Training Videos
I recently read this article about boring corporate videos and it reminded me of a time when I was studying at the University of Minnesota and had a job at a store in the Mall of America. I remember how uninteresting the job training was. It was a typical corporate welcome package with probably one of the most boring training videos I've ever seen--one person speaking in monotone, looking directly at the camera, with a few poorly edited cut-away shots of the CEO.
I pursued a career in the entertainment industry after graduation, with video production as my chief aspiration. I wrote screenplays, helped produce shorts, and got busy running small production houses. After nearly two years living and working in Los Angeles, California, I was offered a job with a marketing company in the Washington, D.C. area as their video expert for a series of videos. I realized that the world of training videos had changed. Gone were the days of talking heads and monotone speakers. Ushered in was a new era of clients making demands that their training videos be creative, compelling, and interesting enough that their employees would actually watch them. We hired actors, we wrote storylines, we developed characters, we employed the use of fully staffed film crews, and we shot on locations to get the most resonant, realistic feel we could manage. These videos were sometimes funny, sometimes serious, sometimes relatively clinical, but the common thread was that they were worth watching.
There’s a lot to be said for people aspiring to work in the entertainment industry taking jobs creating corporate, commercial, and government training videos. It’s a great training ground for honing skills. There are a lot of people who can dream up characters in faraway worlds or dramatic roles that we might see on the silver or small screen, but to come up with the same quality story and characters for a video about common-sense safety measures, or a company’s sexual harassment policy? That takes some doing. Some talent. And some serious skill.
Cinematography as a Communication Tool
I remember my first video shoot. I was quite young running through a field with my cousin and my dog fleeing from the pursuit of an imaginary prehistoric elephant with at VHS camcorder on my shoulder. Eat your heart out “Blair Witch”! I was shooting handheld in 1989!
Jump-cut to today and hundreds of client projects later: dramas, documentaries, comedies, commercials, learning videos, instructional material and short films; every opportunity holds a lesson for the next. For example, running through a field at the age of 16 from imaginary beasts taught me that what you do show is as compelling as what you do not show in order to suspend disbelief and move the narrative forward.
In many situations your budget often dictates your set, your number of actors, any effects or treatments, the scope of the shoot or handling of the topic, even the length of the material. As a cinematographer, your worth is not simply found in how well you frame your shot but in your ability to communicate what is going on within the shot or imply action outside of the point of view. You can create a much larger world through many kinds of visual and audible inferences. This way you can keep the budget under control while helping visually support a larger idea without actually building out larger sets or hiring many more actors.
In the next blog post I will talk about making your visuals larger than life by incorporating background sound tracks (think: you only have two people in the waiting room and you want the room to sound much bigger and busier). Instead, for this blog entry I was thinking I could recommend a few good books to help you with your shot composition. Here we go:
Cinematic Storytelling: This is a great place to start. The author examines the work of some of the most powerfully cinematic directors and cinematographers in film. This is an excellent book if you want to simply expand your cinematic vocabulary.
The Five C’s of Cinematography: No cinematographer (or Director) should be without this reference. This book takes you through your shots and outlines how the angles and perspectives communicate different messages and evoke certain emotions.
Master Shots: From composition to movement and perspective, this book helps you master the use of 100 different techniques behind any camera. The emphasis of this book is the honing of your art so that you can create “big production” shots on a smaller budget shoot by focusing on how cinematography communicates and moves the story forward.
DSLR Cinema: If you have joined the HDSLR video revolution now underway, this is a priceless book created to help you control and achieve a much costlier “film look” in your video project.
This should get your started. And remember to take the time after each shoot to take down “shot” notes. If you want to improve the quality of your work, taking the time to critique your own technique is priceless.
