The Art of The Interview, or How to Be Invisible

Interviewing for an audio-visual enterprise is an ancient art.

In a good documentary, the star of the interview is the person being interviewed. The interviewer is typically off-camera, and if the interviewer is really good, you’ll never see them or hear them speak. Why?

They ask questions that get full answers.

The art of the interview has been bastardized by today’s TV performer who wants not only to look handsome or pretty, but also smart. So they ask a lot of rapid fire questions. They’ve only got a minute, and they are thinking Emmy. So these questions contain major hints at the answer the interviewer is looking for.

Interviewer: Tell me about how horrible you must feel now that you’re house has burned down?

Interviewee: I feel bad.

Well, yes. But it can be worse. I often hear local cable interviewers ask the question this way:

Interviewer: The fact that your house burned down must make you feel awfully bad, doesn’t it?

Interviewee: Yes, yes it does.

Interviewer: How bad?

Interviewee: pretty bad.

Pretty bad, indeed.

In a corporate long form documentary style video, an ideal scenario is the video that can be “narrated” solely by the interviewees, through their own words, in complete and meaningful sentences. Suffice it to say that this is hard work. You must ask the right questions in the right fashion and then have the editing chops to put it together into a compelling narrative that has a beginning, middle, climax, and end. The interviewee will not be a talking head on camera, so you have no excuse to make your interviews TV style, where editing would cause unsightly jump cuts (therefore giving the producer an excuse to edit less. More gross profit!)

Some producers will pretend that TV style interviews are the right way to sell business-to-business products and services. That’s ridiculous. Looking at two talking heads blathering on without b-roll, music, or story is an absolute waste of a company’s dollars. That producer has no intention of working for his or her money.

We believe in interview style videos, just as surely as we believe in unstaged actualities to convince audiences of a product’s quality or a company’s intent or philosophy.

Yes, it takes longer, and it costs a bit more. But the shelf life can be very long, and the impact multi-tiered. Its a technique that works at meetings, or on the web. Consider this technique for your next video.

An example can be found by clicking on the image below.

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You’ve read elsewhere on VideoStory Secrets that you’re not going to get anywhere without a demo reel.

Well here, courtesy of the Viral Video Film School on CurrentTV, is a look at demo reels that will get you absolutely nowhere.

We had the perfect event storm here in Phillipsburg, NJ the other day– The final day of a “Thomas the Tank Engine”  full size train ride experience for kids and families up the street from Union Square, where we live, and “Heritage Days” in Easton, which is a stone’s throw across the river from us.

The Free Bridge prior to the Fireworks

Easton, PA, and Phillipsburg, NJ are both joined– and separated by– the 100 plus year old “Free Bridge”. It’s called that because it’s, well, free, as opposed to the toll bridge on Route 22 a minute or two and 75 cents away.

Heritage Day concluded with fireworks on the river, and so all roads leading to both sides of the bridge were closed off, making the Free Bridge the perfect vantage point for the fireworks.

Phillipsburg– especially its historic downtown– has seen some tough times but it’s undergoing something of a renaissance. Money has been put into redoing the streets and sidewalks of the main drag– Main Street– and local merchants have tried to build up traffic by any number of means. The Urban Enterprise Zone has worked hard to bring new businesses into town.

But building traffic is tough. There is of course Easton, across the river, Bethlehem, Allentown, and any number of artistic and quaint and fully developed communities in Eastern Pennsylvania and Western New Jersey. Clinton. New Hope. Flemington. Jim Thorpe.

I’m not crazy about fireworks. Nothing has compared– ever– to my memory of the display on the river in Norwalk, Connecticut when I was five.

But looking out our front window with its perfect view of  the bridge and Union Square, I was struck by the traffic.  No, not the motorcycles and muffler-free trucks we listen to every weekend– but the foot traffic.

So, at the very last minute, we left our fourth floor walk-up and decided to experience the fireworks on the river.

