Picking Your Approach

Form ever follows function."

--Louis Henry Sullivan (1856-1924), U.S. architect.

Creation is easy for omnipotent superbeings. They contemplate for a moment inside omniscient super-consciousness and out pop entire worlds, brimming with all manner of flora and fauna.

But for the rest of us, creation begins with blank slate, a white piece of typing paper, a computer's blinking cursor followed ominously by--nothing. Do whole worlds spring forth at our command? In most cases, no.

Where do great video ideas come from? You have to create them. Even if you hire a writer to put your script down on paper, you're still responsible for the content. It's up to you to tell the writer what kind of a script you want. How do you know what kind of format, or approach, the script should have? You don't. It's subjective. Every project is different.

What follows is a brief discussion of how to find the right approach for your work. Though this knowledge won't make you into an omnipotent superbeing, it will help you when it's time to choose a format to work with in your video projects. We can't tell you how to have good ideas, but we can give you some pointers that just might jump-start the creative process.

This is where we get into the gray, fuzzy area that drives engineers and other logical thinkers crazy. They want to know: if A then B, if B then C. Most of the time, creation doesn't work this way. It's more like making a stew. You take all the information you have about a project and throw it into the pot (your brain). Let it simmer. Don't put too much heat on it because you might burn it. After a few hours, days or weeks--again, it's not an exact science--the idea will come to you.

Aha, you say, creation is easy. You just let it cook in your head and eventually it will pop out on its own. Except getting the ingredients for the stew takes an effort. It involves doing your homework.

Let's say you get a call from Amalgamated Widgets about a marketing video. You take a meeting with Joe Widget to discuss the project. You learn the purpose: to sell a new kind of widget; the intended audience: factory managers who use the widget in their processes; the method of distribution: the client will show it on large monitors at trade shows; and the length: five minutes.

You ask every question about widgets you can think of and take copious notes. You get copies of every memo, letter, press release, newsletter, advertisement or anything else that anyone has ever written about the widget which will be useful in your research. You take a tour of the factory and talk to the folks who came up with the new process for the widget. You take a prototype widget and sleep with it under your pillow.

By this time, you have widgets coming out of your pores. You should have plenty of clues about the form your video is going to take. Widgets are not inherently interesting. Therefore, the video will have to compensate in some way for this lack of excitement. You have learned that the intended audience of factory managers are no-nonsense people with busy schedules. This means that they want their information in a simple, straightforward manner, in a form that doesn't waste their time. And you also know that the place where they will see the video (a trade show) is a noisy environment where hundreds of booths are competing for attention. This tells you that your video must grab the audience immediately in a way that doesn't ask for a high level of concentration from the viewer.

Once all these parameters are in your brain, you can come up with a solution. Your video could put a heavy emphasis on beauty shots of widgets supported by words on the screen. If the video had a narrator, he or she would be off-camera, and the viewer might not be able to hear what they were saying. Therefore, all information that the viewer had to absorb would be visual.

Let's take another example. Say your video is a travel piece, a personal documentary of your experiences on a family outing. The audience would probably be friends and family, sitting on the sofa at home and eating popcorn. An on-camera narrator might be just the thing to turn a boring series of travel shots into an interesting and fun way to relive your vacation.

You may want to create a video that will work in any situation. You could try to create such a thing, but it would probably be neither fish nor fowl. By trying to be all things to all people, the video would more likely be a mish-mash of information with no clear purpose. An audience may not know why a video bores them, or makes them angry--but that doesn't stop them from being restless or perturbed.

The key to finding the right voice is to understand that form follows function. The underlying structure of the video should make sense in the context of the specific purpose of the video. Would you wear a tuxedo to go swimming at the beach...or a pair of Speedos to the President's Ball? If the answer is yes, then rational arguments may not work in this case. Go for the irrational.

And remember: every video has a voice, whether or not it's intentional. Regardless of your level of videomaking, your work will be more impressive if it looks like you put some thought into it.

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