Once you have your finished audio file and have created, collected, and edited the images you need, you’re ready to start producing your video.
The five tenets of Smarthistory video production:
- Show what is said
- Keep it moving
- Invite close looking
- Design counts
- Minimize distractions
To help you see how these principles (explained in detail below) are applied in Smarthistory videos, we have annotated two of our own: the Seated Scribe and Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein.
Note: Don’t expect to make a good video in an afternoon. We spend a lot of time (sometimes several days) on image search, good design, and thinking about how to illustrate our audio clearly and succinctly.
1. Show what is said
Ideally, every detail discussed in the audio should be explicitly shown in the video, using closeups, text or visual annotations, or additional images. We assume that our viewers have no prior knowledge of the work, movement, artist, historical context, or of any specialized vocabulary. The idea is to support what is being said, and not distract from it. Our model is an instructor leading learners through a work of art in an art history classroom.
Any specialized vocabulary should be defined with succinct and clear text. Images should have short captions. This means that, for instance, when we’re talking about painterliness, we show the brushstrokes and put up a definition of “painterly”; when we’re discussing a location, we show a map or sometimes an exterior view; when we’re talking about a particular aspect of the iconography, we might use Photoshop or one of Screenflow’s annotation features to highlight it. We try to lead the viewer’s eye smoothly and confidently through all the features and issues that are discussed in the audio.
In order to adequately illustrate what is discussed in the audio, other images are usually needed. We often spend significant time on image research. Always remember to include a credits page at the end of your video where you list the provenance and licenses (if applicable) of every image you use.
2. Keep it moving
Ideally, unless you’re pointing things out with annotations or doing a slow pan or zoom, no shot should be up for longer than 10 seconds or so (probably less in most cases, but not so much as to be distracting).
We always use dissolves to transition between images. This is not a rule; it’s part of our own unique style. Other video makers (like Sarah Green at the Art Assignment) cut between images with no transitions.
It’s easy to know what to show when there are specific formal or technical details being discussed in the audio. But what about times when there is no mention of anything visually specific (perhaps the speaker is talking about the historical context or the artist’s biography)?
In these cases, the video should do what our eyes would do when we’re standing in the gallery gazing at the work—meandering over its surface, taking in its details. This is where slow zooms and pans can really help.
Here is an example of a video that makes ample use of this method.
3. Invite close looking
Your ability to lead viewers’ eyes around a work starts with good photography and thorough image search. You will need lots of details so that you can clearly show the parts of the work and any contextual images that are being discussed in the audio.
As you edit your video, be intentional about placing these details in such a way that they match clearly to what is being said. Think about how you might point to details of an image in a classroom or museum—with video, you can do this even more clearly. For instance, if the speakers are discussing Picasso’s treatment of Gertrude Stein’s hands, you should show a closeup shot of her hands—not a shot of the whole painting. And be attentive to timing. You want those hands up on the screen just as the viewer is looking for them, even a moment’s delay will result in frustration. Conversely, putting a detail of the hands up on the screen too early may be perplexing and cause the viewer to question video production choices rather than focus on what is being discussed. Careful timing can help avoid distracting the viewer.
4. Pay attention to design
Be rigorous about using good design principles in your video, especially when you are employing multiple images or text annotations. Make sure that your text and images are aligned and that you use a standard text and layout style throughout. Be consistent.
At Smarthistory, we use Gill Sans font at 36 points for most text, and anywhere between 24 and 36 points for smaller text (we might use this for the caption on a comparison image, for instance). You can, of course, develop your own style for text based on your preferences. (You may notice that our text styling has changed over the years—in our newest videos, we use a combination of semibold and light typefaces to help improve readability.)
Pay close attention to the overall layout of each frame of the video, following the principles of good graphic design. Two key ideas to keep in mind are proximity and alignment: that is, things that are related to each other should be close together, and text and images should be aligned and visually balanced both in relation to one another, and within the negative space of the background.
5. Minimize distractions
Though we pack our videos with as much information as possible, we think carefully about what might be confusing for viewers and try to address potential problems by making everything clear and concise.
We try hard to make sure that text is succinct: short enough to be clear and helpful, without drawing too much attention away from what is being said. We only have text on screen when the term or concept in the text is actually being discussed in the audio.
