Call it what you will – a documentary, a testimonial, a hero’s story – we love to hear tales about triumph and tragedy. When one person takes on a challenge and succeeds (or fails) we love to watch and share in her experience.

This type of video can take longer than an hour to shoot because you may need to follow a character around a bit. It can also take just a few minutes.

Thanks to YouTube, the world has unprecedented access to the cat video canon, and through our research we found one that elegantly exemplifies the hero tale in its simplest form.

An Unexpected Hero

Now, think for a moment about the last time someone started telling you about their cat. Even if you’re a cat lover, you know it’s at best a 50/50 chance you’ll be bored to tears a minute into someone else’s cat story. More people will spontaneously and passionately tell more boring stories about cats than almost anything on earth. (Dreams and children come first to mind.) Why are Maru’s struggles compelling? Even a dog owner can’t help rooting for him, at least a little.

The Hero’s Journey

In 1949, Joseph Campbell released “The Hero With A Thousand Faces” in which he outlined his theory of the hero myth. Essentially, Campbell identified the structure of almost every tale from Ulysses to Star Wars.

Almost universally (and I’m really reducing this), a hero begins in an ordinary world, receives a call to enter a strange world, faces trials, and then returns home to improve the world. Amazingly, this can be even further reduced to a simple formula anyone can follow to tell a good story.

In the case of Maru and the Box:

1) Introduce the Hero: This is Maru. He is inquisitive and cute.

2) Introduce a Challenge: This is a box. Maru absolutely has to get into that box!

3) Show the Struggle: He tries climbing on the table to jump higher. He fails.

4) Vanquish the Challenge: He pulls out a gun and shoots the box. (You watched the video right?)

You can describe almost anything that’s ever happened to any person using this formula. Just stick to the formula. There are two problems people often encounter when trying to follow this formula.

1) Adding unnecessary details to “fill out the story.”

People often want to add things that aren’t in the formula because they are afraid their story won’t make sense without it. For example, you could get hung up explaining to the viewer why the hero’s challenge matters. Don’t do it. If your hero is passionate about their determination to overcome the challenge, the viewer will except any explanation you give them–if you even bother to give them one. For example: What was the gold stuff in the case in Pulp Fiction? What was E.T.’s ship doing on earth in the first place? Why did Maru have to get in the box? The more you explain your story, the more time you give your viewers to wonder “Do I believe this?” Give them nothing.

2) Thinking their industry is too technical/specialized/boring to make a good story–even with Joseph Campbell’s formula .

This is not true. Ever. The more technical/specialized/boring your industry is, the lower the bar your story has to get over–for the right viewer. That’s because the smaller your niche is, the fewer stories your video has to compete with. When the right viewer watches your hero video they are going to be so excited to see a story about something they care about they won’t care if it’s perfect. They’re going to feel like you wrote a song about them. That’s the best!

For example, check out the tale of the Kenmore 90 series Washing Machine and the Broken Coupler:

Was that amazing or what? Did you watch the whole thing? The first time I saw it I watched it at least five times. Let me break down the story:

1) Introduce the Hero: This is Weston. He thinks he is “handy.”

2) Introduce the Challenge: This is Weston’s Kenmore series 90 washing machine. It stopped producing clean clothes and now makes only a bad sound.

3) Show the Struggle: Repairmen are expensive. (Weston is also “frugal.”) It is impossible to compare the sound he hears the machine making to the sound the repair blogs write about.

4) Vanquish the Challenge: Weston fixes the machine with a couple of wrenches and his bare hands. (and a laptop looping the above video)

The only thing more powerful than a video that tells a great story by itself is a video that helps viewers tell the story that matters to them.

Have you ever heard someone sing a song or read a poem about something small that you knew a lot about like your school or your work or your family or you? It didn’t matter that it was terrible because it was about something you cared about. In fact, it was even better that it was terrible because it meant someone cared enough about what you cared about to risk looking stupid singing a song they wrote about it.

