Videos Do Two Things Well

Videos in a corporate, industrial, or similar environment serve a wide range of purposes, but they do two things especially well.

1. Motivate or Inspire – Presenting visuals and audio that will affect attitudes or behaviors in the way you wish.
2. Visually Demonstrate – Showing something, or some activity, or presenting some message in a way that would be hard to simply explain verbally or through text alone.

What video as a medium does NOT do well is successfully deliver a long list of facts or large quantities of information.
 
All video design and development processes, with all the tools and technologies, should serve these basic precepts.

Also read: Video Production Services in Washington, DC, Vienna, Virginia, and Nationwide

 
How best to accomplish this?

• Keep it simple. Identify just a few key content points and be sure all detailed information supports these points.  Include repetition, from different perspectives or different points of view, to reinforce the key points.
• Understand your audience. Don’t make assumptions on what they may already know or what their opinions might be. Then build on what you have learned about your audience.
• When looking to motivate your audience, don’t forget to first motivate them to simply keep watching the video. Engaging and holding your audience is essential.
• Training videos and general informational videos, even videos intended for general entertainment, all require some combination of Motivating and Demonstrating. Training by definition is encouraging behavior change. This will not happen without both motivation and key message delivery.
• Unless you’re producing an extended essay, or a feature film, keep it short – especially if the video is being streamed on-line. Again, if you audience doesn’t watch, then you are not going to get your message across.
• If you do have a large list of facts or large quantities of information to delivery, consider two approaches. Break it up into smaller pieces – perhaps with multiple videos. And develop support materials – perhaps downloads or handouts – that will keep the viewer on track and facilitate follow-up.

Also read: Instructional Design as an IT Exercise