Movement and transitions between images can help viewers stay engaged, but they can also be intrusive if they are overused. Beware of using too many zooms and pans in a row, or using zooms and pans that are so fast that viewers can’t see the image well. You don’t want to make anyone dizzy.
Tip: Do not cut or transition between two images that are very alike.
For instance, if we were showing a closeup of Gertrude Stein’s face, we wouldn’t dissolve to another closeup of her face, framed slightly differently. We would dissolve to either a wide shot, a closeup of something else, or a totally different image.
Here are some examples of what not to do:
And here are some examples of what to do:
Now that you know what to show in your video, you can learn how to edit your video using Screenflow.
Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank: [0:01] So, let’s get started today. We are going to learn how to make a quick video. I’ll introduce myself in case you don’t know who I am. I am Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank. I am the Dean of Content and Strategy at Smarthistory, and I will be leading today’s webinar.
[0:17] I did want to make everyone aware that we are going to record today’s webinar. I’m going to let my colleagues start that process right now.
[0:26] [pause]
Dr. Kilroy-Ewbank: [0:30] It looks like we’re good to go. I also wanted to remind everyone that if you have questions, please post them in the Q&A instead of the chat. We will get to them at the end.
[0:45] So instead of focusing specifically on video production software, we thought it might be better to focus on six principal strategies for video production that we use at Smarthistory, to give you some basic guidelines for how you can make really successful and beautiful videos like the ones that we make.
[1:08] Now, before we talk specifically about those principles, I wanted to at least make sure that everyone knows what you will need to have before you can actually make a video. First, as you’re gathering things, you’re going to need images. You will already want to have all the ones that you will need, and you want to have edited them, say in Photoshop.
[1:29] We don’t actually use live video for our videos. All you really need are still photos, and we recommend that you put all your media in one content folder before making a video so you know where it is located.
[1:43] The second thing you’ll need is an audio file, and not just the raw audio file, you’ll want it to have been already tightly edited, and this audio file will actually determine the length of your video.
[1:54] The last thing you might want is if you need maps, you want to have those already made. Of course, again, if you want to learn how to make a beautiful map, join us for next week’s webinar.
[2:05] Now, if you don’t know how to make your videos beautiful, or edit them, or even how to edit an audio file, you’re in luck because you can check out our previous webinars from the past month or so, as well as other resources such as how-to guides on our new Smarthistory Commons landing page on the website. This is a screenshot showing you what that looks like.
[2:31] Today, like I said, we’re going to focus on the six basic principles for video production. They are, in order, how to keep it short and focused, how to show what is being said, how to keep it moving — really important — how to invite close looking, why design matters, and how to minimize distractions.
[2:52] I’m going to walk us through these six basic things and give you a couple of tools that you can use to make really effective videos.
[3:02] The first is keep it short and focused. It turns out that the ideal length for a video is about four to six minutes. As you see in these screenshots of different videos that we’ve made at Smarthistory, we try to stay in that ballpark length.
[3:19] The reason for this is it turns out that student engagement or just general audience engagement begins to decline at the six-minute mark. As you’ll see in this chart, by the time you get to nine minutes, there’s a pretty steep decline, and any minute thereafter continues downward quite quickly. So four to six minutes is really important.
[3:41] If you are thinking about, say, recording your own lectures or things like that, what we might recommend is just chunking your information to keep it into this shorter time frame.
[3:56] The second key principle is to always show what is being said. Let’s say you’re focusing on this particular painting that’s showing the bust of Jesus, and you’re talking about a specific detail. It makes sense to shift what you’re showing in your video to focus on that particular detail.
[4:15] Let’s say you’re beginning a discussion of the halo that you’re seeing. It makes sense probably to then zoom into that halo or have a really high-resolution, detailed photograph that’s showing that, like you’re seeing here on the screen. Wherever possible, you want to show the details that are being mentioned in your video.
[4:39] Another way of doing this is using visual or textual annotations. For instance, if you’re using specialized vocabulary, you want to define it, but you also want to do that as succinctly as possible.
[4:53] In the example I have here on the screen, we were making a video about a very complex ceiling, and it’s known as an artesonado ceiling. You can see here we’ve included the term in italics and bolded, and then we’ve put a very succinct definition below in a lighter style.
