Learn How to Make Better Videos

It’s a Good Idea to Just “Let ‘em Talk”

There are many ways to tell a story with video. I have written about it before. But one of my favorite ways to do this with video is with interviews. And in my opinion, weaving some interviews together in a way that develops a good story is one of the best ways to make a video. And as you probably know many modern news and documentaries (and even some films) utilize this style today.

Here is a rather humorous example of what I am talking about. It is a clip from the movie Waiting For Guffman, directed by Christopher guest. The whole movie is told through interviews. Here is one clip of what I am talking about:

The “serious” benefits of using interviews to tell the story:

Avoiding Narration
The possible pitfalls of narration are boredom and lack of quality. Most people usually find narrations stale and academic. And unless you have spent a pretty penny on a professional voice over or have a friend that can talk like Morgan Freeman, there is a high chance that your narration is going to sound cheap and from the 80’s.

A really inexpensive and easy way to get around this (which you don’t have to, but it is helpful in many cases) is to utilize an interview and let you interviewees narrate the video for you. It not only protects you from these two pitfalls, but it usually produces a better final product.

Authentic and Organic
Not only can a good set of interviews take the place of a the classic narration, but they take it’s place with style. One of the great things about interviews is that they are authentic and real. Here is this person, sitting in front of me telling a story. It doesn’t feel contrived. It’s a natural progression of history. It’s organic. It’s like the difference between a pool and a lake.

Most people in our world today like transparency and authenticity and interviews with real people satisfy that.

Easy Editing
And to get totally nitty-gritty, interview-style videos are so much easier to edit. All you have to do is lay the interviews in order, throw some b-roll on top of the footage in conjunction with the interviewee comments and you got yourself an awesome video.

This method also allows you to safety-net a video project by not trying to take a video somewhere it can’t go. Having the interviews, lets you know what and what not this video can cover. And once you have the interviews and lay them down in the order you want, 80% of the video is finished. From my experience, using interviews to tell the story of a video make editing easier and faster.

So, those are the reasons I like using interviews to tell the story of a video instead of narrations or graphics. This idea mainly applies to documentaries, news stories, and maybe promotion pieces. It’s not for everything, but my video com padre, I say take advantage of this as much as you can.

I hope this inspires and helps. Good luck.