Training & educational videography
Training videos are unique in their own way, with special considerations compared to other videos. These videos need certain elements to keep your audience’s attention while helping them learn how to do something being taught in the video. When it comes to creating an instructional video, your focus should be on limiting the objectives to four or five at most. Overdoing it may not help your Chicago video production efforts and may confuse or overload the viewer.
Training videos need to contain step-by-step instructions for your audience to do or learn something with the confidence that they’ll do it in the right manner. The best instructional videos follow a tight format and giving your audience just enough ‘entertainment’ to retain their interest, while achieving the main objective of giving them information and guidance.
What You Should Consider
Know your audience
Knowing your audience should be your prime consideration when it comes to making a training video.
Who is your audience and what interests them?
What skills and interest levels will compel them to watch your program?
How interested are your viewers?
What is the age of your viewers and their education level?
Clarify your objective
What are your objectives? What do you want your training video production to achieve? Does your program achieve your objective? Does it serve the purpose it was meant for? What’s your targeted running time? Choose a good target length, subdividing into segments if necessary, since the human attention span is limited.
Determine the video duration
Determine your content’s scope and density, that is, the level of instructional detail as well as time allotted.
If the video is a training of a simple technique, limit it to 2-5 minutes if possible. Remember, brevity is the soul of wit! The shorter, the better.
For an instructional video with more skills to teach and greater involvement, you can keep its duration to around 30 minutes. However, it will help to break it into small segments of 3 to 5 minutes each, so that the viewer has some breathing time between steps.
For any longer than a 30-minute how-to-video, break it into 2 or more training videos.
To increase retention, you can build in breaks, stop the video and let them implement the ideas they were just trained in, give them a quiz and build in other activities to break things up.
Background and lighting
You don’t need an elaborate set for all instructional videos. In fact, a too busy background could distract your viewer’s attention from the subject. It will help to keep the background simple. Neutral shades for the background are great for a training video. Make use of even lighting. Unlike a marketing video, simple is better, as you don’t want to distract from what is being taught. Then again, it has to be interesting enough to retain interest.
Add simple graphics
No doubt, graphics that are easy to read are a crucial part of any instructional video. An opening graphic tells viewers what you are demonstrating while a closing graphic tells the audience where to click for more information or summarizes what they have just learned. Avoid using a background that is too busy with wild graphics. Bullet point graphics are easy to read and can be better used for emphasizing steps in your Chicago video production project.
