The Art of Short Form Content

From Concept to Color Correction

Bryan Cook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317329954
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The Art of Short Form Content: From Concept to Color Correction is an in-depth examination of the craft of creating short form filmic content – a category which includes television commercials, music videos, television promos, movie trailers, digital billboards, corporate videos, and pretty much anything else with a running time under five minutes. Though short form is an important part of the film industry, it is typically overlooked in books on the art of filmmaking. The Art of Short Form Content fills this industry void by answering the type of questions that working short form content creators deal with every day. As Cook explains, though short form content is limited in duration, it is not limited in quality and message. In this step-by-step, full-color guide you will find:

• Interviews with leading short form content creators

• Details on how to create everything from a corporate piece to a Super Bowl spot

• Strategies for how to quickly attract viewer attention to your content

• Extensive information on how to best utilize the craft of film-making in an advertising context

• A comprehensive companion website that can be found at www.focalpress.com/cw/cook

1
Signal Through Noise:

The Concept

" One must know not only how to play well but also how to make oneself heard. A violin in the hand of the greatest master emits only a squeak if the hall is too big; there the master can be confused with any bungler.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

The universal human laws – need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain – are constant, predictable, reliable, universal, and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture. What a powerful thing to know: that one's own desires are mappable unto strangers.

George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone "

Kids pick strange things to obsess over, and somehow, for reasons unclear to my wife and me, our daughter Annika became intrigued by hippos. Now, I wouldn't want to say anything bad about Hippopotamus Amphibious – despite being herbivores they are notoriously quick to take offense – but I do have to point out that they are not the most appealing creatures in the world. Unlike the sexually adventurous Bonobo monkey or the dissolute male lion, the hippo is actually quite boring. Yes it can urinate backwards, which is certainly a neat trick, but from what I can gather the life of a hippo seems to consist of long stretches of floating aimlessly about with the occasional random attack on an unsuspecting villager thrown in to break up the monotony. Even hippos don't seem to like fraternizing with hippos, as Wikipedia sums up their socializing by pointing out that despite their tendency to huddle closely together, hippos "do not seem to form social bonds except between mothers and daughters, and are not social animals. The reason they huddle close together is unknown."

"... we live in a world where the rules of media consumption are rapidly changing."

Despite these character flaws, my daughter can't get enough of hippos, and when the hippo books have been read and the hippo's pajamas put on, there is nothing she likes more than to curl up in my lap and watch clips of hippos online. As a result of this, I have had the chance to see countless clips featuring hippos: a segment from British TV about a hippo named Jessica who lives with a family in South Africa and seems very un-hippo-like in her reluctance to menace her caregivers; a commercial from the 1980s for a board game called Hungry Hippos; a series of clips from the San Diego Zoo of hippos swimming about looking depressed. Sadly, no matter how many times I click to the next page on YouTube, I still have yet to run out of short form video content that a hippo-obsessed kid can consume.

Besides being an annoyance – please YouTube, just kick me to a page on the Meerkat that will interest the child – there is something interesting about this wealth of hippo-related material and how my daughter and I consume it. Namely, that we live in a world where the rules of media consumption are rapidly changing. From our phones, to our Facebook timelines, to the video displays at our local gas stations, our media landscape is becoming increasingly filled with short, sharable video content. This evolution, coupled with the short form content we already were consuming — television commercials, music videos, promos, trailers, show opens, etc. - has led to an explosion of filmic content with a run time of less than roughly five minutes. While this explosion has been great in the sense of creating employment opportunities and pushing the craft forward, it has also made it much harder to create work that is effective, as there is just so much of this stuff competing for viewers' attention (to give just one example, over three hundred hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute).

" . . . there are three interrelated objectives that any piece of short form content must achieve in order to be successful. "

So, the question we now must ask ourselves as short form content creators, and the question which motivated the writing of this book, is how do we produce rich, evocative content that can cut through this noise? In order to answer this question we will look at all the unique disciplines that are part of the short form ecosystem, but, before we do, we need to take a moment and lay the groundwork for our discussion by defining what exactly makes a piece of short form content a success. This examination will give us a good starting place and will orient us as we move through the different disciplines.

To begin, I believe that there are three interrelated objectives that any piece of short form content must achieve in order to be successful. Since the vast majority of short form content is, in one way or another, an advertisement, the first thing a piece of short form needs to do is attract attention. This step is obviously quite crucial, as you could make the most beautiful piece of short form in history, but if you fail to get viewers' attention, you're doomed.

Once attention has been acquired, the next objective is to evoke an emotional response in the viewer. You need to do so in order to retain attention – any piece of content that fails to make viewers feel something is going to have a hard time keeping them hooked – but also because of the pivotal role emotions play in the buying process.

Once these objectives have been met, the last thing a piece of short form content needs to do is to shape perception and motivate action. The way this would look is that a viewer sees a trailer on YouTube and decides that the movie looks good (perception being shaped), and then goes out and sees the movie that weekend (action being motivated). Let's break these three notions down and see if we can't end up with a good guide to the basic foundation of short form content.

