We’re madly finishing up our new series on Economics and Christianity.  Go to EconomicsforEverybody.com to see what’s going on.  We’ve posted our complete first lesson for preview, an overview of what’s in all the other lessons, and, eventually, a lot more interesting things.  The blog will also provide all kinds of economic insights, recommendations, and peeks at the making of the series. Take a look today!

We recently finished a new series of teaching videos for our partner DSG Consulting.  DSG regularly trains some of the top sales teams in the nation to have effective meetings with high-level executives. The DSG consultants are a wealth of knowledge themselves, so we designed an approach for them that hinges on one of their key tools: the whiteboard. The goal was to balance an extended discussion with the visuals to keep it moving along. We were pleased with the results.

This was the question posed to us by our partners at DSG, a management consulting firm specializing in sales and marketing effectiveness. DSG regularly works with Fortune 100 and 500 companies to transform their messaging and sales strategies. In looking at their unique whiteboard methodology, we designed an approach that would feel professional and polished, yet be able to communicate specific steps and methods in a simple-to-understand way. After working alongside DSG with Adobe, Citrix, and General Dyanamics (among others), we believe that together we’ve been able to create a series of  engaging videos that clients and sales teams are extremely happy with.

Here’s what we’ve learned is important to improving the average training video. First, “cast” the most confident, funny people from the organization; after all, if someone is boring in front of the camera, no one will want to watch him long enough to learn anything. Second, spend as much time preparing the players with scripts, dialogue, etc before ever shooting; this ensures people aren’t ad libing when they show up.  Third, use a professional multi-camera  production that shoots the training scenario from a more cinematic perspective. People spend hours every day watching professional video; if your video looks like it was shot with an Flip camera it just won’t be taken seriously.

Face it: corporate training videos don’t have to be boring. In fact, if your company is making the investment to teach its employees something important, it doesn’t want to throw away money on videos no one wants to watch.

We recently finished a new piece for Ligonier Ministries and Reformation Bible College. I looked back over it this morning and was pleased with how it turned out. Much of that had to do with the great content in the four interviews. But as my editor and I approached the piece, we wondered what the best organizational structure would be. Since we both like music, we decided that copying the musical structure of a string quartet might be fun. To understand our perspective, imagine each student a different instrument and the entire video having three progressing, yet related themes. The goal was to weave the themes together as the students developed them, one picking up from another and then another coming in and continuing, and so forth. All to say, they’re going to have a great semester. I just wish I were down in Orlando in a classroom rather than here in Nashville.

We spent a hour this morning with a friend who wants to promote his small business with video. He was surprised when we said doing simple, basic things was more useful to potential customers than doing complex, clever things. In this case, we recommended that he work with us to start creating a series of 60 to 90 second videos that answered basic questions his customers had for his industry. He could then post them on YouTube or Vimeo for free, then embed them on his blog, website and Facebook pages.

Since he’s answering real questions that people ask, he’s being useful.  As a result, potential customers will take time to listen. Furthermore, these kind of videos are a lot easier and less expensive to make than big marketing videos that are just trying to impress.

If you’re creating videos for your business, think simple first. It’s likely the best route to success.

Along with Latin and Economics, we’re also working on a new series that teaches art to children. It’s taught by June Kern, wife of our own Ian Kern, who has imparted the love of art to countless children throughout her teaching career. We feel privileged to get her on film teaching both children and parents how to enjoy art in their own homes. The first intro classes in the series will be released this summer, with many more following. Although the site is still in its beta mode, you can keep track of all our current and new classes at The Compass Classroom.

We were asked by Ligonier ministries to create a short promo piece for their new online study center called Ligonier Connect. It’s a neat system that enables people to hear lectures from RC Sproul, read through material he’s written, and discuss theology with other students online. We decided to approach it from a silent film perspective, using a question about justification as the ball that gets batted from person to person. It was a fun little puzzle to put together. To get the most out of it, try to follow the argument as it develops – that is, after all, what’s so engaging about Ligonier Connect.

We’ve been doing more and more unique training videos for corporate clients and teaching videos for homeschool students. Here are some of the things we think make video materials more effective at transmitting whatever it is that has to be taught.

(BTW – If you’d like to see some samples, we have a number of our educational videos online. To see some of our proprietary corporate training materials, just drop us a note.)

1) Multiple Shorter Pieces are Better than One Longer Piece. Try to break up the material into smaller chunks so that there are natural breaks in the teaching sequence. People can only consume so much video without some kind of break to give their minds a rest. If you can make your training or teaching video segments less than 10 minutes each, then you’re going a long way to making your material more memorable.

2) Laughter Makes the Medicine Go Down. Keeping things light and even funny is important. Try to find ways to make your material humorous, whether it’s the way it’s taught, shot, or edited. You can do all kinds of things to get a laugh, but the most important is making sure that your teacher is basically funny. If the teacher doesn’t have the gift of humor, then you likely want to find someone else who does.

3) Create Teaching Tools that Work with the Video. This could be everything from review sheets to showing the videos in a workshop environment that provides breakout sessions to discuss the material. The key is getting people to start thinking about the material in a way different than they imbibed it. Most people have a best way to learn: seeing, hearing, reading, or writing – and it’s usually not the same for everyone. Video can only do so much here, but providing different modalities with video makes it most effective in the long run.

We produced this little spot for B&H’s new book by Candace Cameron Bure about being spiritually and physically healthy. In watching all the footage, including a lot of things that weren’t included here, what impressed me most was how honest and natural she was. It certainly made it easy to make it real.

We’ve created a new way to learn vocabulary words based on Latin roots and prefixes. Some people like to learn new words to impress their friends and enemies, so here’s a quick and easy way to do it. On a more practical level, students who are prepping for the SAT, ACT, LSAT, GRE, and so forth can improve their scores simply by learning a handful of Latin words. These videos are easy and fun to do – let us know if you think we should make more of them!