Tell Your Story with Videos

A close-up of one of the costumes.

by Steve Meltzer

Courtesy of Handmade Business

When I was 12, I made an epic 10 second-long stop-motion animated movie using toy construction workers who pushed large alphabet blocks around to form the words "THE END." I used my father's 8 mm Bolex movie camera which could be set to take movies one frame at a time. Today, it is much easier to make videos, rather than movies, since all digital cameras and iPhones have this capability.

Despite the ease of shooting video, many artists overlook it as a tool for marketing and promoting their craft businesses. This is a missed opportunity when you consider that posting videos on platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, Daily Motion, and Google is free and gives you worldwide exposure. Videos can bring you new customers and they can actually be fun to create.

Tell Your Story

Simply pointing a camera at someone and filming them throwing a pot or making an earring is not making a good video. The key to successful videos/movies is how well they tell a coherent story with a beginning, middle, and end. Planning is critical when creating videos, and one way this is accomplished is with storyboarding. Before the first frame is shot, a filmmaker creates a storyboard, which is a cartoon outline of the video sequence-by-sequence. It shows you what you need to shoot and what order to edit them.

The way to create a good storyboard is once you have an idea for a story, write it down and then sketch out the scenes. This narrative should tell the who, what, how, when, and why of the story.

This image tells the viewer where they are.

Tips for Shooting

Still photography is about capturing a moment in time, but video is about movement in time. Videos are made up of hundreds of separate shots patched together with lots of rapid cutting between scenes. Watch a typical TV ad and count the seconds that each image is on the screen--for most it will be two or three seconds. In video, five seconds is a very long time, so I suggest shooting lots of 5-10 second sequences to edit together, rather than one very long one.

Yes, when I take video, I overshoot a lot. For my four-minute video I took over an hour of footage and then edited it down.

Avoid lots of panning and zooming. These jerky-cam shots and stunts like shooting into lights do not work well. This is one of my criticisms of my own video; I zoomed and panned a little too much. While it may be a popular technique in action movies having the scene bouncing in the frame, it is better to use a tripod and avoid most camera movement.

Whether you are using a tripod or not, make sure that you keep the camera as steady as possible while shooting. When you take video the camera's built-in microphone is "hot" and will record every sound around it. Therefore, don't move your hands while shooting, don't talk to anyone, and don't put your face too close to the camera. I made that mistake once and produced a video of a tourist attraction with a heavy breathing sound track.

How To Order A Storyboard

  1. The Title: The title tells viewers what they are about to see. In most software it is easy to create text titles.
  2. The Establishing Shot: After the title, the first images should establish where the action is taking place and can be as simple as a wide-angle pan of a street or shop.
  3. Medium shots: These are images that highlight certain parts of the overall scene in the establishing shot.
  4. People shots: These images tell the viewers who the video is about. Sometimes you can start with an image of two or three people interacting and then follow it up with shots of each individual.
  5. Detail shots: Details are always important with fine crafts and artwork; they can be shots of your work, your tools, or even your studio cat.
  6. Artists-at-work action shots: People enjoy watching "backstage" images that take them into the process of making art. Or, as in the case of my video shows, it takes them backstage to illustrate the preparations for an event.

Get the Right Editing Software

Video needs to be edited as much, if not more than still photographs. After all, cutting down an hour of footage to three or four minutes takes a lot of work.

There are several very useful movie editing programs that make editing easy, even for beginners. In particular, I'd suggest that you investigate Microsoft's Movie Maker software (a free download) which is a powerful program that is quite intuitive to use. It is capable of some very sophisticated work, such as adding fades and animations, adjusting color and brightness scene-by-scene, and adding music or narration sound tracks. Once you've made your video, Movie Maker lets you save it in any one of several file sizes for different uses.

Other popular editing programs include Adobe Final Cut ($300), CyberLink PowerDirector ($75), Corel Video Studio ($100), and Adobe Premium Pro ($240).

Narration, music, or both are very important in video. They hold the short scenes together and give the video a feeling of unity. In my fashion video, when I pieced together the same ambient sound of the event, it became a very annoying noise so I added a music soundtrack over the background sound to cover it up.

These are images of the models and clothing taken during the shot.

Save and Post to Your Audience

How you save your video depends on where you will be posting it, who you want to be able to see it, and how people can access it. Within most editing software there are several options for saving video files. For viewing on a high-definition TV or Facebook, Google+, and YouTube, I saved it as a 1920 x 1080 pixels (.mp4) HD video file, which used about 175MB for each minute of video, making the whole video file about 612MB. I could have also saved the .mp4 at smaller file sizes, such as 854 x 480 pixels or 426 x 240 pixels to make it easier to view on a phone or to email.

When posting a video, remember to add as many keywords as the host site will allow. Once you've posted it, send links to all your friends and customers. Share it widely and suggest that others share it too.

Like learning any skill, you will probably struggle to produce your first video. Once you get familiar with your camera and editing software, making videos will be easier--and perhaps when you see your videos, you might just fall in love with filmmaking and storytelling. I know, because it happened to me when I was very young.

These are images of the models and clothing taken during the shot.

Check out Steve's video he created in October 2016 of a wearable art/textile fashion show held at a local art center.
www.handmade-business.com/stevemeltzervideoexample/

"The problem I encountered is that I had no control over the lighting, the sequence of events, or even what to expect from moment-to-moment," explains Meltzer. "Faced with a lack of control, I simply took lots and lots of footage--almost two hours of video--and afterwards I created the storyboard from my memory of what went on."I also got a little creative with the video; in the opening sequence, rather than using a wide establishing shot, I began with medium and close-up images. I showed the models in the dressing room excitedly preparing for the show, and followed that with footage of the photographers anticipating the arrival of the models. Only then do we see models, clothing, and the show itself. I ended the video with the scene of the models and designers coming out to the applause of the audience."

A Video Glossary
  • MP4 (.mp4) is the file extension for most video. For your first forays in video, I would suggest setting your camera to .mp4 since it is easier to use in most editing software and it is the file type that most video platforms work best with.
  • AVCHD (Advanced Video Coding High Definition) is another video format designed for high-definition video. It uses a disc structure designed for Blu-ray discs and is found in cameras manufactured by Sony, Panasonic, and Canon. While you can shoot AVCHD files, the somewhat smaller .mp4 files are easier to work with for online videos.
  • HDTV is high-definition TV--the digital TV system that has replaced analog television. The HDTV screen is made up of millions of pixels and typically has a resolution of 1280 × 720 pixels (or 1920 × 1080). It can display images with far more detail, better color, and sharper images than old sets. The new 4K video standard for broadcast production is twice as large as HDTV with a horizontal resolution of about 4,000 pixels, making it much sharper.


Business and Marketing Articles View All