Tribute Video Book Now Available

Tribute Videos are videos that celebrate a person, couple, group, or institution. They can be engagement videos, anniversary videos, memorials, retirement videos, milestone birthday videos, company histories, leadership stories, school reunion stories, award-winner portraits, and more. They are at home in the living room, rec room, boardroom or ballroom.

Tribute videos are how I got my start. (See “AVSquad” in the links.) And they remain the most satisfying of the work that we do. There is nothing like telling a people story.

A lot of people are into video these days, some as a hobby, some as a potential profession, some as part of their job duties. There is a perception that video is easy, thanks to point and shoot miniature cameras, computer editing, and thousands of tipsters on-line telling you how easy it is and selling something– usually hardware.

But hardware is only part of the problem, and hardware and editing software are covered pretty readily via training web sites, DVD lessons, and more.

No one is training people on how to tell a compelling story. How to interview, how to move pictures, how to choose music, how to pace videos, how to get a visceral reaction from an audience!

That’s where “Tribute Videos for Love & Money” comes in.

Tribute Videos for Love & Money

It’s an ebook that details my communications beliefs and systems. If you like samples of my work, and you want to know how and why certain creative decisions were made, this is the place to start. It concentrates on the “Tribute” people story type of video, but frankly, if you can tell that kind of story, there isn’t much you won’t be able to do as you grow your capability or career.

For more information, go to videostoryschool.com.

I hope you like it and find it valuable.

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At some point in your communications career, you will be faced with writing a video script. It comes with the territory. How you respond to this distraught pleasure will say a lot about you and your understanding of visual media.

What makes writing an av script hard is not knowing how easy it can be. By the very nature of the written word for a visual medium, the key to success is less, not more.

For one thing, you’re writing to be heard, not seen. For another, the medium is a visual one, which means it prefers the pictures to do the talking. Finally, a script for video needs a lot more than just words. It has to provide visual direction, audio direction, and the essential creative blueprint that leads to the success of the project.

Let me give you an example.

Let’s say that your goal is to write a short script about a new software program that helps people track their spending. Let’s call it “Fast Money”.

It’s a simple, easy to use program which can help people budget, save, an ultimately have the money they need to fulfill their dreams.

The success of all video or audio-visual products is to engage the audience by appealing to their desires. You could talk about how “Fast Money” has been written by coders certified in C++, how it is delightful in its use of a user-friendly GUI, and how it automatically sends back error messages to “Fast Money” HQ so that the program can be constantly improved.

But you’d be talking to yourself, because the potential buyer doesn’t care about any of that. They care about money. Their money. Their life. Their future.

SO you need to create a hook. A way to start the script that talks right to them and their needs.

SO you begin writing:

ANNOUNCER: You want to make Money!    VISUAL: Picture of Dollar Bill. SOUND EFFECT: Ka-Ching. MUSIC: Money, by Pink Floyd.

Well, it’s a start, if you want to hit your audience with a sledgehammer.

But hitting audiences with sledgehammers doesn’t create intrigue. But this is often the approach an unseasoned writer will take– they’ll cover all the bases.

The good news is, luckily, you don’t need to know or present all those technical facts. What you need is a way to engage the audience on their terms.

Instead, try writing without using words– ie, skip the narrator for now and create a scene instead.

SCENE: Slow zoom in on man working at kitchen table, He has a yellow legal pad, a checkbook, and a calculator. He looks worried and is wiping imaginary sweat from his brow. A woman, his wife, walks in behind him and looks over his shoulder.

SHE: Well?

HE: It doesnt look good.

ANNOUNCER: Too familiar? It’s hard to save a buck these days.

VISUAL: Alternating closeups of Husband and Wife faces, cutaway to their checkbook showing small negative balance, cutaway to pile of bills.

Now, that was fun! Instead of a litany of facts and figures, suitable only for the engineer that developed the product, we’ve now created an emotional scenario almst anyone running a household can identify with. They’re ready to hear more.

And we didn’t use corny music, jangling cash registers, overblown prose, or dollars marching off a cliff.
Now you’re on your way to being a scriptwriter. Yes, you have to know the facts. But no, the audience doesn’t need all of them. They need reasons to care. And you’ve just given that to them.

Now, they’ll listen to more– even if there are a few facts thrown in.

For more information on this and other create techniques to make your video production life easier, see my book, “Tribute Videos for Fun and Profit”, elsewhere on this site.

Video producers are everywhere.

What was once an exclusive turf driven by hardware, capital and corporate clients is now open to anyone with a camcorder and a computer.

I’ve produced video for 35 years, and I know that the “miniaturization” trend that has lowered the price of admission can be bring both boon and boondoggle. That new video kid on the block may be a joker or a gem.

So, what if you’ve got the spark, the gear, and you want in to the business?

The gear is easy, the entry may not be.

The worlds is overloaded with companies producing video for the corporate world, and documentarians hoping to get their latest idea onto Discovery or HBO.

Both fields are too crowded, with too much price erosion and not enough opportunity.

What the aspiring video producer needs is a niche.

Wedding videos are a niche, but that is a very crowded field.

Okay, what about a niche within a niche? I’ve got one:

Tribute Videos.

What are tribute videos?

Tribute videos are documentary-style personal stories about an individual and his or her life, produced for family, company, or organization use. Trbute videos mix historical media (slides, photos, documents, film, video) and sometimes new media (video interviews) to document the impact an individual has had on his or her family, coworkers, or cause.

They are often a personal life history; sometimes they chronicle a professional life.

Why is this a rewarding niche?

