Motley Fool had been running audio podcasts successfuly for many months and wanted to progress into moving pictures. They key problem we faced was that their sector does not particularly lend itself to interesting moving pictures. You'll see this point exactly when the news (especially Newsnight) starts chucking graphics at this very problem during financial stories. Furthermore, the team available was small and did not have the resource to spend all week filming interesting cutaways to help the video along.
I assisted by running a couple of workshops with their team, looking at what the competition was producing, simple video formats that could be used and some storyboarding and scriptwriting sessions. I also provided general production and integration advice and some hands on editing advice to the team. We then produced a couple of pilots to see how the ideas panned out. The pilot process was fun as we wrestled with trying to make pensions and bonds visually interesting. Eventually we arrived at a few key rules:
- Motley Fool has many writers who are experts in their field - they're valuable so make use of them.
- finance affects us all and people on the street have opinions and stories to tell - make use of them.
- don't try and replicate a news service.
And so the content as it now stands focuses more on people and opinion than we originally envisaged. Also we decided that content should be created when stories would lend itself to moving pictures, rather than trying to force non-visual stories into moving pictures just to suit a schedule.
So now using the magic of blip.tv, Motley Fool's video is up and running and looking pretty good, even if I say so myself. It's well shot and edited, interesting and relevant, which is impressive considering it's about finance. Well done to Andy, Emma, Szu Ping, Donna, Ed, Laura and everyone else involved.
Watch On The Money on fool.co.uk or subscribe.
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