Someone once attributed to a Hollywood director a quote I often repeat in so many words. I don’t remember what was exactly said, but the message is don’t overshoot a scene simply because someone built one heck of a set. In other words, don’t try too hard to get your money’s worth. Show off your set too much and you might bore your audience to the exits.
I often applied this rule when putting together long form special reports for the news. The story often was my idea. I invested a lot of research. I interviewed several people. We shot several days of video. We suddenly were staring at a five-minute news story. Chances are viewers would not be as enthralled with the topic as I. They weren’t as close to the project. So I forced myself to cut down those stories, for example, to three minutes. That wasn’t easy. I eliminated video and sometimes entire interviews. But in the end, I assumed a good five-minute story would transform into an excellent three-minute one.
A recent conversation with a client reminded me once again about that Hollywood quote I can’t quite remember. We are working on several internal videos for employees and we had just finished a shoot with the last executive. As we worked together to capture the final necessary shots to go along with the script, the client wondered if we could simplify the message by cutting out a big chunk of our original idea. And he might be exactly right. Significantly shortening the video might provide just enough information to relay the key points to employees. Maybe the rest we could do without.
Consider videos more of a headline than a two-page, in-depth newspaper story. Most viewers will probably only take away a couple of key points and not remember the finer details. Why not focus more energy on those key points and make people want more instead of less? Include a website or call to action to direct interested viewers to more details. You can always shoot a series of videos instead of just one. A longer video might include more information, but it won’t mean much if people are sleeping or easily distracted.