Planning the Video Story

Video is the new preferred medium of storytelling. In this chapter, you will see how a video story comes to life and how Final Cut Pro assists in the planning process. When planning videos, we need to understand traditional human story types as well as other story types, such as slice-of-life, commercial, instructional, and social media. When you are planning your video, it helps to see where it fits in terms of the types of stories that are universally recognized. In this chapter, you will learn about the different types of stories and how videos can uniquely tell these stories. You will see how the most important consideration is to uncover who the intended audience is. You need to plan your story with that target audience specifically in mind by creating a persona in your mind (a persona is an archetypal person that represents a group of individuals). Throughout this chapter, you will be shown different types of video styles and how to plan for those different...

A story is a journey

Past generations learned how to write a letter or a narrative in school, but the current generation of students is learning how to create movies. Not to say that writing is not important, but the visual aspect is becoming more of a significant factor.

A story can be thought of as a journey, and no journey can start without a plan. You can’t journey anywhere without knowing where you are going. Even an off-the-cuff let’s go out today is the start of a plan. If you are the original planner of the video, your first decision is what type of story the video is going to tell. Just as in a literary composition, a video that tells a human story will be of a fixed set of story types.

Once you’ve started putting together a draft of what the video is about, it’s time to explore the different plot ideas.

What are the types of stories?

There are differing opinions on how many story types exist. Some say there are only two types of stories...

What you should remember when planning a story

You need to be aware of several factors that will affect how you plan your video. Once you understand the following information, you will find planning much easier.

Knowing your target audience

All video stories, both human and commercial ones, need to be tested for their appeal to the target audience. There is no point in trying to sell fridges to Eskimos, would be one way to put it. It’s not just who the audience is but, more importantly, the attention of the audience or how long they will watch your video. A video about politics is unlikely to hold the attention of a very young audience. A documentary on cars is unlikely to attract people who have no interest in driving.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that the target audience is only a pre-production concern. As the video editor, it is just as relevant for you to keep the persona of the target audience in mind as you progress through the edit. You may not...

Planning for different types of videos

Different types of videos will have different planning processes. The following subsections look at different types of video styles, laying out some ideas for the specific planning required.

Documentary videos

If you were involved in shooting the documentary, you would have gone through the process of defining a target audience, so you would be more aware of how the clips will be organized.

Try to arrange the media chronologically, usually according to the storyboard, which will give you a pattern to follow. You will be able to set up the footage as described in Chapter 2. In most cases, all the planning has been taken out of your hands, so after organizing the footage into categories, you will need to follow the procedures described in Chapter 4.

Interviews

When it comes to planning, and you are editing another shooter’s footage, interview videos follow similar lines to the documentary type. However, in many cases, you will...

Summary

Planning an edit is highly dependent on the target audience. Without an understanding of who will be viewing the video, you are taking a shot in the dark as to who will be interested in it. As with any story, a video is a journey that takes the viewer from one point to reach a resolution. It doesn’t matter whether the video is a drama story or a commercial video. Any story should typically have a beginning, to introduce the viewer to the story, then a middle, to inform about the object of the story, and an end, to give a resolution to the information presented in the middle of the video.

To understand the planning process, it is important to be aware of the different types of video stories and how these types should be treated during the editing process. This knowledge has its greatest need when it comes to producing videos for social media, where it is so important for the format and the aspect ratio to be fixed.

If you only take one thing away from this chapter...