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Another Way to Get the Information Across...
There is no faster way to put a room full of people to sleep than to turn the lights down and show them a video consisting of “talking heads” conveying “important information.” While the client may be impressed with seeing his or her message on a video screen, it is doing them a disservice if the audience for whom that message is intended tunes out two minutes in.
My advice: Find another way to get the information across... Any other way. But first, “Off with those talking heads.”
In a previous article I wrote for this journal I talked about creating an edit of an event using the three act method. An original, scripted video done to convey a message will still use the three act form but has the added burden of being informative as well as entertaining.
The informative part, naturally, contains the information you have been hired to convey. But it’s the entertainment part that will get your viewers hooked and keep them watching to the end and make the experience memorable.
As an example, I’ll use a video, if I may, that we did for an industrial educational organization interested in spreading the word on the classes it offers and their value to companies seeking solutions to some very specific problems. The first thing we did, as you can probably guess, was discard the “talking head” approach. Instead, we decided to parody a hard boiled private eye movie complete with voice over and a bluesy saxophone. It gave us an immediately recognized style that from the first shot said “pay attention, this is going to be fun.”
In production terms, the voice over approach had the advantage of less on camera dialogue which gave us more control and made for faster shooting. We could have chosen to parody a soap opera, a sitcom, a commercial or any number of other forms that are quickly and easily recognized and provide a built-in style.
In our video, the private eye became a beautiful consultant named Phyllis Marlowe, who is hired by a troubled businessman named Lamonica from Santa Monica who manufactures harmonicas.
Marlowe visits a few of the less than functioning divisions of the company and reports the bad news to her client. To find a solution she meets with a mysterious stranger under a lamp post who slips her a piece of paper with the name of our industrial educational organization on it. Returning to the client, Marlowe sings the virtues of the organization while we cut to moments from actual classes run by the group.
We decided to turn our slim budget to our advantage by creating a “look” for the piece. We shot the whole thing in one room, draped the walls in black for a “limbo” effect that gave us a pseudo “film noir” look and used a minimum of props, desks, chairs, etc that we mixed and matched to suggest various offices. Although we used some professional actors we also cast a few members of the organization itself who had theatrical experience.
In just seven minutes we tell a story that has a beginning, middle and end. It is amusing, entertaining and contains every bit of information that a “talking head” would have conveyed.
One video I have seen that turned a tight budget into an advantage concerned the issue of security and securing documents in a highly technical environment. The video was shot in black and white, had the look of an old time silent film complete with dialogue printed on cards, a ricky-ticky piano score, used only company personnel as actors and was highly entertaining and effective.
With a little thought and imagination you, too, can lop off those “talking heads” and produce a video you, your client and most especially your viewers will find informative, fun and memorable.
“Bruce Kane is the president of Bruce Kane Prods, which specializes in conveying information through humor.
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