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Tuesday, June 18, 2002 |
A day in the life - How not to do a video
this afternoon I went to a satellite downlink on HIPAA. This is a health insurance act which includes provisions for much better privacy for medical data. Meeting the mandate means changes all the way from basic network infrastructure, thru physical arrangements of office space (can people read personal data off of screens in a reception area?), to policy issues (how do you ensure that the PDAs that many interns and residents carry don't become a privacy risk, when people misplace them so frequently?).The downlink itself was terribly amateurish. Tip for people doing video: your audience is there for info, not to face watch. URLs for web sites were printed on screen, but only for exactly as long as the presenter took to recite them, so they were difficult to copy down. What's more useful in presenting a list of testing stages: showing seven bullet points with a voiceover, or showing the face of someone obviously staring at cue cards?
It's really too bad, as most of this could have been fixed in post-production. Heath used to test the instructions for their Heathkit electronics projects by bringing in inexperienced people and watching them try and follow the instructions; the people doing this video would have done well to watch a group of ten people watch this video and try and take notes on the information being presented.
