While we were living in Koh Lanta, we would take breaks to go on adventures in the Andaman Sea.
I’ve been working on developing my storytelling skills using video as a medium. While producing a series of 32 videos of us crossing the United States, I stepped up my editing game a lot. It was a great learning process. I feel like my video edits dramatically improved from using ScreenFlow and my iPhone 6 in New Orleans to using a Cannon g7x and Adobe Premier by the time we got to New York and crossed the country to Nevada.
Now in these latest videos I’m using a DSLR to get really delicious cinematic shots, a GoPro Hero Silver to go underwater and action and the g7x and the iPhone. I’m also using my podcast recording studio to record great sounding audio. The gear is improving… but I’m starting to think that’s not the important part.
What is the Important Part?
The problem that I’ve self-identified (I’m open to the idea that this is not accurate) is that as my editing and gear gets more and more intricate, I’m not noticing an uptick in views or completion percentage of my videos.
So I started thinking about my favorite movies and why I watched them to the end. It always breaks down to either:
- Wanting to know the end of the story
- Wanting to hear the kick at the end
Those seem like the same things, but they are slightly different. CollegeHumor is an example of the kick at the end, Vice News is an example of wanting to hear the end of the story.
I never watch the end of Vice News stories because it’s always just credits rolling. That’s great, but I can’t image many people watch that.
I always watch CollegeHumor stuff to the end because they add something hilarious at the end of every video. Therefore, I always feel like I’m missing something if I don’t watch the whole thing.
That’s The Mission Going Forward
The above video and this video are examples of me playing with this concept and trying to get better at the craft of video editing.
I’d love to hear from you. Please leave a comment below if you have a suggestion on how I can improve these videos.
My long term goal is to have the tools and background to work with really interesting people to make videos that people find really valuable.