Let’s define reward: There are two kinds in the video business: emotional, and monetary.

Tribute videos are full of emotional rewards. First of all, there is the reward from the audience. They applaud, cry, laugh, cheer, and thank you profusely. You often also get to know a person’s life story better than most anyone else, and the life lessons learned are also invaluable.

The other reward is monetary. As a high-niche producer, you are more apt to be able to control your financial destiny. Corporations pay for what they can’t get easily, and individuals or families will pay for a high end producer they see as a guru. Being a generic “we do anything” producer is the enemy of a decent income stream these days.

Tribute videos are work: about 100 times more work than a talking head training video or a YouTube stupid human trick. But the financial and emotional rewards are commensurate, if you know your stuff.

Tribute Videos are the perfect production and storytelling playground. To succeed, they need plenty of audio and video production prowess, but they need storytelling chops as well.

Which is why the field is still wide open. The training hasn’t been there… and some people just don’t like to work!

Which is a shame, because for me, with years of training, product, meeting, fundraising and other business video work behind me, the Tribute video remains the one niche that always satisfies and always rewards.

That’s why I’ve written a new book: Tribute Videos for Love and Money. The love is the admiration of your family, friends and coworkers. The Money… is the money you can make when you dive into this satisfying career.

But before you make it a career, you’ve got to see how you like it. My book covers the methods of making great tributes, and tells personal takes of my successes and failures.

I hope you’ll give it a try. At least visit the sight, and sign up for the free email lessons.

Slide Shows. Slide Talks. Slide-Sound Shows.

These phrases strike fear into the hip and trendy.

And why not? Say “slide show” and your brain is filled with Dad’s vacation slides or a grade school filmstrip on how to brush your teeth. Or maybe you envision an old audio-visual presentation you saw when you were a summer intern: “Improving Tolerances in the 303B Die Cut Assembly.”

But some of us know better. We know what slide shows can really be. And the first thing we need to understand is that they’re not slides, and not even powerpoint. They are moving picture presentations, tanks to today’s advanced slideshow making and video editing software.

As a baby-boom-aged audio-visual and video producer, I should know. I started out in “slides.” And the first thing I and my colleagues across the country did was try to turn the slide show into more of a “movie”— a theatrical experience.

This required sophisticated soundtracks, fade and dissolve effects (pairing two  slide projectors and a “dissolve unit”, and synchronization between sound and picture. Soon, the only thing we couldn’t do was talking heads (thankfully)— the rest was simply using the language of film… wide shot, medium shot, close-up, cutaway, rinse and repeat.

Because motion picture film was expensive, and industrial video hadn’t yet been mainstreamed, slide shows became the corporate norm through the mid-eighties.

Across the country and around the world people produced award-winning communications using slides.

Of course, once video became affordable to the corporates, that changed. But often, the video productions that replaced slide shows actually weren’t as good— why work hard when you can feature talking heads?

But people who were in the slide business adapted their hard knocks techniques to video, and produced some pretty incredible stuff. Video cameras weren’t as portable as a Nikon and a cassette tape recorder, but extraordinary soundtracks, awesome editing, and location video made for a very nice mix— a lot better than corporate talking heads.

Often, the best videos featured still photography— company histories, executive biographies, fund raising appeals. Historical materials were usually print, and fund raising can benefit from the unique emotional power a great still image or still image sequence can create.

Today, video is everywhere— affordable, digital, distributable on the web, on DVD, or on an iPod or flash drive. But a great deal of the video that is out there is “out there”— not really communications, but more real-time stupid human tricks or ego-driven monologues. We all want to be the next big thing.

And so, the thought leaders have forgotten slides, photography, still life, and historical documents.

If we need a slideshow type “thing”, we use Powerpoint, a background template, and a bunch of words and some small picture or clip art inserts. That was special 15 years ago; its not so special now.

But if you mix the editing and distribution power of digital video with the emotional language of truly great slide shows, what so you get?

Well, an award-winning PBS series or ten from Ken Burns, as an example.

A stirring tribute to the retiring head of a company.

A love story more compelling than any wedding video.

A family scrapbook with pictures, clippings, old movies, new interviews, and stirring music guaranteed to reap adoration and applause.

The satisfaction of a a job well done, and even, perhaps, a corresponding income as an independent producer.

Whether you use a slide show program, or a video editing program, slide show techniques are alive, and well, and communicating every day. Put them to work for you!

This blog– VideoStory Secrets– is intended to be a free repository of tutorials, lessons, samples, explanations, and other information regarding the art of “Video Storytelling.”

We did have a few entries already uploaded, and propagating nicely, when someone I hit– the wrong button.

Well, you know what havoc that can wreak. But it gave us a chance to enhance a few things, and develop more free offerings, which you’ll see here soon.

In the meantime, I realigned some of the website hosting, moved this from there to here and there, and here we are.

And just in time. Today, we quietly launched the sale of our book, “Tribute Videos for Love & Money”, which is really a book about how to tell a video story, or more bluntly, how to make really good videos.

It uses as it’s main examples “Tribute videos”, videos produced to tell someone’s life story, either for a company or private (personal) function.

It is 120 pages or so, generously illustrated, and is accompanied by tutorials and samples, some ready now, some ready soon.

I hope you’ll consider looking at what the book has to offer and perhaps purchasing a copy for your family video-maker, your company video people, or yourself. There are a lot of good ideas in it, and a pretty good explanation of the philosophies and structures of videomaking we have been using for the past 35 years.Go here: http://www.videostoryschool.com.

Thanks

Brien Lee.