[5:16] Another way of showing what is said is picking out features in the image that can be challenging to see. I know when we are, say, in a classroom or where we’re before people, it’s a lot easier to draw people’s attention to what these details are. Maybe pointing it out on the screen with a laser pointer or even using your finger if you can walk up to it.
[5:36] But when we’re making a video, it becomes even more important to signal to people what it is that you want them to be focusing on, and especially to pick out features that can be challenging to see. You don’t want to lose your audience or cause them to feel frustrated that they don’t know what you’re talking about.
[5:52] One way that we do this is sometimes maybe highlighting a feature with a different color so it automatically draws people’s attention to what it is that you want them to be looking at.
[6:03] In this example, we wanted to show that these wooden laths were going over and under different sections, and so we use yellow so it would automatically draw your eye. You see that we moved our little text box also close to it so that everything is very connected to one another.
[6:20] Another way of signaling to people what you want them to focus on is to add comparative images if it’s relevant to the discussion in your video. In this case, you see we’ve also put them close together so that someone who’s watching the video understands that they’re supposed to be looking at these in conversation with one another.
[6:44] Our third principle, which is really important when you’re thinking about video making, is keeping it moving. What I mean by that is you don’t want to linger for too long on the same image or the same shot on the screen.
[7:00] For instance, what we try to do in Smarthistory is vary what’s being shown on the screen about every 5 to 7 seconds, but 10 seconds maximum. It could be that you have one image on the screen, but maybe you have a text annotation pop up, or you have an arrow pointing to a detail pop up.
[7:18] That counts as varying what it is that you’re seeing, but where possible we’re also wanting to shift through to show details and things like that. I wanted to show you a brief example of what I mean by this particular principle.
[7:32] And also to point out that transitions between different frames, different photos that you might be using, is also a nice way to signal to people watching your video that something is changing. It keeps their focus also on the video that’s before them. We know how easy it is to have a short attention span these days. Here’s a short clip.
[7:53] [playback starts]
Woman 1: [7:55] One of my favorite details is the tassel on what’s probably velvet or some type of luxury material that is draped over the table, and the artist has very carefully delineated each little piece of the fringe on this textile.
Woman 2: [8:08] Or we could see it also in the tassels on that green fabric just behind Saint Cecilia or in attention to the luxuriousness of the…
[8:16] [playback ends]
Dr. Kilroy-Ewbank: [8:17] You could see there how we were picking out particular details and also keeping it moving to maintain attention. Whoops. Let me pause that for a moment. Started playing before I wanted it to.
[8:32] Another way to help keep it moving is, let’s say you’re talking in your video about a historical event, a broader context, maybe the artist biography, something where you’re not talking about the object very specifically.
[8:45] We at Smarthistory think this is a great opportunity to maybe show details of an object that perhaps you haven’t shown yet, or maybe even zoomed-in detail. Maybe you’ve shown them before, but you want to show something that’s even really special about the texture or maybe the brushstrokes.
[9:05] Maybe it’s an opportunity to show slow panning or zooming across an object, so people have a chance to just absorb and take in more of what they’re seeing. I want to again show you a short clip of how we did that with a recent video. Let me actually go back here very quickly.
[9:25] [playback starts]
Woman 1: [9:26] …seeing are in and of themselves part of this scientific revolution.
Woman 2: [9:30] This is the time of Galileo. This is the time of Kepler and Copernicus soon after. We’re at this time of incredible curiosity about the natural world and how it works and Palissy is theorizing about that. He’s not just a ceramicist, he’s thinking about how does life emerge from the pond? How does life transform into a fossil?
[9:52] These are things that early scientists were working very hard to understand. In…
[9:57] [playback ends]
Lauren: [9:59] You can see there, we’re talking about this larger historical moment in time, and we’re using it as an opportunity to show these fabulous details of this ceramic platter.
[10:08] [playback starts]
Woman 2: [10:09] This is the time…
[10:10] [playback ends]
Dr. Kilroy-Ewbank: [10:12] Our fourth principle here is to invite close looking, and we’ve touched on this a little bit already. This is one of the key principles that drives much of the work that we do at Smarthistory, is how do we invite people into this conversation with us? How do we invite them to look closely at these objects that we’re talking about?
