These three elements can make the average training video – fantastic!

Let’s face it. Lots of people might prefer to sit through a root canal over being forced to watch an organization’s training video. But if you can find a fun and humorous way to approach the topic at hand, you can carefully craft a wonderful message that gets the points across, entertains your audience, and leaves a lasting, memorable impression. It really comes down to good storytelling. A lot of times, we like to look to Hollywood movies and television shows for inspiration. It is fun to re-interpret and spoof known situation comedies, classic TV, reality shows, game shows, soaps, and blockbuster movies and apply them to the training material.

For example, we borrowed the look and concept from “Top Gun” for a hand truck safety video. Remember the iconic scene on the aircraft carrier at dawn where they are preparing the planes for the big battle scene all in dawn’s early glow – yellow/orange sunshine and pilots in silhouette. So in our version, we have our key character (demonstrator) taking the job seriously and preparing for the day’s work, all with the glow of the morning sun beaming behind him. Close up shots of him checking that his shoe laces were tied, putting on his work gloves, and stretching, all before he loads up his truck using the hand truck.
It is situations like this that make the audience relate to everyday tasks, pay attention to the details that they might normally take for granted, and helps them remember to follow these same tasks when approaching their job. When you stop and think about it, there are probably tons of spoofs that can be generated out of pop culture. We find working with improve comedians can be very rewarding, bringing fun interpretations of the characters at hand and delivering memorable performances for the end audience. And just like Hollywood, if it’s good enough, it leads to sequels.