Attracting Attention

I have gently touched upon this notion a few times already so let's just state it explicitly and get it out of the way; the vast majority of short form filmic content is advertising. Yes I know, you probably consider yourself as an artist not an adman, but, if you are getting paid to make short form content, you are almost always making ads. The commercial advertises a product, the trailer advertises a film, the music video advertises an artist/album, and so on. This is quite different from the majority of long form content, as the TV shows and movies you watch are not ads but instead are end products. Long form content can often feel like an ad given product placement and other ways programmers have tried to monetize their content, but, at the end of the day, long form content is almost always an end product and short form content rarely is (as I mentioned in the introduction there are exceptions to this, such as short films or video art, but these are definitely in the minority).

Short form's status as advertising means a couple of things for the short form content creator – besides the fact that you might need a stiff drink right now as you contemplate your membership inside the evil empire – but the most crucial is that the first task for any piece of short form content is going to be getting viewers' attention. People will pay attention to a TV show because it has a story that they want to engage with. They will go to YouTube to watch clips of cats playing the piano because, well, people seem to enjoy watching cats play the piano. The commercials you make that ultimately pay for all this amazing stuff? Not so much, that is what the DVR is for. So, short form content must be instantly engaging. It must force the viewer to pay attention despite the fact that it is usually an interruption from the content that they actually want to consume. To look at it from the perspective of an economist, the value of any individual piece of short form content lies in its ability to capture that most precious of resources: attention. As Michael Goldhaber put it in his essay on "The Attention Economy":

Van Damme and his "Epic Split."

So, at last, what is this new economy about?... We are told over and over just what that is: information. Information, however, would be an impossible basis for an economy, for one simple reason: economies are governed by what is scarce, and information, especially on the Net, is not only abundant, but overflowing. We are drowning in the stuff, and yet more and more comes at us daily...But, attention, at least the kind we care about, is an intrinsically scarce resource... So, having attention is very, very desirable, in some ways infinitely so, since the larger the audience, the better. And, yet, attention is also difficult to achieve owing to its intrinsic scarcity. That combination makes it the potential driving force of a very intense economy.¹

I think this is basically correct, and what Goldhaber is positing – an economy based on the value of getting attention in a world awash in information – nicely sums up the challenge we as short form content creators face (as Nietzsche put it in our epigraph, "One must know not only how to play well but also how to make oneself heard."). Let's now take a look at a piece of short form content, the viral video "Epic Split," which does an excellent job of attracting attention.

Images from "Epic Split."

"Epic Split" was created to promote the dynamic steering found in Volvo's trucks. The spot swept all the major ad award shows and was an enormous viral hit, with over 77 million views on YouTube, countless parodies, and enough organic PR that some marketer in Sweden probably spontaneously combusted from happiness. If you somehow managed to miss it, "Epic Split" features the actor Jean-Claude Van Damme delivering a monologue on the vicissitudes of his life while perched on top of two Volvo trucks that slowly separate, forcing Van Damme into his "epic split." All of this happens in one majestic take – scored by Enya's "Only Time" – as the camera starts on Van Damme's face and then pulls back and sweeps downwards to reveal the Volvos moving backwards as our hero does his maneuver. The spot ends on a lone title card that simply states; "this test was set up to demonstrate the stability and precision of Volvo Dynamic Steering."

"Epic Split" had no media dollars behind it, which meant that it had to capture and retain attention organically. The ability to do this is what makes or breaks a piece of viral content, so successful work of this nature is engineered to attract attention and be highly shareable. "Epic Split" is tailor-made to do so, as it features a celebrity – always a good thing for getting attention – doing something quite remarkable. Besides having a concept that is guaranteed to attract attention, the spot is executed in such a way that from the first frame – which is a close-up of Van Damme being gently jostled by the movement of the trucks beneath him – to the last, you are hooked.

The opening frame of "Epic Split."

Although the premise of the spot is quite unique, the piece has a real narrative simplicity, which is key for short form in terms of attracting attention. Viewers opt into watching long form and so they will usually tolerate a more complex narrative that might take them a bit of effort to work out. In short form they will discard the work immediately if they feel like it will take too much cognitive energy to figure out the basic workings of the story. As we have seen, and will continue to see as this book moves along, making great short form content takes a lot of really talented people executing their individual crafts at the highest level. This process involves countless hours of work and thousands of individual decisions for just one piece. That said, no matter how much thinking goes into your work or how novel your approach, at the end of the day, the basic plot and concept of your narrative should be clear and concise. This is why "Epic Split" works so well, as the narrative you need to understand in order to follow what is going on can be boiled down to "a guy doing a split on top of two trucks as they drive backwards." This sort of simplicity in the basic plot is critical for short form, as the way people see our work, whether it be during a commercial break or playing overhead on a video display in Times Square, necessitates that the basic story can be followed fairly easily.

"The deal the viewer is offering in this scenario is, basically, their attention in exchange for an emotional experience."

This way of thinking echoes something that psychologists refer to as "cognitive fluency." As Drake Bennet describes cognitive fluency in an article in The Boston Globe, "Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard." He goes on to note that everything from choice of font to the name of a company can affect human beings' thinking and decision-making process which leads him to conclude that "the human brain, for all its power, is suspicious of difficulty."² This notion that people prefer things that are easy to think about is important, as the major pro...