Fireworks as seen from the Free Bridge, Phillipsburg, New Jersey

And I took with me my Flip MinoHD.  I didn’t plan on using it, but once I started I couldn’t stop.

The next day, I put together a quick edit using Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum Pro Pack, natural sound, and finally, a voiceover track featuring my off-the cuff comments as the edit played back on my laptop screen.

The Flip is a nifty little device; it has surprising picture quality (especially in 720p HD), and it’s ability to pick up ambient sound is great.

It does not have image stabilization, which means without a tripod chances are very good there will be a little shakycam. You could image stabilize that in post, but then you’d be rendering for a half a day, and I wanted to get this thing done quickly.

What was REALLY surprising was how good the fireworks look.

But maybe you should take a look and let me know what you think. it’s a pretty casual approach for me, but it was fun, and it plays to these little mini-cam’s strengths– the ability to capture reality with a minimum of invasiveness.  People don’t ask “When will this be aired?” and other things like that, and they don’t alter their behavior for the camera.

You can find the video on YouTube here. Remember to click on the HQ for high quality in the lower right of the player. And comments or questions are welcomed.

Tribute Videos are videos that celebrate a person, couple, group, or institution. They can be engagement videos, anniversary videos, memorials, retirement videos, milestone birthday videos, company histories, leadership stories, school reunion stories, award-winner portraits, and more. They are at home in the living room, rec room, boardroom or ballroom.

Tribute videos are how I got my start. (See “AVSquad” in the links.) And they remain the most satisfying of the work that we do. There is nothing like telling a people story.

A lot of people are into video these days, some as a hobby, some as a potential profession, some as part of their job duties. There is a perception that video is easy, thanks to point and shoot miniature cameras, computer editing, and thousands of tipsters on-line telling you how easy it is and selling something– usually hardware.

But hardware is only part of the problem, and hardware and editing software are covered pretty readily via training web sites, DVD lessons, and more.

No one is training people on how to tell a compelling story. How to interview, how to move pictures, how to choose music, how to pace videos, how to get a visceral reaction from an audience!

That’s where “Tribute Videos for Love & Money” comes in.

Tribute Videos for Love & Money

It’s an ebook that details my communications beliefs and systems. If you like samples of my work, and you want to know how and why certain creative decisions were made, this is the place to start. It concentrates on the “Tribute” people story type of video, but frankly, if you can tell that kind of story, there isn’t much you won’t be able to do as you grow your capability or career.

For more information, go to videostoryschool.com.

I hope you like it and find it valuable.

Just bumped into this from a sight called Remarkable Communications. It’s worth a gander.

At some point in your communications career, you will be faced with writing a video script. It comes with the territory. How you respond to this distraught pleasure will say a lot about you and your understanding of visual media.

What makes writing an av script hard is not knowing how easy it can be. By the very nature of the written word for a visual medium, the key to success is less, not more.

For one thing, you’re writing to be heard, not seen. For another, the medium is a visual one, which means it prefers the pictures to do the talking. Finally, a script for video needs a lot more than just words. It has to provide visual direction, audio direction, and the essential creative blueprint that leads to the success of the project.

Let me give you an example.

Let’s say that your goal is to write a short script about a new software program that helps people track their spending. Let’s call it “Fast Money”.

It’s a simple, easy to use program which can help people budget, save, an ultimately have the money they need to fulfill their dreams.

The success of all video or audio-visual products is to engage the audience by appealing to their desires. You could talk about how “Fast Money” has been written by coders certified in C++, how it is delightful in its use of a user-friendly GUI, and how it automatically sends back error messages to “Fast Money” HQ so that the program can be constantly improved.

But you’d be talking to yourself, because the potential buyer doesn’t care about any of that. They care about money. Their money. Their life. Their future.

SO you need to create a hook. A way to start the script that talks right to them and their needs.

SO you begin writing:

ANNOUNCER: You want to make Money!    VISUAL: Picture of Dollar Bill. SOUND EFFECT: Ka-Ching. MUSIC: Money, by Pink Floyd.

