How We Made A 60-Second Gaming Video

During my placement with Makematic, I was tasked to produce a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) video on the benefits of gaming and the life skills it provides. After the initial planning, when I was faced with the task of editing a minute-long video I didn’t think much of it. However as the team and I planned the video’s content I started to get worried. The thought of trying to fit so much information about the benefits of gaming and the life skills it provides into 60-seconds was quite daunting.

Personally, I love long-form content. I’m the person who will almost never watch YouTube videos that are under 15 minutes and prefers hour-long content that I can have on in the background. And while I have made short-form content before in school and university, 60-seconds was definitely pushing what I was familiar with.

However, once we had refined our script as much as possible and I started editing, I realised that it wasn’t as difficult as I was psyching myself up to believe it was because we had done the hard part while we were scripting. And as I watched the footage back I realised just how useful short-form content can be. The restrictions of only having 60-seconds to include as much information as you can while not bombarding a viewer with too much to take in means that you end up refining your points down to the bare minimum, and most interesting information possible. And this - if done right - inevitably makes for better content because it’s all of the best bits.

Our topic being gaming meant that I could use transitions and music to play into that aspect. The team and I knew that we wanted to start off with an old-school PSA style video in black and white, somewhat mocking the “serious” tone, but I wasn’t sure how to then transition into the rest of the video which would be in colour without it being a typical crossfade which wouldn’t work. After discussing it with Ryan, one of the producers, I realised that feeding into the gaming nature of the video would help in this case and so I tried out a bunch of different glitch effects to transition the clips. I think it has worked really well, not only practically, but stylistically as well I feel like it compliments the video contents really well.

Massive thank you to young people involved in the video: Niamh Brooking, Justin Pornasdoro and Chloe Shaw!

If you haven’t yet, check out our CSR video on the benefits of gaming.