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Chapter 4 Creating Educational Videos 53

Other examples? If you sell auto parts, you might create a series of videos showing
how to change oil, replace a brake light, and so forth. If you sell guitars, you could
create a series of videos showing musicians how to restring or tune their guitars, or
even how to play chords and scales and such. If you provide accounting services,
you could produce a series of videos showing small businesses how to set up and
manage their books. If you’re a dentist, you might produce videos showing kids
how to brush their teeth and floss.

We can go on and on with examples of how-to videos, but you get the idea. You
don’t show people directly how to use your products, but instead show your prod-
ucts in use during the course of doing a common project. It’s more infomercial-like,
less of a hard sell—which is what works on YouTube.

The key with this type of video is to offer truly useful content. You have to show
people how to do something they want to do (sew a quilt) or need to do (repair a
leaky faucet). Attack a task common enough to draw a large audience, make the
steps easy to follow, and then use the video to sell other goods and services.

That means, of course, that you can’t be too shy about showing your product in
action. There’s nothing wrong with showing a close up of your product performing
its assigned task, nor with adding an overlay stating the product’s name or model
number, along with a link to your website. You have to be subtle, but not so subtle
that people don’t notice and remember what you’re selling.

Producing a How-To Video

Producing an educational video is more complex than producing a simple talking-
head video. You need to plan it all out in advance, scripting and storyboarding
every shot you need to make. The shooting process is likewise complex, as you have
to produce each of those shots. You then feed all those shots into a video-editing
program, stitch them together with the appropriate transitions and onscreen graph-
ics, and produce yourself an easy-to-follow step-by-step video lesson.

Let’s start at the top. This type of video has to be well planned in advance; you can’t
wing it on camera. You have to work through the steps you need to present, and the
shots necessary to accomplish each step.

This means creating a pretty tight script, as well as an accompanying storyboard.
Work through each step in the process, shot-by-shot, camera angle by camera angle.
Know what you’re showing and how, so that when it comes time to shoot, it’s a sim-
ple matter of setting things up according to the storyboard.