One of the most common misconceptions with web video is that you can sit down in front of a camera, record yourself talking for 5 minutes, upload it to YouTube and you’re business will suddenly flourish.
Unfortunately, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
We’ll save the traffic portion of the above scenario for another post…and instead…focus on an interesting new study that shows how video content and editing styles can literally “control” a viewer’s brain activity.
The study was done by New York University neuroscientists, where control groups were essentially hooked up to MRI’s and then shown video clips; scenes from an Alfred Hitchcock movie, an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm and an unedited clip of an orchestra playing in a park.
And what they found was that the more a film editor tried to manipulate a viewer through editing, the more he actually succeeded.
In fact, the researchers noted that the “data suggest that achieving a tight control over viewers’ brains during a movie requires, in most cases, intentional construction of the film’s sequence through aesthetic means.”
They continued on by writing “The fact that Hitchcock was able to orchestrate the responses of so many different brain regions, turning them on and off at the same time across all viewers, may provide neuroscientific evidence for his notoriously famous ability to master and manipulate viewers’ minds. Hitchcock often liked to tell interviewers that for him ‘creation is based on an exact science of audience reactions.’ ”
The lesson here is one that more experienced video editors have always known (and one that budding web video producers sometimes struggle to grasp): the script and editing of your video must be purposely done to engage the viewer’s senses and emotions…continually. If fail to do that, viewers will just click away.
Or in other words, if that video you put together wasn’t starring you (or made by you)…and you randomly found it on the web…would you stick around to watch it?
To see the full text of the study I refererenced above, click here.