video 2 zero

Once upon a time…

A group of Jewish businessmen were invited on a philanthropic tour of Israel. They visited many fine charitable projects throughout the country, and at each stop were expected to make contributions to keep the projects going, which they did happily.

The businessmen returned to Jerusalem, poorer in dollars, but aglow with righteousness. They had, in the words of one “given until it hurt”.

As the group was about to leave the King David Hotel for the airport a guide diverted them from the line of taxis to a conference room.

They were left waiting, 15 minutes, 30 minutes - and became concerned that they would miss the El-Al flight back to London. “Don’t worry” they were assured “the jet will not leave without you”.

After almost an hour the doors sprung open in front of a small troop of soldiers in battle fatigues. In the middle - Moshe Dayan.

Now, I don’t know what transpired during the short time the General spent in the room - but during those few minutes the pledges of financial support were more than doubled.

“Did you not resent the request for more after you had already given so much?” one of the businessmen was asked.

“No” he replied “we all felt the better for it”.

Becoming a better person editor

The first stage of edting video is what Walter Murch eloquently describes as “cutting out the bad bits”. That’s the easy part. The second stage can get painful:

“When time comes to make that final revision, however, you must harden your heart, sharpen the ax and murder your darlings“.

For most web video there is no budget. I’m not talking the dollars and cents it takes to make a video but rather the minutes and seconds it takes to watch one.

Web video is occasioning a total rethink of time budgets. Going into a movie theater we have already budgeted 90 minutes of our time to that movie. Switching on a sitcom or a news show - 30 minutes. A video on a video sharing site 2-3 minutes. A video embedded on your web-page - no budget at all.

In Seth Godin-speak we do not have permission to show a video. Large-sample studies by the BBC and others show that 10-20 times more visitors will watch a video that is embedded on a web page, over one linked on an external page. Just the few seconds it takes to load an external page can deter 95% of your audience.
Time was when every scene had to move from an wide shot to a medium shot to a close-up. Failure to open with an establishing shot would “confuse the audience”. Films like Babel would suggest that it is very difficult to confuse modern audiences.

Films like Star Wars prove that if a scene stays on the screen for too little time to allow the audience to digest all the details - don’t worry - they will just buy the DVD.

It’s the cult of the infomercial versus the Chinese whisper.

- ran out of time I’ll finish later.

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