll have a wider selection in the ‘Settings’ tab, and the opportunity to upload your own.
.05 Get Vimeo Plus
Speaking of Vimeo, if you use the service regularly, and take your video seriously, then I think upgrading to a Vimeo Plus account is a worthwhile investment. It’s roughly $70 plus a bit of tax depending on where you live for an annual membership. The benefits are impressive: you 3x more uploading space a week, and all of them can be in HD (as opposed to just one). You also get more detailed analytics, and you can control how your video appears on other websites.
I don’t know a serious online video creator who doesn’t have one.
Right away: (only if you can afford it, and create high definition video on a regular basis) Log into Vimeo and upgrade to the Plus account.
.06 Meta data
Another silly mistake made all over the web – often by companies, newspapers or magazines – is to forget the meta data. The laziest uploaders barely bother to change the title from ‘Final_version.mov’ and ignore description, categories and tags.
Why does this matter? You’ve probably heard video described as a ‘black hole’ on the web. This is because Google’s spiders can’t crawl video files to work out what’s in them. Until HTML5 and cool projects like Popcorn.js becomes more widespread, a video file is virtually invisible in search engine results. So the description, tags and categories matter – they’re the only thing that identifies your video.
Right away: make sure all your videos have really detailed descriptions (transcripts if necessary), lots of tags, and are categorised in someway. Make sure your tags are semantic and properly identify who, what and where is featured in the video itself.
.07 Get your audio straight
A common problem on videos when they’re uploaded is drifting audio. It might be in sync when you filmed and edited it, but that disappears when you watch it online. I’m not 100% sure of the cause of this myself (if you know for certain, please enlighten me in the comments) but through experience and some research I think it’s to do with the sample rate of the audio itself. Audio commonly is played at either 44.1kHz or 48kHz, and the drift happens when you switch from one to the other.
Vimeo & Youtube can only support 44.1kHz, so if your camera or audio device records at 48kHz that might be the cause of the problem.
Right away: if you’re having trouble with audio, then investigate what sample rate you record & edit in.
.08 Basic colour correction
Another quick hit is to do some very basic colour correction to your footage. Cameras have different colour temperatures, and often pictures come out over saturated, too red, or too flat.
I would recommend two changes that improve almost every shot. Firstly, adjust the contrast of your image, to make the dark parts darker and the bright parts a little brighter. Play it by eye, and make sure nothing is blown out when you do it. Secondly, pull back on the saturation of the image – not much, just a little to give it a cooler, washed out look. I used both of these regularly when I started out, even though I wasn’t using industry standard software.
Right away: if you’re using a popular edit software (Final Cut, Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas etc) find out how to adjust these settings. If your edit platform doesn’t allow these changes, then you can now edit them after uploading them, using Youtube’s Video Manager (see below).
Before & After: using Youtube's video manager to adjust the contrast and saturation of video
.09 Compress for the web
One of the biggest problems video uploaders struggle with are the technical details of video. I often see videos that were shot in HD that look pixellated once online. This is usually because they’ve been compressed in the wrong way.
There are lots of different file formats and codecs for video and I’ll spare you the class. However, for publishing on the web, the variations are quite simple. Firstly, for most videos, in my opinion, it’s worth exporting at 1280×720 (72op), even though it’s not the largest size. This is because Vimeo & Youtube convert videos to this size anyway, so you might as well upload it that way, to save on file size.
For the web there are a variety of file types: .mp4, .mov, .avi, and .flv to name a few. The first three are good because they all use the h.264 codec – this is the one that takes big HD files and has an almost loss-less compression (high quality but a low file size).
Right away: if you’re shooting in HD, stick to 720p and be sure to compress your video into either a .mp4, .mov or .avi file using h.264 before uploading.
.10 Get the right bit-rate
Finally, there’s one other thing that affects how good video looks when it’s uploaded, and that is the data rate or bit-rate of the compression. I’m no expert, but pretty much the rule is the more bits, the high quality the video will be (again, if you can offer more clarity in the comments, please do!)
That said, Youtube & Vimeo put limits on the bitrate for their videos – to around 5000kbps for HD video. So if you’re using compression software like MpegStreamclip, Apple Compressor or Handbrake, you can make your file size smaller by limiting data rates to this level too.
Right away: learn how to use Compressor or MediaEncoder if you have it. If not, download MpegStreamclip or Handbrake (they’re free) and learn how to use them.
As always, I’d love to hear more ideas for your own quick hits that make video better. Like I say, it won’t repair poor storytelling, but at the same time, it’s a shame to see a good story lose out because of things that can be fixed so easily.
Some things never change: 20-year-old lessons in video
I’ve wanted to make TV/video/films since I was a kid. That was a hugely frustrating experience back in the 90s as there were no cut-price flip cams, free editing software or platforms like Youtube to share it on. In fact, there was no way for a 10 year old to make video, so I had to settle with reading about how to make it instead.
