Today’s Plan:
- General Principles for “How To” Videos
- Storyboards
- Homework
General Principles for “How To” Videos
Today I want to spend sometime reviewing general principles for How To videos (or instructional or documentation videos). These have become increasingly popular over the past decade–a lot of products now come with links to Youtube videos in place of long, complicated instruction manuals. As a boardgame fan, I almost always go to Youtube to search up a “how to play” video before I read the instructions. Commonly, these are “talking head” medium shots with cutaways.
But these can also be what I call “lofi”–simply still pictures and voice narration. Over the next few weeks we will be making one of each of these videos–starting with a rather lofi version. I say rather lofi, because I would like the following base storyboard for your video:
- A wide shot that includes you doing the thing you’ll be instructing
- A medium shot of you introducing yourself and the video
- Then you can cut away to a series of shorter videos, either with individual audio or with a recorded voice-over narration
Don’t worry if you can’t get a clean audio transition between your medium shot and your voice over narration. We’ll work on cleaning up audio later.
Note that you can make this in either Adobe Rush or Adobe Premiere. Let me show you how to use the narration recorder in Rush:
- really simple–just remember to mute the track as you record
- also remember that you can mute the video clip volume if necessary to eliminate background noise
- finally you can add a background music track (plus sign to add media)
In case the computer in CAND is screwing up, here’s a screenshot.
I want to look at one more example. This presents a slightly higher level of difficulty, and you cannot pull this off using Adobe Rush. This requires Adobe Premiere. In this video (and the more sophisticated Gloomhaven video above), there is one continuous shot of the speaker reading the entire script. This has been imported into Premiere, and then the video has been “detached” from the audio file. Then, they insert the cutaway clips over that audio (overwriting part of the video file). Don’t worry today if you don’t get this–we will be working on this next week. But, if you are ambitious, then you can go ahead and try this for Monday’s video!
From Outline to Storyboards
As writers, I imagine most of you are familiar with outlines. I also imagine that most of you have written something where the final product doesn’t really look anything like the original outline. Video production tends to follow the outline process a *bit* more strictly.
Professional video production often requires storyboarding–in which a director lays out an idea of how shots will align with script.
Let’s look at a few popular templates.
Homework
Work list #3 “How to” is due on Monday. We will watch them in class and mess around a bit more with Premiere (I’ll ask you to do in class what I did today).
Worklist #3 needs to have:
- A wide opening shot
- A medium shot of you introducing the video
- 4-6 shots/still images with voice-over narration
- Some title text
