Selecting and positioning content
Design principles around choosing and placing content.
So we’ve flown our flights.
We’ve got a lot of footage in the bag.
We need some guidelines now to help us pare down that footage into the best stuff that we can use for our editing purposes.
There are four design principles I’m going to talk through here for two of them.
I’ve developed a couple of tools to further help you meet those design principles.
So what we’re looking at here is what should I include and where should it go.
The first two design principles don’t have an associated tool with them.
The first one is this for each production you’re creating.
You should focus on a specific location or a theme and select content around that so the location might be a specific flying site that you’ve flown around or it might be something broader like beauty dramatics and sunsets or it might be surfing whatever you’re going to do it needs to have a cohesive theme that the viewers can recognize at least implicitly whilst they’re looking at this.
They’ll enjoy the video much more if it’s got a theme in it like that.
Also if you can do then focus on a specific location.
If you’re interested in your videos getting lots of YouTube recognition and search engine recognition then search engines tend to pick up specific individual locations better than they will other kind of themes.
A point closely connect to that last point is this you really want to be flying a minimum of three separate flights and have footage from those three separate flights before you start trying to edit up an individual video.
I’ll easily lose 10 or more flights for one of my three minute videos and typically the more flights that I’ve got footage from the better the video will actually be.
The second design principle around how do we choose content and where do we position it is this.
Sometimes you should select your content that tells a story.
Now I use the word sometimes because surprisingly for aerial footage where people have made videos where they follow a long story they tend to be way less popular than videos that only have stories parts as a component of the overall video production or indeed aren’t there at all.
Sometimes it makes sense to do so.
If you’re going to be doing that you’re likely to be looking at some ground footage to get that into your video or you’re going to have some footage that shows the flight path that you flew along.
This will be particularly important for instance if you’re actually showing some footage that is expressing the SPI high flight.
Dramatic is if you remember that flight dramatic is about showing the user what it’s like to have the ability to travel anywhere up into the sky in high to reach places and view details from there.
And it’s showing the passage to get there more than the details.
In that case you want some footage that tells the story of the flight path.
That’s one of the occasions where it will make sense to select your footage based on it telling a story.
Only do this some of the time though because it does not have that big an impact on the viewer.
It does have some.
So that’s why I’ve mentioned this point here.
Lifestyle Project 