The first book I ever read about this sort of thing was called Directing On Camera by Harris Watts, and it was published 20 years ago in 1992.
It started out as a checklist for trainee directors at the BBC before becoming a book. It’s got a matte red cover, with a graphic of an old VT countdown clock (remember them?) over it; some rather dated references to cassettes and dubbing, plus some quaint cartoon illustrations.
It seemed pretty out of date when I was reading it in the late 90s, but this week I decided to take another look at it to see how it fares in the 2012 world of online video, flipcams and Youtube. Is it still relevant today? You’d be surprised.
Lessons in video from 1992
Here’s a selection of advice from the book which I think still holds true two decades on, to a new generation of visual storytellers.
Show things happening: this is a big mistake made by many novice film makers – interviewing someone, sticking some pictures of buildings or trees or something over the top, and effectively creating a piece of radio. This is the first thing Harris Watts says in the book, so it must have been a problem 20 years ago as much as it is today:
“Television is moving pictures. So it’s no use turning up to shoot when the meeting is over, the factory is empty or the children have gone home. Whenever possible you should shoot action not inaction.There’s no point filling the screen with nothing happening – it doesn’t offer an experience for the viewer to share.”
A useful book for editors of rolling news channels, perhaps. Twenty years on his use of the word ‘experience’ holds new meaning: we need to be creating ‘experiences’ for our audiences, not just videos.
Think in sequences: sequences are a cornerstone of strong video storytelling, and still today one of the most important things I teach my video journalism students. A sequence is most simply thought of as a single action, covered in two or more shots, creating the illusion of continuous movement from shot to shot. Watts describes them as “visual paragraphs…recording an event or sharing an idea in the finished film.”
Teaching yourself to ‘think in sequences’ – to effectively see them all around you – makes a huge difference on a shoot, when you need to get the shots in quickly.
‘Shooting is collecting pictures and sound for editing’: I remember this was the real takeaway for me when I read the book. Films are made in the edit, not in the shoot; Watts uses a cooking metaphor to explain better:
“You choose your recipe (subject and angle), write out a shopping list (treatment and storyboard), get some money (you need more than you think) and go shopping for the raw materials (shoot the pictures and record the sound). Then you return to the kitchen (cutting room) and start cooking (editing). The meal is made in the kitchen; the film in the cutting room.”
The filming part is still important of course, but visual storytelling is about the assembly of lots of juxtaposing shots to create meaning, not single shots following the action around. Hugely relevant for new film makers today.
Go for opinion, experience, anecdote: this bit of advice relates directly to interviews and what to get from them. Many interviews are very descriptive and shallow, eliciting facts from the subject alone. This rarely makes interesting watching, so good video storytellers tease specific stories, anecdotes, and opinions from their subjects. Ira Glass values the anecdote too, and you can see more interviewing tips in this post.
In the fast paced, tech driven world of online publishing, there’s an understandable push for the latest training or the most-up-to-date advice. But when it comes to video storytelling – or storytelling of any kind – the craft we’re learning is an old one.
The technology – the tools – are mostly irrelevant, which is why a book written as the internet was just being born can still be relevant to a new generation of digital storytellers that Directing on Camera‘s author could never have imagined would exist.
The most important part of your online video stories
What’s the most important thing to consider when making online video?
Is it having a high end DSLR camera with a prime lens? Afterall, if your pictures look pretty and slightly out of focus more people will watch it, right? Nope.
Is it having a really compelling character on a journey we can all relate to? That’s super important – but it’s not the most important thing.
Is it having a rhino suspended upside down from a helicopter? Nope, it’s not even that!
So what’s the most important thing to consider when making online video?
It’s the first ten seconds.
That’s how long you have to win your viewers over. As I mentioned in this article for journalism.co.uk last week, statistics suggest around 20% of people click on from a video after just 10 seconds.
According to Visible Measures, that means if your video gets 1 million views, 200,000 of them didn’t watch past the first ten seconds.
It’s a harsh fact but people are fickle; weeks and months of work, and thousands of dollars invested in a video all stand on the first 10 seconds.
It amazes me then, just how care-free some big publishers are with their first 10 seconds of video.
For example, in a non scientific test, I had a look at some leading online news organisations. The Financial Times, Telegraph Newspaper and CNN all blow their first 10 seconds showing me a pre-roll advert. No thanks guys.
The Guardian loses 4 seconds on its branding ident, even though Guardian videos are not shareable (and so you’ll likely only ever watch it on the Guardian website). That gives them just 6 seconds to make me interested.
So who gets it? Good.is get it – they don’t mess around with branding at the start of their videos and crack straight in. Not always, but usually with a good hookline.