We’ve all (hopefully) heard someone tell a story that had us catching ourselves holding our breaths at parts and laughing out loud at others. You’ve likely also had the experience of trying to re-tell a great story you heard to a friend only to have them stare blankly at you and say something like, “So they couldn’t find the right printer paper, but then they found it.”

From the smallest feline to intergalactic cowboys, heroes come in all shapes and sizes. We’ve been telling stories about them for a very long time. By integrating this classic structure into your videos, you not only help your viewers solve their problems, but you help them become a hero as well.

The “how-to” video is the quintessential video for content marketing. By creating a video that solves a problem around a particular keyword set you not only show yourself off as a thinker but you create extra inbound marketing bait.

How To Write A How To Video

Choose Your Topic

This is probably the most important part of the process. Have you identified a solution to a problem that you’ve haven’t found online yet? Are you looking to get some traffic around a particular set of keywords? Take some time and research YouTube for videos about topics that are important to your audience. Look at the competition and see if there are some gaps they haven’t covered yet. You may discover that you have the opportunity to build an entire channel that didn’t exist before. If you’re SEO savvy, do some keyword research using your favorite tool and see which terms are the most searched in your area. If there are 200 searches a day for “make organic dog food” and you do just that, you may have found your topic.

Choose A Catchy Title

Good Ol’ Fashioned copywriting rules apply here when you’re choosing a title. You want it to be mind-tingling and SEO friendly so that both your audience and Google love it. Consider using the Cracked.com formula of headline writing – “Number Adjective Noun That Noun Verb”. Really. It’s a successful formula. You can also use “How To” in your title. If someone sees that they’re going to believe they’re going to learn something.

Introduction

Keep this simple and straightforward. Introduce yourself, who you’re with and then tell us what you’re going to do. Shoot this as a separate segment so that you can get it right. Afterward, you’ll be able to edit it in to your clip.

List of Supplies

If you’re doing something complex, you’ll often have a list of supplies that your viewer will need to gather. Remember that people consume content differently, so rather than only taking shots of each item for your video, consider itemizing the list in your blog post.

Storyboarding

When you’re designing the video, it helps to break out your story into its component parts.

Video: Obviously, video is best for conveying action and dialogue. Which shots do you want to use for this video?

Images/Graphics: Which images convey your message. Will you be using photos or are you better served with drawings that you can cut in.

Text: Which pieces of text can you use? This will probably come in the form of titling or may be even itemized lists in your video.

Audio: You want to be heard. You’ll need a voice. You’ll may also need music and sound effects. Consider where they may go in your clip.

Shooting The Steps

You have a couple of options here for shooting your how-to video.

Shoot all at once: Shoot your entire video at once so that you get a nice continuous piece of audio and video to use in your timeline. Audio is a critical piece of the video since you’ll use it to structure the story. Various shots can be added as needed if you have a solid structure.

Shoot in segments:Record each step of your “how-to” video individually. Doing it this way insures that each piece is polished as possible. Plus it keeps you in the flow of each segment giving you confidence each time you repeat yourself.

B-Roll

In order to keep things lively, you’ll need b-roll. That is you’ll, need individual shots of either your materials or separate closer, detailed shots of you working on something. You’ll add these shots into your timeline to give your audience something to look at besides just a long speech on fixing washing machines.

In this post, we show you how to shoot a video book review that shouldn’t break your already stretched time commitments. You can download the pdf over at Scribd. We’ll be improving the package as we add more posts to this series for the folks over at @SMBAustin.

How Long Does It Take To Create A Video Book Review?

Here’s a rough sketch of the time it takes me to do a video book review. Your time commitment will depend on how much you put into post-production.

Maximum, I spend 2 hours on book review. That includes uploading. If you’re a better multi-tasker you’ll get these things knocked out more quickly – literally in 5 – 10 minutes without a lot of post.

Read the book: This depends on your style.
Get Your Bullets: 15 minutes
Shoot The Review: 5 – 10 Minutes
Edit: 5 -15 minutes
Export and Compress: 10 – 12 Minutes
Upload: Up to 60 minutes depending on file size
Tagging/Descripting: 5 Minutes
Writing Blog post : 10 Minutes
Transcribing: 2 Minutes
Scribd: 3 – 5 Minutes

Shoot Fast and Genuine

Keep your book reviews short and to the point.

