The only thing more painful than surrendering to the time and technical complexity that goes into making good instructional video is getting to the very end of a project and realizing that you need to start over…
As we reshoot our entire skin on frame prep course, one of the hardest videos is: selecting wood for building skin on frame kayaks. The challenge here to convey the details that are really useful without getting so lost in them that the clarity of the big picture suffers or the video is way too long.
Through a weeklong process of re-shoots, edits, voiceovers, and cutaways I finally was able to cram it down to 20 minutes, but at the very end of the edit I realized that my whole approach was wrong. I was standing in front of the boards and cutting away to kayak building when standing in front of kayak models and cutting away to boards would dramatically increase clarity while cutting time to that magic 15 minutes beyond which nobody watches anything anymore. Also, a friend showed us a new lighting technique last week that improved things so much that it’s just hard to use the earlier shots. (pro tip: the biggest most expensive soft-box just can’t compare to a well-shaped light bounce!)
It’s hugely rewarding when I get to the end of a project but the challenge for myself and so many other people for whom video is becoming an increasing portion of our businesses, is just trying to find ways to manage the logistics and still have time to actually do the thing that you’re trying to film!
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