Phos photos, the producers of Last Minutes with Oden get it. In the first 10 seconds they tell us the title, introduce the main character and he says something interesting.
Eliot Rausch/PhosPictures
The exceptions to the rule are the longer, cinematic pieces – for example those produced by MediaStorm: the first 10 seconds still matter, but they’re able to take a slower approach, easing you in & setting the scene. In this case we’re watching for the story, and the opening of Act I is a good place for storytelling nuance.
Getting the first ten seconds right is not easy. Looking back over pieces I’ve produced in the past, I’ve blown the first 10 seconds on all sorts of nonsense. I’m trying to make more active decisions though, and in this short film I recently directed for Kingston University, I used the first 10 seconds to tell a bizarre anecdote that doesn’t fit with what the audience expects, as a way of piquing interest.
Kingston University/Adam Westbrook
So what should you use the first ten seconds for?
- To show your most arresting images
- To use your strongest soundbite
- To surprise your audience
- To raise a question in the mind of your viewer, setting up “the big reveal“
- To get straight into the story
It is not the place for idents, adverts, cliches, weak pictures, hackneyed introductions, or anything waffly.
This advice has nothing to do with creating good documentaries or crafting engaging narratives – but none of those things matter if you blow your first 10 seconds.
The upside down rhino rule of great video storytelling
What does it take to make a story stick? To make the audience care enough to click “share”?
It’s not uncommon for clients to ask video producers or their PR agencies to “do them a viral”. But to even try to predict such a thing is to misunderstand its very nature.
Speaking of ‘sharing’ things around, nearly 200,000 people have shared this short film about WWF’s work transporting rhinos around South Africa. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s worth a look, and of course it’s in the video .fu library of extraordinary video storytelling.
© Green Renaissance/WWF
You might think the way it is shot is impressive (it is), marvel at the high quality lenses used, or the style of editing. But there’s one thing this video has, that no other does, and it’s the reason it has gone viral: an upside-down rhino, flying in the air.
The ‘upside-down rhino rule’ of video storytelling
In all my days I never thought I’d ever see a rhino being suspended, upside-down, beneath a helicopter. But there you have it, right there before your very eyes.
And this is what video is for.
Video is there to take us places we’ve never been, show us things we never thought we’d get to see. It gives us access to people we’ll never get to speak to, close-ups of things our own eyes can’t see, it lets people share ideas we would never normally hear, and see what it’s like to be someone living in poverty on the opposite side of the world.
It is not there for long interviews with CEOs, or coverage of conferences, or – dare I say it – vox pops.
Tell that to all the newspapers, charities, businesses and the like jumping into the video game to churn out more of just this kind of stuff, and then wondering why no-one watches it.
The upside-down-rhino, though, means different things to different people. To a small community, seeing a politician apologise for embezzling their tax dollar, as opposed to reading about it, has the rhino-factor. So does a video tutorial in using HTML to people who need to see it to understand it.
The next time you commission, or start to make a video, ask yourself this: for your audience, will it have the equivalent of a frickkin’ upside-down rhino being suspended from a helicopter?
No? Then put the camera down and go find a story that does.
How to keep up in 2012
So a new year is upon us, and as usual, it’s a good time for reflection and making big plans for the year ahead.
There’ll be some small tweaks to how I do all this blogging in 2012, so briefly, here’s a quick round-up of how to keep in touch with everything I do this year.
In return for your attention, I promise to keep writing useful practical advice on multimedia production, plus ideas and advice on publishing and entrepreneurship.
The blog
This blog now reaches between 5 and 10,000 people a week which is really nice. The posts here are usually much more thought out than anything else I write, and focus – as much as possible – on the doggedly practical.
Make sure you subscribe by putting your email address in the box to the right of this page. It’s free, and you should only ever get an email whenever a new post is written.
You can also keep in touch over RSS – click on this link to grab the rss feed for this blog.
Tumblr
I started using Tumblr more in 2011, and it’s a much more informal place for raw ideas, quotes, thoughts and more reflection. I wrote a post looking back on 2011, which was more personal than you’d expect here, as well as explaining why I’ve quit Facebook. There’s a very small, but growing, number of readers – if you’d like to be one of them, just follow me, the tumblr way, here.
If you want to keep up anywhere, Twitter is probably still the best place, although I’ll be tweeting a little less in 2012. @AdamWestbrook is the link to click.
Video .fu
The video.fu library of remarkable video storytelling is growing over at Vimeo. I add any awesome factual video I find – and usually go onto to write about it here. But subscribers see the videos as soon as they’re added: a nice way to keep your inspiration flowing.
The website & journal
Finally, there’ll soon be some changes to my home page on the web, with a new design, and the addition of a web-design journal, where I’ll be creating blogazine features throughout the year.
That’s it! Here’s to an amazing 2012.
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2011 in online video projects
Continuing my look back at work I’ve done in 2011, here’s some of video I’m most proud of this year.