[10:33] And so a few of the things to keep in mind is to have great photographs. You want as high resolution photographs as you have access to because you don’t want the images to be fuzzy, but also this way people can see the details crisply and beautifully.
[10:49] You also want to have lots of details. Like I said, you don’t just want the one great photograph of the object as a whole, but wherever possible, you want to have photographs of specific details. Here, for instance, Steven Zucker has taken this excellent photograph that was a detailed shot of the face of Christ that I was showing earlier.
[11:12] Another important aspect of inviting close looking is actually making sure wherever possible to pair what you’re saying with what you’re seeing on the screen.
[11:22] This goes back to something I was saying earlier, that if you’re talking about, say, the eyes of Jesus in this painting, you don’t want to be showing a different detail or even the whole painting if you can avoid it, because it is distracting potentially for your audience.
[11:43] Our fifth key principle is that design matters. Design isn’t just about making the video beautiful and attractive and pleasant to look at, but it turns out that design also is important for maintaining your audience’s focus, and if we’re thinking about students, helping students learn more effectively. Drawing their attention to what is important and essentially not distracting them from what is important to what you want them to be focusing on.
[12:14] Some key sub-principles of why design matters, or some techniques that you can use to make sure that you’re paying attention to design, would be things like aligning your images and text. Trying not to have images of different sizes side by side, trying not to have, say, text in too many different areas.
[12:33] You see here with this particular frame from the video, we’ve placed the images of equal size side by side. We’ve put the text boxes on top of the bottom of the image and we’ve aligned those so that there’s not too many distractions happening across the screen.
[12:54] Something else that you can do is to be consistent, and especially with things like font and layout, because this is really important for readability. As I mentioned, you don’t want too many things happening on the screen.
[13:07] Also, if you have too many different types of font sizes and font styles, this can actually be a distraction. Going back to this earlier shot that I showed you earlier, you’ll notice that in our text caption here, we have “artesonado” in semi-bold, and we have the definition in light.
[13:27] We’re using the same font throughout all of our videos, and using this style throughout all of our videos to maintain consistency across the board so that it becomes, if you watch enough videos, it signals to your audience repeatedly, they know what they’re looking for.
[13:48] Another important principle of design here is that if things are related, place them close to one another. Here, for instance, we’ve placed these two paintings that are related and are being discussed in conversation with one another in our video, we’ve placed them close to one another.
[14:02] Not so much so they’re overlapping, and they’re not looking too squeezed together. We’ve left just a little bit of space in between them so that you know they’re different, but that we want people just to automatically signal visually that they are related to one another. This is something that goes also for text as well.
[14:23] Another way of signaling to your audience that things are related could be even something as simple as picking them out with colored boxes like you see here. In this shot, we wanted to indicate that the three paintings at the top were all located in the United States in museum collections, and the ones below are from Europe.
[14:42] You can see all we’ve done is just pick them out using different colors to try to make an automatic visual association that these are belonging to two different groups.
[14:56] Our final principle is minimizing distractions. Distractions, of course, are not great when you’re thinking about videos because it means that people are going to start paying attention to other things, or they’re going to get frustrated and they’re not going to keep watching. Of course, we want people to remain engaged in our video.
[15:15] One of the things you can do to minimize distractions is to use text sparingly. When you do use it, keep it succinct. The example I have here on the screen was an important point in this video about a particular ceiling made in 16th-century Spain. It’s an idea that we repeatedly come back to in a video.
[15:36] At one point it makes sense for us to put this up on the screen, that the Renaissance world is this complex, dynamic, transcultural moment in time. We tried to keep it succinct, and we put it on the screen to reinforce this important point. Then, of course, we’re elaborating on it in the audio component of the video for longer than what you’re seeing here.
[16:02] Another way to minimize distractions is while it’s good to have zooming and panning with images, of course too much is also very distracting. With that is not only overusing, but if you zoom too quickly or you pan too quickly, it can be very disorienting. In some ways, it can give people almost motion sickness if you’re like myself.
[16:24] I made a bad example of zooming and panning, and then we’ll follow it immediately with, say, a better example, just to give you some sense of how different experiences can be if you’re zooming and panning too quickly or too often.