Well, it’s a start, if you want to hit your audience with a sledgehammer.

But hitting audiences with sledgehammers doesn’t create intrigue. But this is often the approach an unseasoned writer will take– they’ll cover all the bases.

The good news is, luckily, you don’t need to know or present all those technical facts. What you need is a way to engage the audience on their terms.

Instead, try writing without using words– ie, skip the narrator for now and create a scene instead.

SCENE: Slow zoom in on man working at kitchen table, He has a yellow legal pad, a checkbook, and a calculator. He looks worried and is wiping imaginary sweat from his brow. A woman, his wife, walks in behind him and looks over his shoulder.

SHE: Well?

HE: It doesnt look good.

ANNOUNCER: Too familiar? It’s hard to save a buck these days.

VISUAL: Alternating closeups of Husband and Wife faces, cutaway to their checkbook showing small negative balance, cutaway to pile of bills.

Now, that was fun! Instead of a litany of facts and figures, suitable only for the engineer that developed the product, we’ve now created an emotional scenario almst anyone running a household can identify with. They’re ready to hear more.

And we didn’t use corny music, jangling cash registers, overblown prose, or dollars marching off a cliff.
Now you’re on your way to being a scriptwriter. Yes, you have to know the facts. But no, the audience doesn’t need all of them. They need reasons to care. And you’ve just given that to them.

Now, they’ll listen to more– even if there are a few facts thrown in.

For more information on this and other create techniques to make your video production life easier, see my book, “Tribute Videos for Fun and Profit”, elsewhere on this site.

I love still images but sometimes there is nothing like motion. So I ask You:

Are you packin’ cam?

Your video camera, that is.

Your camera– and your right to use it– is as important to many of us as our right to pack heat– uh, carry a concealed weapon, that is. And no, I don;t pack heat.

But I do pack cam, and that can be just as important. With it, you can:

• Capture a family moment.
• Witness a crime.
• Record breaking news or a natural disaster.
• Make a personal statement by pointing the camera at yourself.
• Record a coworkers moment of triumph.
• Surreptitiously record b-roll for a company video.
• Ask Grandma 20 questions for posterity before she shuffles off to Baltimore.
• Narrate your own personal documentary.
• Record something worth 100,000 hits on YouTube (like that territorial squirrel fight I saw– and missed– the other day. I forgot to pack cam.)

So pack cam. The links you gain, the views you rank, even the money you make from a once in a lifetime catch, is worth only the amount of cam you take.

This family history DVD  was created as a Christmas gift from parents to their sons and daughter and their childrens’ children. What an amazing and thoughtful gift. While it preserves photos and especially 8mm films that had not been seen in decades, the larger story is the interviews from the parents that pepper the story. This excerpt hopefully will give you the flavor of a compelling, lasting keepsake not possible in any other way.

Recorded in my mobile recording studio outside of Stop & Shop, Phillipsburg, NJ.

An Introduction to SlideShow Secrets

There are two ways to approach writing a script for a video: before you shoot, and after you shoot.

Before you shoot is where the majority of corporate and event videos land; after you shoot usually indicates that you’re conducting interviews and won’t know what material you’ll have until after the interviews.

Let’s look at the first, and most traditional, method.

Scriptwriting is the art and craft of extrapolating a creative approach into a working creative plan. A script is more than just the words. It is the blueprint that indicates the structure or flow of your video, what kinds of shots are necessary, what kinds of graphics are appropriate, and what types of music might be used or created.

My first business partner couldn’t do wordplay worth a damn, but he actually was an excellent scriptwriter, because he knew how to pace a piece of communications. So whether you think you’re a writer or not, let’s look at the basics of how you can craft your creative blueprint.

The Creative Plan

Before you begin writing, you must know what your strategy is. Whether you’re selling widgets or telling the life story of Uncle Teddy, you must know your beginning, middle and end.

