One of the things I like to do, when I’m not making videos, is helping fellow YouTube creators out by offering criticism of their videos. On forums like Reddit or Yttalk, there are areas where creators can post links to their videos and request feedback. Sometimes the feedback request is about specific parts of the video making process (“Critique my editing skills,” for instance), but for the most part, it’s just general feedback. Did you like the video? What would you improve?
The main thing I keep telling creators who upload their videos is to really focus on what you’re telling the audience. It seems that, in creating videos, many creators want to throw everything they have at any given concept, which can lead to a lot of digression and wasted viewing time before you get to the joke, or the information, or the review that you clicked on the thumbnail to see.
A good example of tight storytelling would be fairy tales. Fairy tales are generally pretty short and almost always have a lesson buried within the context of a fantastical story. So you may have a princess who is disgusted by a frog, but then she is convinced to kiss him, and he turns into a fabulous prince! The reason for this story? You can’t judge someone by their outward appearance, or everyone has something you don’t know about them.
A fairy tale about a princess and a frog won’t start with details about the princess’ ladies-in-waiting and how they all gossiped about the events of the day. The story of Cinderella doesn’t care about the next-door neighbor who digs wells for the village. What a fairy tale does, in about the same length of time as an average YouTube video, is tell a story that has a moral, and then move on.
When approaching your videos, think about what you want your audience to come away with. If someone asked a viewer, “What’s that video about?” don’t make it too difficult to give a one-line answer. “It’s a funny video,” you may say, “About these people who….go places and do things and there’s a scene….” you’ve already lost your viewer.
Editing isn’t just something you do with your video clips. Editing starts at the story level, and the more laser-focused you can get about the point, the moral, the lesson, or the story in any given video, the more successful you’ll be.
