Timing: Don’t Get It Twisted
Jess and Jenni covered a portion of the workshop that will help to keep your viewers captivated and retained; timing.
Runtime is how many minutes a viewer will spend watching the entirety of a video. Timing is the beat and tempo of the context of that video that will help them ignore, entirely how “long” a video will be.
Tackling Timing While Filming
Speak three-times faster than you would in real life.
People will hang with your pauses in real life - not so much on video.
Fully scripting or making a bulleted list of what you want to talk about will help streamline your thought-to-speech process.
Most of us speak very slowly. By forcing yourself to laugh for 15-30 seconds before you press record, you’re energizing yourself and your intonation/speaking speed.
Keeping It Rolling In Post Production
Online video will ultimately be consumed most by people with, what Jess refers to as, an inter-gnat attention span. This makes it that much more important that from the moment they decide to press play on your video, they’re glued to the context of what they’re watching.
One of the best parts about pulling your footage into whatever software you choose to use is getting to piece it all together with transitions. Now post-production is also the ability for you to develop a style for your video.
Jump cuts aren’t a transition option reserved for comedic timing. For example an at-camera, anecdotal vlog can maintain viewer attention with the use of jump cuts, too. A common misconception I’ve heard from peers about jump cuts and their aversion to them is that they feel it takes away from the connectivity of natural speech. A sloppy edit job that makes the vocal structure too tight can definitely be a turn off.
This is one of those moments where you’re going to need to get used to the sound of your own voice though. Listening to the audio outside of yourself, as if you’re a stranger or a friend watching and listening will be key to this one. Think about how you might get bored listening to someone telling you a story in person because of the pauses and breaks between thoughts. With video we have the opportunity to create the connectivity of a scenario like that but control the speed of delivery.
There are also transition styles like swipes and fades that can add visual dimension to your content, but being conscious of these having tight timing continues on with the concept of keeping things moving. (This is the part of the workshop where Jess did a badass twirl and didn’t fall down. You best believe that was the first report she gave her mom when she called to tell her how the workshop went.)
In video, a 2-second transition can seem like 2 minutes in real life time.
