Violation of the Brevity Rule
The multimedia news feature from the Arizona Star about recycling and garbage disposal follows two of my three rules for effective use of video. They did chose an evergreen topic and something was added to the understanding of the viewer through the videos. However, it violated the time issue. While no single clip was overly long, there were so many of them that it built up to become too much. I would have much preferred to just read the information; it would have been a lot faster. Some of the clips were beneficial though, so I think that if they had used shorter clips or maybe not used so many clips, it would have been more effective. Especially for the recycling section, there was too much talking in the video and it was the same person for all of them. It didn’t make things very interesting for the audience. The man was saying informative things, but still I do not think the average viewers’ attention span would be kept by the same person, saying the same type of thing in every clip. The pictures for each step though were good. They also kept the text to a minimum and organized it neatly into colored charts and bullets, which made it fast and easy to read and understand. So my main complaint is just the quantity and length of video.
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Angela Palumbo on Violation of the Brevity Rule : As the resident person in this
Josie Rush on Violation of the Brevity Rule : I completely agree about the v
I completely agree about the videos, Greta. (Actually I linked to this entry in my blog, so you know for your portfolio.) By the time each video loaded, and the information was given (by the same voice...bleh), I was ready to be done on the site. However, the pros you listed were very well-done. They did keep text to a minimum, and made their site eye-catching with pictures. To doctor the videos a little, perhaps they could use more images and try to make their information more concise.
As the resident person in this class with possibly the shortest attention span I thought this video was a snooze-fest. I know that sometimes when people are really passionate about a subject they tend to talk too much. This is exactly what happened. Some information was really good, though as you ladies recognized. They just need to edit some out. Where was the editor for this video? You can't tell me that they can't shorted a video like they may shorten an article that is a little too long.
I'm glad you both agree and that I was not the only one that thought the videos were too long. I know that I for one have a very large tendency to be extremely verbose. I have a hard time keeping things short and succinct. One might think that a video could solve wordiness and length. However, this is a very good example of how we need to keep even videos short. Not just articles can be be too long (as Angela points out), so can videos.