Ravi Jain: Mining the Power of Immersive, Short-Form Video

Ravi Jain , Senior Associate Director of Digital Media & Web Development at Boston College, gives the skinny on short-form video #skinnyinminny

Kicking Things Off

Boston College (BC) Minute: Final Call

Key question: How to foster audience engagement before social media?

Concept
- Episodic
  - Individual threads weaving together a tapestry
    - Get a better sense of the bigger picture as more and more episodes come together
  - Don’t try to do too much
    - Capture “the spirit”
    - Not trying to cram in tons of messages or sound bites
- Did a pilot for proof of concept
  - Faced a lot of skepticism – what can you really do in 60 seconds?
DNA of the BC Minute
- No set pieces – not a staged “let’s get students together to do XYZ because we want to show ABC” – fly on the wall observations
- No talking to the camera, no lower thirds, no text on screen/captions (“You’re here at the Psychology Lab”
- You are in the story, experiencing it
- Cinema verité

The more you can plan ahead/research, the better the end result
What is the story or message? How does this align with your content strategy?
Where will this take place? Who are the players?
What equipment will you need?
How many people do you need on your team?
Can you scout the location ahead of time?
- Environmental conditions (e.g., noise from trains, lighting, etc.)

Log, log, log
- Log your footage – see what’s there – document it!
Get to your rough cuts as quickly as possible
Work with what you have – don’t get caught up in “I didn’t get this shot!” – figure out a way to make it effective
- Channel your inner Tim Gunn and make it work
Length isn’t everything
- The story will dictate the length
- A crappy short video can be long and painful to watch
- A well crafted longer piece can fly by

For real. We just made a Vine: Doing It for the Vine