[16:39] [playback starts]
Woman 1: [16:41] They’re seated inside a Florentine palace, and there’s a window behind them that looks out onto a cityscape.
[16:49] [playback ends]
Lauren: [16:49] Okay, so too quick, too many. [laughs] Let’s look at an example of a better one. One that’s a little bit softer where you can see we’ve also softened the transitions in the pans so they’re not so jarring.
[17:04] [playback starts]
Woman 1: [17:07] They’re seated inside a Florentine palace, and there’s a window behind them that looks out onto a cityscape. Then beyond that, we see it receding into this larger, hilly land.
[17:19] [playback ends]
Dr. Kilroy-Ewbank: [17:21] That’s also a good example of moving through images every five to seven seconds, and also trying to pick out the details that you’re talking about in the video.
[17:36] That’s it for our webinar today. We really just wanted to focus on these six basic principles so that you felt empowered to even just make small, subtle changes to your videos. At this point, I’m happy to answer questions from all of you who are here.
Dr. Steven Zucker: [17:59] Wonderful. Thank you. We do have some great questions. This is Steven Zucker. Hi, everybody. I’m the designated question reader. The first question is, what tool did you use to create that nice yellow detail in the ceiling?
Dr. Kilroy-Ewbank: [18:19] That’s a great question. I used Photoshop to pick out that yellow detail. You can find free alternatives to Photoshop where you can do exactly the same thing with no cost to you.
[18:36] If you’re interested in learning about what some of those alternatives are or even how to do that very simply, I highly recommend going and watching Steven’s webinar that talked about the basics of Photoshop that’s available on Smarthistory.
Dr. Zucker: [18:51] Great. We have another question. Do you need to cite images that you use in videos if they are not your own?
Dr. Kilroy-Ewbank: [19:01] Yeah.
Dr. Zucker: [19:02] This is in the context of potentially a video shared online in a college course on a learning platform.
Dr. Kilroy-Ewbank: [19:09] This is a great question. I actually had a slide in here about this. Then, of course, I panicked that I was going to go far over time if I kept talking. What I recommend is, if you want to know this style that Smarthistory uses for citing images and photographs that are not our own, if you go to the end of any of our videos, all of them will have this.
[19:29] We’ll have a final text box that includes all of our additional images and gives attribution to all of the photographers or institutions who have made these images available for us to use.
[19:44] I will note though that, wherever possible for our videos, we do use Steven’s amazing photographs. If anyone here has not had the opportunity to go check out our Flickr page, there are over 10,000 photographs that you can use for free in your videos, provided you give attribution to Steven.
Dr. Zucker: [20:15] There’s a question, “what programs do you use to create these videos? I’m finding recording PowerPoints to be very limited for transitions, zooming, etc.”
Dr. Kilroy-Ewbank: [20:24] This is an excellent question. Initially when we were thinking about this webinar, I was going to do a very hands-on webinar about making a video in one of these examples of software, but it turns out that it’s a little more complex than a 20-minute conversation. [laughs]
[20:41] What we use at Smarthistory is something called ScreenFlow. It costs, I think around…what is it? $125 for a license to ScreenFlow for the year. It’s a really great, powerful piece of software that you can use to make videos, but there are also alternatives to that that work very similarly to ScreenFlow.
[21:03] If you’re a Mac user, there’s iMovie, that comes with your computer, that can do a lot of those same things, like transitions and various other techniques that we use in our Smarthistory videos.
Dr. Zucker: [21:18] Then we have a question that’s a little bit outside of our usual area. “Great presentation, but very focused on art history. I’m interviewing scholars on Zoom for the Shakespeare center that I run. Any advice about creating effective interviews?”
Dr. Kilroy-Ewbank: [21:38] That’s a great question, and I’ll do my best to answer it. Something that is very much a key part or principle that guides much of what we do at Smarthistory is to keep things conversational. We’ve really been trying to even maintain that in our webinars that we’ve been running now the past four or five weeks.
[22:00] For us, if you can keep the interview conversational, where maybe things don’t seem overly, I don’t want to say overly practiced, but overly formal, where you really can just allow for conversation to naturally flow, even if you have a set of key points that you’ve all agreed that you want to discuss beforehand, especially on Zoom, it adds a little more dynamic quality and a little more personality and human qualities to the screen world in which we find ourselves.
