video2zero

1. Shorter is better. Michael Eisner on What works in Online Video:

Sex seems to work. User-gen, sports, news, anything with Sarah Palin works. At the end of the day, like in all the other industries from movies to TV, long-form, story-driven content is what ultimately works. paid content

Time is the currency we use to pay for online video. Getting someone to pay a nickel is easier than getting them to pay $1 - big surprise. But if the guy who charges a nickel can’t turn a profit - who cares?

2. Content is king. It’s not the content of the video that generates the return, it’s the ability to integrate the video into a larger information loop where value feeds back to the producers. And that involves getting a commitment to more than 3 minutes. Without appropriate context the content has limited value. Context is king.

3. Emotional video works. True in movies, true on TV - not true on the web. People don’t click on emotional videos.
When you take an emotional story and edit it down to 2 or 3 minutes you transform emotion into sentimentality. When you don’t edit it down then you better have an engaged audience if you expect anyone to watch it.

4. Avoid talking heads. This is the flipside of Connect Emotionally. Talking Heads don’t make for riveting movies or TV - but they work just fine on the web. Gary Vaynerchuck, Andy Plesser (beet.tv) and many others prove the point across a wide spectrum.

5. Avoid information intensive presentations. Following on from Avoid talking heads is the notion that videographers should avoid information-intensive presentations. Information is more efficiently conveyed in text and pictures - it doesn’t need video.

But many thousands of viewers would rather watch David Pogue than crack a manual….As the information density goes up, and the age of the target audience goes down - the preference for video over text increases exponentially. Absorbing even mildly technical detail from a book is a chore. That same information repackaged as visual media is digested effortlessly.

6. The tripod rules. There are two Tripod Rules. The first - Never Shoot with a Tripod, and the second Always Shoot with a Tripod - may seem to contradict one another. Ignore them unless you are entering a competition of some sort. For everyone else just go with whatever improves your confidence, flexibility, confidence, efficiency and confidence.

7. Lots of closeups. Close-ups work well in web video. But they also work well in television, movies and photography.More bandwidth, faster connections are obsoleting the 320×240 frame - so the original justification for more close-ups on the web is disappearing. But the close-ups are not.

Close-ups are easier to shoot: auto-exposure, auto-focus, AWB are all you need when the subject fills the frame. The effects of camera shake are minimized (Big Issue for the anti-tripod brigade), and all but the most basic rules of composition can be ignored. Close-ups are easier to edit: you can switch back and forth between close-ups with abandon - wide shots you require careful sequencing so as to avoid disconcerting jump cuts.