Home Video Hints: Planning Production: Part I

With this column, Home Video Hints ups the ante. To date, we've focused on the casual, sometime shooter who wants decent-looking videos with the least possible effort (access past articles online at videomaker.com). Over the next 12 issues we're going to survey the basics of video production - the procedures you'll need to create short, easy, but professional looking programs. Though we'll vary our topics from issue to issue, we'll end up covering the basics of pre-production, production and postproduction. To start right at the beginning, today's homily covers step numero uno in making a video: figuring out what video to make.

Once you've taped enough vacations, holidays and family events, you may want to create a real program from scratch. But what kind of program and what's the subject? A famous journalist once confessed, "Writing's easy: you just stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood stand out on your forehead." The same is true about starting a video project. To get your project launched (and prevent excessive blood loss) break the job down into practical parts and complete them one at a time. In order, you need to decide on your program's genre, concept and subject.

Genre
First, what genre, what basic type of program is it? Maybe a documentary (your daughter's prowess at softball), a training program (How to drive a stick shift car), a story (the shrub that ate Toledo), an editorial (trashing the environment is wrong), a commercial (the Lion's Club charity breakfast) or a music video. These are just a few standard vide…