[22:31] I’m always a fan of hand gestures, and even things just to keep people’s visual attention on the screen. Those would be my very quick recommendations for such a thing.
Dr. Zucker: [22:44] One last question, which is “how do you highlight areas of work? You’ve answered this a bit before with Photoshop, but especially on details such as on the Coatlicue statue.”
Dr. Kilroy-Ewbank: [22:59] Ah, okay. I think you could do this in a number of ways. Sometimes, and this is where it’s so important that we do try to think of our audience, is I think oftentimes what we try to do with Smarthistory is think about what’s the, a, what’s the most effective way to highlight something? Does it just require an arrow pointing to it, or does it really need to be something that’s picked out maybe in a different color or illuminated so that the rest of the image goes dark and just that one detail is highlighted? I think it depends.
[23:32] Now something like Coatlicue that’s very visually complex, and if people are seeing it for the first time, it can be hard to know exactly what maybe you’re looking at, that’s probably an opportunity where picking out some of those things, either highlighting them to make them brighter or using a different color, can be really useful.
[23:54] There are a number of different ways one can do that in a program like Photoshop, but if I’m understanding the question correctly, it is about how does one pick them out?
Dr. Zucker: [24:10] I think so. I think you’ve actually got it. The point that you made about it being sensitive to the object is really important. We’ve got some other great questions coming in. “How long does it take you to create and edit a four-to-six-minute video?”
Dr. Kilroy-Ewbank: [24:30] That is such an excellent question, and I’ll be very frank on that one. [laughs] When I started making videos, it took me an exceptionally long time, in part because I was learning the software and in part because I had never been asked to make a video in this way before.
[24:52] I was used to being in the classroom and maybe making quick little recap videos, or I was leaving the same image up for five minutes and never changing it. It did take me a while to learn the software and adapt to it. However, I didn’t have any of these resources available to me, so I was just doing it blind.
[25:14] My experience is probably very different from some of you who — hopefully these webinars or resources we’ve made will actually make that process much smoother and much faster, frankly.
[25:25] Because now I can actually put together a pretty…if it’s a straightforward video that’s really focused on an object and is not asking too much in terms of having to have too many maps or too much complicated historical context, that can actually go pretty quickly. It’s not going to be something that you can do in 30 minutes.
[25:46] It will still require hours to make a short four-to-six-minute video in the style of Smarthistory. My big recommendation to people is to not feel that you have to have it perfect the first time you’re doing these.
[26:01] None of our videos started off like this. This has taken a lot of time to play around, to improve, to see how things can improve based on feedback. Even just small changes, such as some of the ones we talked about here, can make a big difference, even if it’s you’re using the same video and you’re just making subtle changes.
Dr. Zucker: [26:25] One more question. “Can you discuss the pros and cons of showing yourself in the video?”
Dr. Kilroy-Ewbank: [26:33] Yes. I think that’s actually a really great question, and I have different feelings about it depending upon which hat I’m wearing at what point of the day or moment.
[26:48] At Smarthistory, we don’t show ourselves. That’s largely because we don’t want to distract from the thing that we are talking about, whether that’s architecture or an object.
[26:59] We really want people to focus on the subject of the discussion instead of looking at ourselves, because it’s a distraction. To see someone talking on the screen in the video maybe distracts away from what it is that you’re showing.
[27:13] However, in the context of teaching, there could be an argument to be made that for certain videos, it might be nice for your students to see you talking.
[27:25] Me personally, for my students this semester, I made separate videos, little intro videos that are maybe one minute of me talking. Then I would have the other videos without me in them, in part maybe so that I could reuse them. In part because I didn’t want to distract away from the actual object that I wanted them to be learning about.
Dr. Zucker: [27:48] The last comment is really a comment, not a question, but the note that someone would happily sign up for a longer how-to.
Dr. Kilroy-Ewbank: [27:57] That’s already in the works. We just have to figure out when.
[28:07] Thank you, everyone. It’s been a pleasure. If you have more questions, just another reminder that we do have a new Facebook group, and we are happy to answer questions there, whether about this webinar or other questions you might have. You can also always find us over email as well. Come join us for next week, and thanks for coming today.