Often people ask us to help them with internal videos. These can be anything from the CEO talking to short animations explaining a business strategy (no prizes for guessing which are the most fun to make).
Often it's hard to make them interesting but a recurrent problem is the length - especially with a talking head video.
Once a senior manager warms to their theme its very hard to shut them up. Nothing can possibly be simplified and examples absolutely have to be given that reference every major division of the company. To my shame, I recently was implicated in the production of an eight minute talk by a senior manager.
I'm not saying it was bad, but eight minutes is beyond human endurance.
If you look at news items on the TV they are often around 45 seconds. They might stretch to 90 seconds if there's a bit of studio discussion.
Watching stuff on a PC at work is tough when the film is more than a minute. Distractions abound - if you don't land the message instantly you're probaly wasting your time.
I'd argue that's the standard internal video should aspire to. And if it's over 90 seconds - it's probably a second video.
The difficulty is that compressing down a video script is not a skill that many of us acquire.
There are some good resources on the web such as this and this. I'm actively looking for a short course to get my skills upto date.
But I think film making poses a really useful test to the communicator. How well can you distill a core message down into the basics?
One to ponder I think!
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