If you’re planning to have testimonial or interview videos produced to help market your organization, there are certainly a number of critical elements that we, as a video production company, will handle on your behalf. However, there are components that you, as the subject matter, are often times better suited to take care of. We want to outline a few of the steps in a collaborative process that will help produce better overall content through our video testimonial production services.

Prepare Your Interviewee Before Recording. Ideally, the time the cameras are rolling should not be the first time your interviewee has heard the questions you want to ask. If you prepare them in advance, not only can they prepare potentially better and more extensive answers, but you also have the added benefit of screening what is good content, what isn’t, and what should be elaborated on. While this type of prior planning isn’t always possible for certain events, the effort should be made when the opportunity is there. Encourage interviewees to go over their answers with themselves so they get a little practice in articulation.

Pause Before and After an Answer. If you find yourself conducting the interview. Make sure there is a brief pause between when the question is asked and after it is answered. Doing so will allow for cleaner edits to be made when content is strung together in a video. You may also want to coach people who are not trained speakers to focus on reducing “disfluencies” or words such as “umm”, “uhh”, “you know”, and “like” that are designed to maintain dialogue when the proper words haven’t yet been processed in the brain.

Encourage “Short and Sweet” Answers. If the dialogue for your video is meant to be soundbites, often times people need to be coached to speak in soundbite format. Those not familiar with speaking on camera will often get nervous, speak too quickly, or ramble on with their answers. As the interviewer, be listening for what they’re saying, extract the key part of it, and feed that back to them so they can repeat their answer in a more clear and concise statement. This will always produce better results in the context of a video.

It is also highly recommended to sound positive and upbeat when working with your interviewee. People nervous on camera will feed off that energy and generally improve their performance over a short period of time when dealing with a positive person.

Have Interviewees Talk Specifics. The typical “this company is great, and they really helped me a lot” type of dialogue is good and does have its place, however any testimonial video should also mention specifics. Using specific examples of the who, what, when, where, why, and how, along with terminology specific to your organization or efforts, builds credibility and can potentially better connect with a viewer in similar circumstances. You want to make sure that there is context to what they’re discussing, so the more proper nouns and less pronouns used in an answer, the better.