People tend to stop watching videos that are over 1:30 long as it is. You want to speak from the heart, but only say the 3 – 4 things that you really want people to know about the book.

For examples of people who do it well, take a look at www.chrisbrogan.com and read Chris Ming Ryan. Chris is a professional storyteller and offers great insight on how to keep things zipping along.

Also check out Brand Autopsy’s dramatic readings, they’re definitely a different spin on the genre.

To reduce time, I also shoot with a Canon HV40 right into iMovie on my laptop. This keeps me from having to record to tape and then import later. I despise iMovie for editing and move into Final Cut Express when there’s real work to be done, but it’s great for getting the video shot quickly.

Shoot With A Microphone

You don’t HAVE to shoot with a microphone, but it sure sounds a whole heck of a lot better. On camera mics are terrible. Plus, people will stick around if they can hear you.

I’ve been using the Audio Technica ATR-3550. It’s wired, easy to use and produces a sound good enough for a quick book report.

Transcribe

Not everyone wants to watch your whole review. They may just want to skim it.

Transcribing your videos not only helps your readers consume your content the way that is easiest for them, but helps seed your post with fresh, SEO tuned content.

I’ve been using SpeakerText with some great results. For $20, you can get several videos transcribed. They usually cost me .33 to $1.50 a piece depending on how verbose I am. Another reason to keep things pithy.

One warning, SpeakerText is in BETA and at times it can take a while for them to find your YouTube video. Don’t get too addicted to the juice just yet – they’re still working out the kinks. UPDATE: Matt Mireles, CEO SpeakerText, and Bjiorn Liljequist were extremely fast and helpful in fixing the problems I had.

Distribute, Distribute, Distribute

It’s all about production and reach these days. While YouTube is your most trafficed video site out there, I highly recommend that you try TubeMogul for launching your book reviews. This can take some time to set up, but you’ll be happier when you see your shining face show up in random places.

Remember that distribution doesn’t just mean video – you’ve created a lot of text-rich content as well. I like to use www.sribd.com to load up my transcriptions and build links back to my videos.

Tell the Authors

More social media savvy authors will already be listening for mentions of their books. Be sure to tell Twitter what you’ve just created and there is a good chance that the author will comment, respond and even debate with you about your points.

Conclusion

So that’s it. The trick is to just get the video up and work your way into your own style. As you produce more content, you’ll develop patterns that will help you move along more quickly.

In this clip, @Talmadge shows you how to convert the h.264 codec from the Zi8 into an Apple Intermediate Codec that plays well if Final Cut Express using a free tool called MPEG Streamclip. This should cut your render times way down and give you more time doing the creative video work that you really love.

Why You Have To Render Files From The Zi8 Into Final Cut Express

The Zi8 records video to the h.264 codec which is a finishing format, not really a production format. It’s great for sending files up to YouTube, but not good for editing. Plus Final Cut Express only supports DV, HDV, and AVCHD footage, so in order to work with a file from the Zi8, you have convert the file to something that it supports natively.

The Zi8/Final Cut/MPEG Streamclip Solution

1) Download MPEG Streamclip from Squared5. It’s free.

2) Import your file from the Zi8.

3) Open your file in MPEG Streamclip. File > Open Files.

4) Convert your file to Quicktime. File > Export To Quicktime

5) Choose these settings:
Compression: Apple Intermediate Codec
Quality 100%
Frame Size: 1920×1080 (HDTV 1080i) or whatever you shot in
Click Make Movie

6) After you have your movie, bring it into FCE and you’re done!

Check out VideoCamp Austin for more tips on becoming a faster, more creative web video storyteller.

The personal injury attorneys at Morris, Craven and Sulak, LLP in Austin, TX are some of the most experienced in the Central Texas Region. For over 30 years they have handled all types of injury claims, including product liability, trucking and automobile collisions, construction accidents, medical negligence, premises liability, unfair insurance practices, and employment discrimination and sexual harassment, as well as other cases involving serious injury and death.