So, you have a big and complicated story that you want to tell to employees within your company, to potential customers or perhaps to the whole world. How do you package that? With a whiteboard film of course! But how we make complex information understandable? Here’s an explanation in five steps.
Plans and ambitions
Let me take you to the first appointment with a client. To that intense moment we experience again and again. Imagine: there they are, the colleagues of the company that wants a movie, with all their plans and ambitions. They want to tell this in the video, and this, and this! We have to help them come back to earth: in a three-minute film there are only 400 words of voice-over text. That’s not much.
The heart of the matter
Is that bad? No. It’s often good. It forces you to get to the heart of the matter, to get a clear picture of what you actually want to say. Are you warming up to the idea? Don’t worry, you don’t have to do it alone, we can help.
So if you want to make complicated information understandable in a whiteboard video, step 1 is: get to the heart of the matter.
Inspire
Step 2 is this: realize that a whiteboard video is ideally suited to inspire and motivate. Informing the viewer is a less important goal – with a few exceptions. Why? Viewers of a video don’t remember everything that’s said. What lingers is a certain feeling – involvement, inspiration, emotion.
Suppose you want to introduce a new configuration management system to your employees. The detailed description can be put in a manual, but the video is for the viewers to get a sense of how great the new system is.
Show it
Then we come to step 3: be as specific as possible. With inspiration and motivation you might think of grand abstract terms. But here’s a wonderful principle – even if you want to inspire – show don’t tell: don’t name something directly, but describe it. Instead of saying “The bike route is fantastic”, describe that route, how the road feels, what fantastic things there are to see, to hear, to smell. So that the viewer himself thinks: How fantastic!
Examples work very well here. That is why in our videos we often work with a few case studies or characters. We tell the viewer a story. By putting the information in story form, we bind the viewer to us, and then say: there are many more examples or possibilities.
Experience it
Finally step 4, actually the most important one: if you want to reach a group, you have to know what their perception is. With what feeling or prior knowledge do they watch the video? What appeals to them, what do they find important, what inspires them, what do they encounter, what are they sensitive to?
Better images than blabber
And our magic step 5 is of course: make it visual. There is a lot of research that shows that people understand pictures much faster and remember them better than text, whether written or spoken.
In this way you can offer the most complex material in an attractive and easily accessible manner.
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