How to do Video Interviews: Crafting Your Video Message

Part 4: How to Craft Your Video Message

Got a junk drawer?

Yup.

Everybody has one.

Got a few seconds?

Go ahead– open it up.

What do you see?

Wait.

Don’t tell me.

Junk, right?

Now let me ask you something.

What if you eliminated the stuff you never used?

What would be left?

Only the things that matter, right?

Eliminating the clutter from your interview is a lot like eliminating the clutter from your junk drawer

Finding out what you want from the interview requires getting rid of what you don’t want. Getting rid of what you don’t want (the “junk”) leaves you with the most important part; the core message you want to communicate to your audience.

So now what?

You’ve got your transcript in your hands

You’re itching to discover the core message and start shaping your script. How do you find the core message in a sea of words?

Let’s create a scenario.

Let’s say you’ve interviewed three customers

And let’s say each customer has generated about six pages of content.

That’s 18 pages of words.

Whoa, that’s a lot of words!

How do you begin dealing with 18 pages of words?

It’s easy.

You begin by organizing your content.

Without organizing your content, your brain goes into a tizzy trying to figure out the final script. Figuring out the final script is simply a matter of eliminating the confusion. You begin by creating a “paper edit.”

What’s a “paper edit?”

A paper edit is your “video on paper.” The “video on paper” represents your interview selections arranged in the order of the video– you edit on paper before you edit in video.

The paper edit allows you to rearrange your message easily and quickly– saving lots of time (and probably money) in the edit session. How do you create a paper edit?

Four simple steps to create a paper edit:

Photocopy the transcript.
Highlight all the interesting answers.
Cut out the highlighted answers.
Select the best answers.

1. Photocopy the transcript

The first step in the paper edit process is to photocopy all the transcripts. Copy everything, keeping your original safe somewhere. Copying the transcripts lets you be creative and a bit messy when you make notes on the copies.

2. Highlight all the interesting answers

Grab about five different colored highlighters. There’s a trick in this highlighting process. The trick is to use a different color for each main idea. So if you have several answers relating to “our competitive edge,” then highlight (or bracket or circle) those answers in red, for instance.

Let’s say you highlight the answers about “how we got started” in green. And the answers about “our future” in blue. Each topic gets a different color.

Got your highlighters ready? Got your video player ready, too?

Cue up the video interview to the beginning.

Play the video and read the transcript while the video is playing.

As the interview is playing, listen carefully. Any answer where you think, “Oh, that’s great,” is your cue. Highlight or put brackets around that quote. At this point, don’t be too picky in your selections; it doesn’t have to be the perfect answer. Just mark-up any interesting quotes you think might have a chance of being in your final video.

If you just read the transcript without watching the video, you may select quotes that look fine on paper but don’t come across well in the video (for any number of reasons). So, yeah, play the video and mark-up what might be a great quote for the video.

When you’ve finished playing the interview, you’ll now have a transcript marked up in different colors with all the favorite quotes you’ll consider using in your final video.

Repeat this process with all your interviews.

3. Cut out the highlighted answers

Remember that junk drawer? Remember how you cleaned it out and you were left with things that you really wanted? It’s time to do the same with these quotes. It’s time to eliminate the clutter so you are left with the most valuable answers.

Cut out all the quotes you highlighted

Be sure to include either the time-code or the counter time with each quote.

What do you do with the answers you cut out?

Find a table and lay out your answers.
Start arranging the answers to tell a story.
Keep moving the answers around to see what works best.

Hidden within those quotes sprawled out on your table is your story, your final script.

4. Select the best answers

How do you select the best answers? By reading the answers over and over. It’s a bit like putting a puzzle together. Keep studying the answers. Part of what’s happening now is the brain is getting familiar with this new territory. At first, the territory feels a bit awkward. Once you become familiar with the material, certain answers will pop out more than others .

5. Arrange the best answers into a final script

You’re familiar with the answers. You’ve started to weed out the clutter. You’re now left with the “best of the best.” Arrange the answers so your message follows the “arc” if you used that as a starting point. If you didn’t use the arc, that’s fine; arrange the quotes so the beginning feels interesting, perhaps even a bit mysterious. Move to the middle with your main points and end with a call to action.

Many videos incorporate additional footage complementing the interviews

This additional footage supports the interview and gives meaning and context to a sequence of quotes. This additional footage is commonly referred to as “B-roll.”

For instance, if your interviewee is talking about expanding their operations by building a new facility, you could show photos or video of the building being constructed along trucks unloading equipment, etc.

If you plan on incorporating B-roll into your video, you could use 3 x 5 index cards to write your B-roll scenes. Each scene gets an index card.

In the example above you could have one card saying “Construction”

You can take the idea a step further. If the element has three distinct scenes, each scene could have its own card, like this:

“Moving lab equipment in”
“Building outdoor testing facility”
“Opening day ceremonies”

Now insert these cards where appropriate in your paper edit

Note: you can also do this entire process electronically. For instance, you can copy the transcript file and save it as a new document. Then highlight the sections in your new document with different colors. Finally, cut and paste those highlighted quotes to another new document, creating a first draft of your final script. Now you can move the different sections around till you like the sequence.

The paper edit is a great “hands on” method still used today by many filmmakers. If the paper edit isn’t your cup of tea, feel free to switch to the electronic form.

Congratulations. You now have a final script!

All the quotes might fall into place to create a smooth, free-flowing message.

Did you say free-flowing? You mean you’re stuck?

On the other hand, your quotes might not be so free flowing.

You might notice something is missing between the answers.

What’s missing?

What’s missing is something called “connectors.”

Connectors are like bridges

A bridge makes a physical connection between two points. As you’re arranging your answers, you may notice a gap between one answer and another that needs connecting: you need a way to “bridge” the two ideas.

You can’t connect one idea to the next with a quote

Unfortunately, sometimes your interviewee didn’t say anything you could use to bridge the two ideas. This happens from time to time. Your guest didn’t give the answer correctly or they didn’t give you a complete answer. They may have given an answer that was completely different from what you expected.

How do you fix this gap?

Use a simple text graphic to connect the ideas

A graphic with a few words (ideally, no more than six) is the easiest way to connect two ideas if you can’t connect them from your interviewee. Using titles also serves to break up the video visually; it gives the eyes a break from seeing the same things over and over.

Here’s an example

Let’s say you’ve just launched a new product. You’d like to capture a 90-second (or so) video testimonial about the product from one of your customers. This short video will stand by itself (or it may be integrated into a longer video with other testimonials).

Note: In this example, we’ll use the regular, everyday time counter which will look like this on your transcript: 00:25:12 (0 hours, 25 minutes, 12 seconds)