TechSmith’s Ultimate Guide to Easily Make Instructional Videos

One of the main thrilling things about working in Learning and Development is that I’m constantly exposed to new ways of creating, curating, and distributing content. It makes this line of work so exciting.

One of the joys I’m currently experiencing is that I’m improving my video making skills. As part of my learning journal, I’ve reviewed the TechSmith's Ultimate Guide to Easily Make Instruction Videos  and want to share with you about what resonated with me.

Let’s dive right in: The most important tips they provided

The team at TechSmith really gave a step-by-step process and other tips and best practices for producing and publishing instructional videos. But what stood out for me the most were the following two:

1. Just get started and publish. For me, being quality driven, getting started with what I fear to be a sub-par product feels uncomfortable. But, if I let that paralyze me – the video (or training, or job-aid, or survey) will never see the light of day, nor will I ever improve. It is about putting in the miles that will improve the quality over time. Learning from feedback, constructive critique, and simply just starting and not throwing around all the excuses why I’m not quite ready yet. Which leads me to the second most important tip…
2. Equipment. I used the excuse of equipment to stop me before, but really – over time (after having bought all the equipment) I tend to do a lot with simply my mobile phone and webcam. And it still works. Yes, certain equipment I am grateful to have invested in, like my microphone from Blue Yeti, but on the whole I’m able to produce quite a lot with basic, already available equipment.

How the information in their guide aligns with my initial thoughts about planning a video

Getting to the actual planning of the video, the TechSmith guide aligns pretty good with my own process. I like to think about the audience and what they need to know (and that which they already know that I either should not include or could build on).

The team suggest writing a storyboard, and I typically combine this with the script narrative. I go straight to the script outline and include screenshots or PowerPoint slides in the script to have a clear overview of the sequence of the video.

When it comes to recording narration, I used to approach this different than suggested in this guide. I’ve recorded the actions before as outlined in the script and then added the narration. There would be two issues I would encounter:

1. I'm needing to speedread due to my actions going quicker than my voice, or be ahead when the actions on the screen are moving a little slower. It would increase my 'ehms' and hesitance in my voice, which subsequently would require a re-record.
2. Doing it the way I used to could result in different sound quality due to a lot of re-recording, as the recording would also result to be done in 'stages'. Simply by changing your seating position could ultimately change the sound of your voice. I'll share more on this in a later post with some examples.

I’m now seeing the use of first recording, but need to play around with this some more to get it just right. Doing the recording of narration upfront could possible prevent the above issues encountered, but it means the script must be very solid in terms of the sequence. Play around with this yourself and see what order you would find most helpful to your videos.

Planning for me in general

A lot of my planning (now) is focused on audience, content analysis, and settings, tools, and equipment I need to use. Where I needed to improve is ensuring I reserve sufficient time in my schedule for this activity, and ensure the video is the ideal length of time. This would prevent being (generally) overly optimistic around the actual effort required and helps me to reassess the focus (and content) of the video, if needed. Thereby securing that the most important content also has the main focus on the video.

My process for approaching tasks or processes that are unfamiliar to me.

As I mentioned before, I could get paralyzed with inaction when I first started. This I changed with the ‘just get going’ approach, but also meant in the past I would spend too little time planning ahead and then being unprepared for interruptions and challenges. This lack of planning back then would easily double my development time. One piece of advice: “Don’t fall into that trap!”. Yes, certainly do ‘just get started’, but I would suggest you get started by reviewing some easy to follow tutorials and guides. Like following the TechSmith’s guide to creating instructional videos was really helpful to me. If you are using their step-by-step process from day one when creating instructional videos, this will help you be encouraged in the ease of the process and the quality of your first videos.

That's it for now. Hope this was helpful to you. It is always fun to see and hear how you got on with your projects, and what worked and didn't work as expected. 

Resources

https://www.techsmith.com/blog/instructional-videos/