How to Shoot Vacation Video that Won’t Bore People to Death

Vacation videos suck, unless you follow these tips.

How to shoot vacation video

When I was a kid, the Armbrusters had a slide projector.  Which meant that after every vacation they took, we’d troop dutifully to their house for endless carousels of badly-shot Kodachrome slides, narrated  live.  The slide show always seemed longer than the vacation itself.  Washed-out, badly composed views of Disneyland or Paris—dotted here and there with the back of the head of someone we knew.

Today technology has changed everything.  People can record hours of vacation video on a single chip. But they don’t trap you in their living rooms anymore. Instead they find you at work, at parties, on … Read the rest

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The Curse of the Inactive Hero: Lessons from “Ant-Man and the Wasp”

A hero is who your story is about. A mute woman rescuing a monster she loves, a lawyer facing down the bigotry of his 1930s community to save a man’s life, a woman of color who wants to do math for NASA to save a mission– all great heroes. They each take big risks and strong actions. Seeing how that action turns out for them is what pulls us through the story.

Generally speaking, the stronger the hero and the tougher the odds they face, the better the story. Which is why superheroes, who are larger than life by … Read the rest

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Just Don’t: 6 Ways NOT to Shoot Video Interviews

I’ve written a lot about how to shoot video interviews (here, here and here, for example) but not a lot about how NOT to shoot video interviews. Here are some advanced “don’t do this” tips for you to go out and not do immediately:

1.  Don’t tell them what to say.  In commercial focus groups a few years back, we showed two different sets of “testimonial” type spots.  One set featured absolutely real people, who said real things about the product.  The other featured people saying more positive things about the product, but they were actors, and … Read the rest

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