I believe all creative plans follow some essential rules of marketing, and often follow the same basic outline for the script.

Marketing Rules

These hardly ever vary. They are called many things, have sold a lot of books, and been rehashed over and over.

But they work. It’s all centered around the person you’re trying to sell. It’s called the USP, or unique selling proposition. Ya gotta have one!

From the USP comes the ability to do the following:

State a clear benefit.
Offer proof.
Have a unique angle.
Show the solution.
Eliminate objections.
Ask for the sale (or the demo).

In the video script world, this might look like:

Introduction or Premise
Who we are
What we do
Why we’re different
What’s in it for you
Ask for the sale

Really. That’s about it. Remember, this is not a brochure. People’s attention spans are short.

Now, let’s say you want to create buzz so that MyCO, your new computerized inventory management company (and its new product, “The Docufab 5000”), can look large enough to compete with the big dog in your field— we’ll call them BigCo.

BigCo owns the market, but they’re— big. Slow to innovate, slow to respond to customer requests. They haven’t revised their product offering in 5 years.

You want to eat their lunch (or, if you’re starting out, any lunch at all), and you have just the product to do it.

You have just enough money to make a video, which you figure you’ll show to customers on your laptop, in your trade show booth (a massive 8’x10’ with a table), and on your website.

Video Outline

Let’s look at the questions to ask yourself.

What outcome do I want from this video?
What unique thing does my company offer?
How does this product embody that unique feature (or philosophy)?
What’s in it for the customer?
What hang-ups does the customer have?
How do we move to the next step?

In this case, the next step is being put on the bid list, being asked to make a presentation to upper management, or being asked to make a proposal. This is also the outcome you want.

You are sensitive to the needs of the industry and are a house of ideas, moving fast, developing solutions, adapting your patented technologies to companies large and small.

Your product offers ImageFast, a revolutionary way to reduce scan time and speed document flow over traditional Cat5 wire.

This will offer the customer a direct impact in greater productivity, faster shipping turnaround, less time spent running around looking for manuals, and allow the company to sell and ship more of whatever it is they do. (The hidden bonus is the hero factor— the person that buys this product will introduce such productivity and profit to the company that he or she will get a raise and a corner office— of course, this is implied, not stated.)

Now think it through— you’ve got a better product than BigCo— is there anything that would make a potential customer NOT buy what you’re selling?

Yes, you’re young enough to look like you just came out of high school. Your track record is neither good nor bad— it’s empty. So you get an endorsement from your Uncle Don who’s a well known civil engineer (or a past customer, if you’re well established).  Maybe you grow a beard.

And you offer a guarantee.

The Final Structure

So now, let’s look at our final outline:

Document management is slow, and industry leaders are not keeping up with bandwidth demands.
You have a solution that’s unique to the industry.
You are MyCo, a company dedicated to R&D and solutions that provide productivity and profit. You never stop innovating.
The Docufab 5000 blows the competition away. You proceed to tell how. (features)
The Docufab 5000 will change your company for the better, is upgradable, etc. (benefits)
Let us demonstrate our system and give you a quote. If you’re not 100% satisfied, we’ll (fix it, refund your money, whatever…)— we believe in our product and good old-fashioned customer service.

Okay, now you have to add spice, or the hook— the unique angle. You’re dedicated to productivity, speed, and service. For a fraction of what BigCo might quote for a new system, you will revolutionize the customer’s business with profits, productivity, and volume.

All the customer has to do is— “Do the Math.”

That becomes your hook. It’s a good one, because it de-emphasizes being big, established, safe, etc. It says, “If I can offer you my unique solution to save you this much money— will you take a chance on me?”

We’re skimming the surface, but at least now you’ve thought through goal setting and creative planning for almost any video project, at least those that are written before the shooting begins.

Now, HOW to write the words is another story, and one we’ll tell soon.

Want to see the video this story was actually based on? Go to http://www.vimeo.com/806538.

Next time, more specifics on how to write a script.