The Human Factor: Do You Speak Video?

As a collegeundergraduate, I used to draw a cartoon strip if I got bored inclass. I had grown up reading cartoon strips in the daily paper, butit still took several months of practice before I could write a stripthat another person could read easily.

Despite myfamiliarity with the medium, I had to learn to apply some rules Inever actively noticed when reading a strip. Concepts that shouldhave been common sense, like the fact that people in America and inmost other Western cultures read from left to right and top tobottom, were ideas that I had to re-discover in the context ofdrawing my own strips.

My self-guidedforay into authoring comic strips never taught me to drawparticularly well, but it did teach me that communicating effectivelyin that medium required more nuance than I originally thought itwould take. Certainly, it required a good bit more than simply owningpaper and a pen.

Somebody do something!

My cartooningexperience came back to me recently while watching the director’scommentary on a favorite television show. At some point during theshow, the script requires the characters to sit and listen while anexpert engages in a three-minute-and-fifteen-second translation of anancient text. As the director noted, three minutes is a long stretchof screen time when no appreciable action takes place on screen. Arequirement like that creates a challenge for a director trying tokeep the scene and the story interesting.

The challengeprobably sounds familiar to anyone who has recorded video for onlinelearning or any other training use. Granted, three minutes is anunusually short amount of time to record an expert in the world oftraining and development. But it’s a fairly commonplace requirementfor a training professional to record an entire classroom learningevent. The longer the camera runs, the more complex the challengebecomes.

After hearing thedirector’s dilemma, I watched the scene again, this time with thesound turned off. He compensated for the lack of action within thestory in two ways. First, because his subjects were relatively still,he introduced movement to the scene by moving the camera around thecharacters, panning to one after another as they listen or askquestions. Second, he used a lot of different camera angles, andswitched them out frequently — about every two seconds, on average.I never would have noticed the device as a casual viewer, butobserving it in one context reminded me to look for it in others. Itturns out to be a fairly standard technique, one I’ve seen manytimes without realizing it.

Are you telling your story?

Video has becomerelatively inexpensive to produce, and because we all have a lifetimeof experience with watching video, it’s easy to believe that weunderstand how to communicate reasonably well using video as amedium.

When e-Learningprofessionals think of the challenges we face in using video todeliver training, we often frame the discussion in terms of theconstraints around streaming video, the file formats we’ll use, orthe devices the viewers will use to watch it. Without question,understanding how to get content to learners is critically important.But if we want students to view and actually learn from the content,it’s equally important that we understand the language of themedium we’re using to deliver our messages.

Video is astoryteller’s medium, and, in the language of video, showing ismuch more important than telling. Using a single shot of a classroom,or an expert, or anything else for an extended period of time makeseducators seem like bad storytellers. The content of the visualmessage (people speaking) doesn’t support the actual message, whichis the subject under discussion in the video. Worse, it makes thesubject matter itself seem boring because nothing visuallyinteresting is happening on the screen.

Up to speed in 2011

The fact is, ine-Learning, we tell stories. They may be stories about how to performa task, or cautionary tales about how to behave in the workplace, butthey’re still stories. Using video to tell these stories, or tosupport them, can add richness and depth if we understand thelanguage we’re using to communicate, or can detract from themessage when we don’t. So, this year, one of my New Year’sresolutions is to learn how to speak effectively using video. Here’shoping it’s as much fun as speaking through comic strips.