Скачать или смотреть How to Hook Your Audience: Perfect Video Opening Strategies

Of all the tricks, techniques and skills of video making perhaps the most sought after understanding is the art and science of the OPENING. Your audience is swimming in a vast sea of video, and like fishing in a big ocean the key is to know how to hook them and hook them quickly.

I’m Dean Arnett and in this film we’re going to look at some of the best ways to grab your audience, keep them engaged and ask - what actually IS the opening, is it the first 3 seconds, 9 seconds or first minute?

The opening serves a number of key purposes. The most important - is it needs to hook the viewer - tease them and intrigue them. It needs to set up the story and - as best it can, explain what is coming up. It’s a promo, advertising the rest of the film and giving you reasons as to why you should stick around. And it sets up agreed values, demonstrating the, editorial and production, style of the film.

The opening image is key. You have 3 SECONDS to grab the viewer, so it needs to be striking, summing up the story and ideally, creating an emotional reaction.

But the opening isn’t just the first 3 seconds of the video. You need to drive the audience on into the heart of the narrative so they CAN‘T’ switch off. On that basis it could be argued that the opening is the first 10 seconds, 60 seconds - or even, the WHOLE FILM LEADING UP to the end pay off!

Channel 4 have a made a name for themselves with highly successful, social media specific video content.

A good film is a good film, but a really brilliant film speaks to it’s target audience. As we know, different platforms have different audiences, so a good opening needs to acknowledge that.

So a powerful image that sums up the story is key, but beyond that simple premise there are various OPENING STYLES that do well. All are story and audience dependent though, and all have their pro’s and cons.

The opening IS important, but a good opening shouldn’t damage the rest of the narrative.

So far we’ve talked about visual content, 60 to 80% of the audience may well be watching without the sound on, but sound IS still important.

Like anything, there are NO ABSOLUTE, hard and fast rules about what makes a succesful opening, if you no other reason than any success is SO audience specific. That’s why you need to tailor what you do - to perfectly align with what your audience wants. And the best way of doing that - is by using Facebook and Instagram’s own built-in analytics.

Whole books could be written on the science of the opening sequence - and in these days of video saturation on social media, making your film stand out by getting the opening right is more important than ever before.