An Alternative Approach
by Glenn Koenig
Perhaps the best approach in video is to start by thinking about your message in the first place, rather than start with a meeting or event. After all, the needs of an audience for a video recording are quite different from those of a live audience, as I explored on my page on 'The Essential Difference.'
To use this approach, ask yourself three simple questions:
• What story do I want to tell (or what message or concept do I want
to get across)?
• To whom do I want to tell it?
• How can I best use the medium of video (moving picture & sound)
to get this message to these people?
More specifically, you might ask yourself, "What can I show people that they might not have seen before?" or "What ideas can I offer to people that they might not have considered before?" You might also want to ask a more 'action oriented' question, such as, "What could I bring to my audience that would have them sit up and take notice; and perhaps actually become more interested in my story or message?" Also, you could ask, "What would I want people to think or do after seeing my video?" If you think you have similar characteristics to your viewing audience, then you might want to imagine yourself sitting down to watch a video about your message. What would you like to see? What pacing would you like? How quickly would you like to get the message intended from watching it? How could the sounds and images work together to clarify the message?
Starting from these questions, you might decide to plan out a short video production, consisting of a variety of segments edited together, shot in a number of different locations. Sure, producing something like this will take significant work, perhaps. But getting a decent recording of a meeting or event would also take significant work. So, it's not the amount of work that makes the difference. The point is, if you design something from the beginning with the viewer in mind, instead of recording an event that was originally designed for a live audience with the video audience as an afterthought, you're more likely to end up with something that viewers will really want to watch, . The point is, you'd like your work to serve the viewing audience in some way, to give them something they didn't have before, something they might not get, even if they attended a live event.
One additional observation:
Many commercials on TV today have the goal to stop you from thinking clearly about something. Their objective is to get you to buy products or services without even knowing why you want to. So don't use their approach as a model if you can help it. If you want your video audience to really understand something well, then it may be better to not throw lots of quick cut images and music and narration at them all at once. Of course, this all gets back to those three questions I posed above. How you pace your program, how you make the images & sounds fit together should come out of understanding the answers to those three questions, first.