I’ve been busy all year working on some interesting commissions for lots of clients; I’ve made short documentaries, produced interviews, made 10 minute long features and more. Although the clients have always been happy with the final pieces as I’ve delivered them, looking at this collection, I can see room for lots of improvements in 2012.
[NOTE: If you’re reading this in an email, click on the link to view the videos on the website!]
EcoMattic 3: home-made methane
The third film in a web series following Matt and his over-the-top attempts to cut back on his carbon emissions. He’s had his car crushed, tried recycling everything he owns. In this film, shot on the last sunny day of the year, he tries building a methane converter to power his house.
Attribution/ShareAlike
You can read a behind-the-scenes Storify of this project here.
Green Alliance: Bringing It Home
UK environmental think-tank The Green Alliance asked me to produce a film to support the launch of a major piece of research into peoples’ attitudes towards going green. It found some fascinating insight into what makes us tick when it comes to things like recycling and using plastic bags. I combined research footage, motion graphics and interviews for this piece which was shown to MPs at a launch in Westminster, as well as going online.
© 2011 Green Alliance/Adam Westbrook
MediaTrust: Untold Stories
This was the only piece of video which I produced for television this year (I work almost exclusively in online video). I spent some time with a British charity MENTER who support asylum seekers, and other minorities in the East of England.
© 2011 MediaTrust/MENTER/Adam Westbrook
Global Business Challenge China
A highlight of 2011 was traveling to Chengdu in southern China to produce a documentary about the Global Business Challenge. Nearly 100 students from around the world came together to battle for the crown and tensions ran high.
It was pretty inspiring to see such young ambitious people from places like Sri Lanka, South Africa and China showing their mettle with a determination young people in the UK don’t really seem to have: it makes you realise where the power in the future will lie.
© 2011 CIMA/Adam Westbrook
myNewsBiz: can journalists be entrepreneurs?
To promote our nationwide entrepreneurial journalism competition in 2011 we produced a short series of features, where some of the UK’s best entrepreneurial publishers shared their secrets.
Attribution/ShareAlike
And just for fun…the Absolute Radio Mobility Scooter Grandprix
Probably one of the more bizarre commissions I had in 2011. UK national radio station Absolute asked me to join their grand prix race through Central London …on mobility scooters for their breakfast show. It was one of the earliest shoots too: we had to do the race at 5am to avoid the police, and Buckingham Palace security.
© 2011 Absolute Radio/Adam Westbrook
Next week I’ll be looking at what went well and not so well for me in business terms, and thinking about my big plans for 2012. If you’re serious about doing great stuff and making a difference – whatever your field – then I highly recommend taking a good bit of time out to reflect.
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2011 in motion graphics projects
Although I write lots about how to make online video, I rarely show you any of my own stuff. That’s partly because I don’t want this blog to be a shameless showreel, but this week I thought I’d collect some of the films I’ve made this year.
On Thursday I’ll put up my best video work of the year, but today I’ll start with motion graphics.
[NOTE: If you’re receiving this post via email, click on the link to read the post online to view the videos]
Back in 2010 I bought Final Cut Studio when I upgraded my video production kit. The package comes with other products, like Apple Compressor, and something I’d never heard of before – Apple Motion. It’s Apple’s equivalent to Adobe After Effects, and allows you to create motion graphic animations.
Throughout 2010 I taught myself how to create animations from scratch – an investment in time which has really paid off in 2011. I have completed several commissions for whole range of clients, and even had to turn some down for a lack of time. Here are some of the motion graphic-only pieces, although almost all of my video this year feature a motion element somewhere.
myNewsBiz
January 2011 – an animation to launch the myNewsBiz student enterprise journalism competition. The two winners are now working on launching their new products. This one has a strong palette and was my first real experiment with 3D and moving cameras.
AV referendum
April 2011 – I created this explainer about the AV referendum back in May to experiment with the idea of making complex issues more simple. It was a bit more complex than any I had done before, and I had to break it down into four ‘chapters’ to put it together. This has led to the creation of a new website & business, launching in early 2012.
StuConnect
September 2011 A commission for StuConnect, a new startup aiming to help students collaborate across different UK universities. Videos like this for startups need to be short & sweet.
VInspired: Food Poverty
November 2011 – A recent commission for V Inspired a UK organisation helping young people become leaders. I’ve written about the creation of this piece in more detail in this blog post and Storify.
Hopefully, the takeaway is that you can teach yourself a new skill and quite quickly convert it into paid work. The great thing about programs like these is that they’re relatively cheap – and learning them can be completely free if you use the right sources.
I invested about £40 in a book about how to do motion graphics, and then about two hours a night for a couple of months – and I’ve easily recouped that now.
Adam Westbrook // ideas on digital storytelling and publishing 
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