A key skill of producing successful video explainers is to write visually. Often when those new to the genre focus too much on the words, thinking only about the visuals as an afterthought.
You can tell this has happened when you get “wallpaper” — visuals with little relationship to the script. For example, watch the first 30 seconds of this explainer about veganism from the Economist. As viewers, we hear about population growth, rising food demand and so on, but what we’re shown is a stream of stock footage clichés, all with little relationship to the words spoken. This is wallpaper: visuals weakly anchored to the script, added as an afterthought.
Script your visuals
If you’re scripting a video explainer, thinking about the visuals is your job, not that of the video editor, art director or someone else. Obviously, make the most of help and advice, but explainers work best when the words and pictures are integrated and this means the writer thinking about the visuals from the beginning.
One way to improve your visual writing is to use a two-column script: one column for the voice over, the other for the visuals.
If you can’t think of what visuals to show at a certain point, there are various options — a piece to camera is often one solution — but if you have lots of gaps then your film is in trouble.
Go hunting for visuals early
Are there powerful visual assets — videos, photos, graphs, maps etc — for your topic? When researching spend time looking on places like Reddit, Pinterest and Google Images for interesting visuals.
If the topic has no powerful visuals, then the obvious question is, why are you doing this as a video? Would it be better as an article or in some other format?
Choose a visual topic
I recently interviewed Phil Edwards of Vox about his process for coming up with video ideas and he talked about being strongly “asset driven”. In other words, he looked for topics that had great visuals to them. For instance, the inspiration for this film about Concorde came from finding some footage of the pop star Sting on a cross-Atlantic trip. With lots of great archive to show, he started thinking about the topic and came upon an interesting question (why did it fail?). The result is a great video explainer.
Find a visual metaphor
If your topic isn’t obviously visual another option is to find a visual analogy. One example is the famous scene in “The Big Short” when Ryan Gosling’s character explains bad debt using Jenga.
Another example is this film from the Economist featuring chess Grandmaster Gary Kasparov talking about Putin. Kasparov explains that Putin is often described as a master chess player (cue visuals of the chessboard), but Kasparov then sweeps the board aside and argues it’s better to think of Putin as a poker player. A great visual set-up and not expensive to produce!
Your visuals and voice-over must dance together
When someone watches an explainer video they are receiving two streams of information: the visuals they see and the voice-over they hear. Because a viewer can only take in so much at any moment, you need to be clear about which of these two is in the lead at each moment in your video.
At the moments when you’re showing powerful visuals, stop speaking or pare back and simplify what you’re saying. Conversely, if you’re trying to outline something complicated in the voice-over, then aim for simple visuals that support the explanation. (Again the Economist video is a good example of what not to do, with the facts about carbon and freshwater lost amongst the busy stockfootage.)
Think of the relationship between visuals and voice-over like a waltz: both sides dancing but only one in the lead at any one time.
Also, it’s important to know that if there is a conflict — busy visuals and busy voice-over at the same — it will usually be the visuals that the audience focus on.
Put your visuals at the start
If you have a visual, it often helps to introduce it early so you have something to show the audience.
As an example, compare these two paragraphs:
- “Before it was discovered in 1953, a determined group of loosely related scientists had spent years trying to discover the actual shape of DNA. These efforts finally culminated in a paper published in Nature by Jim Watson and Francis Crick, which would introduce this iconic shape to the world: the double helix.”
- “This is the double-helix. Before it was discovered in 1953, a determined group of loosely related scientists had spent years trying to discover the actual shape of DNA. These efforts finally culminated in a paper published in Nature by Jim Watson and Francis Crick, which would introduce this iconic shape to the world.”
The second option is better because we immediately have something we can show on screen — the double-helix — whereas the first option doesn’t give us something to look at until the second sentence when it mentions the 1953 paper.
Cut the details from the voice-over and put them on screen
One of the advantages of explaining something in video form is that you can put details or supporting evidence in the visuals rather than in the voice-over. This means you can summarise something quickly, knowing that viewers can pause the film and look through the details if they wish.
For instance, in the pre-titles of this explainer about seltzer we see a graph illustrating seltzer’s rise in popularity. While the script could have given the details — an “increase of 100 million gallons from 2007 to 2016” — all the narrator says is, “Here’s a chart: seltzer then, seltzer now.”
This breezy summary is enough for most of the audience and if it isn’t, they can pause the video and examine the details for themselves.
I call this technique “homework on screen” and you can find more examples here.
Consider using a contents visual
As a viewer, it can be easy to lose your place in a video. While the reader of a text article can scan the whole thing and quickly see the main headings and overall structure, that’s not the case with video.
One method to help the viewer is to use a “contents visual”, something similar to the contents page of a book that shows the upcoming chapters. This helps give the audience a sense of the structure, and if you refer back to it, a sense of the video’s progress.
For example, this video from Vox numbers four things we need to know about coronavirus charts, shown by the graphic below.
Be aware of what is easy and what is hard to animate
If you’re working with animators then remember different ideas will take more or less time to draw. For example, the line “imagine a box” is simple to animate, whereas the line, “imagine a swarm of insects”, is harder.
Often a good animator can come up with clever solutions to tricky scripts, but it’s worth bearing in mind that different visuals take different amounts of time to draw.
Script on screen
You can emphasise key moments in your script with the words of the script on screen. In a fast-paced or visually stimulating video, this can help emphasise certain points you don’t want to get lost.
