The Art of Creating How-To Videos

Personally, I think that that being the founder of a start-up is one of the most interesting positions you can have. The reason being that you literally get to experience being every department in a company and while it may be a lot of work, you get exposure to so many new experiences.

Yesterday we worked on creating "How-To" videos for Mo-Billing at Ben Hoskyn Studio. Ben is a Ottawa-based cinematographer, director, and producer- and superb person to work with! Our main focus was recording the voice overs for the videos. After spending a couple hours working solely on the voice overs, I came to realize that I underestimated how much thought is needed in producing voice overs. I thought we would do one or two takes, but we did several. We did versions with different tones, word placement and sentence structure. You could spend a whole day trying to find the perfect way to describe something, the right words to use, the right order of the words and sentences. The total product is yet to be completed. Ben will take the many voice over recordings we did, play around with them and overlay them with different parts of the video- quiet an art!

Remember that your video visually explains a lot, so your voice over is intended to be supplemental to your video. In the end you want the voice over to be as succinct and straight forward as possible for your users.

Producing a "How-To" video to simply and quickly explain how to do something can be challenging but spending a couple hours finding the right words to use and the order to place them are the starting steps.

I've added some pictures of us hard at work!