major benefi ts of the new drill in a 30-second
commercial. With this in mind, you set a program
length of about three minutes.
Budget
Finally, you need to consider budget: the
amount of money available to produce your
program. Budget constraints will determine
both what you can do and how you can do it.
What You Can Do
For the Sidewinder drill program, the original
concept was to use fast motion techniques to
show several women building an offi ce building
using Sidewinder drills. However, you soon
realize that a lengthy location shoot in a real
construction site would be far too expensive,
Figure 9-6. Instead, you develop a less expensive
concept involving three performers in a kitchen.
How You Can Do It
With any concept, there are often alternative
ways to produce the program. For example, your
fi rst version of the kitchen concept might be to
shoot the Sidewinder program in the elaborate
kitchen of an expensive home. But, when you add
up the costs of renting the location, lighting
the kitchen, and transporting cast, crew, and
equipment, you realize that it will probably cost
less to design a kitchen set and build it on a
sound stage instead. However, when you cost
●
Subject matter. Within the program types that
are not standardized in length, the actual
duration of a video may depend on the
extensiveness of its content.
Superfi cially, subject matter might seem to
be the fi rst determiner of length, rather than the
last. It would appear logical to allow a video
to run as long as it takes to cover the chosen
content with appropriate thoroughness. This
is often how publishers set the lengths of
nonfi ction books, such as this one. A book may
have 300 pages, or 600, or 1,200 depending on
the extent of its subject. But, a book is a random
access document. You can dip into it anywhere
you please, read it at your own pace, pick it up
and put it down when you feel like it. The length
of a book is not critically important, because the
reader controls how much of it to absorb at any
one time.
The video viewer, by contrast, cannot control
the speed at which information is delivered,
and most programs are designed to be watched
continuously, at a single sitting. For these reasons,
the lengths of video programs are infl uenced
less by their subject matter than by the other
factors discussed above.
Considering how these factors infl uence
your Acme Sidewinder video, you realize that
impatient net surfers are unlikely to watch a
promotional video for even fi ve minutes. On
the other hand, you cannot demonstrate the
Figure 9-5 TV program segments are standard
lengths to accommodate commercials.
(Adobe)
Figure 9-6 Women constructing an office building
would be too expensive to produce.
(Corel)
164 Video Digital Communication & Production