Shoot your own videos - beyond the talking head

Wednesday I participated in the LOSmakers meetup. The LOSmakers are a group of people interested in learning & social media. Cycling through the rain to the station got me soaked 4 times, but worth it, it was a very inspiring meeting. It was fun to meet and share with others who are also experimenting with video. In university I once made a film about pre-history and we could make use of a professional editing room.  (that was in the pre-historical time before the smartphone). With smartphones and tools like periscope and screencasting video is now within the reach of every lunatic / trainer / consultant. However, it is not easy to really come up with good materials .. I myself for instance don't want to edit movies because it takes a lot of time. As a result I often have the so-called talking head movie. I interview someone put it online.

Professional filmmaker or do-it-yourself?
An important question is: when to do it yourself and when do you turn to a professional filmmaker? Sometimes it simply depends on the budget but I try to at least look at how often you can use the movie and how quickly the content will become outdated. A nice quote from a fellow LOsmaker Matthijs was that "you have to spend hours in making videos yourself". It helps you to improve and to collaborate with professionals.

Storyboarding
We got our hands dirty working on story boarding. Bart Wagenaar explains here what story boarding is (in Dutch). Next week I will attend the Learning en Technologies conference and we decided to storyboard a video from the conference.

It was fun to storyboard, you see that you may be using the same words but that you have completely different images. A nice way to also deploy other design processes. Before making a video it definitely helps to know which shots you want to shoot.

Beyond talking heads
My question is: what else you can do in a video instead of a 'talking head'.  My own case was about a video concerning assessment. What I picked up quickly was the idea that it is good to investigate the objective of the video and the target group and not to jam too many objectives into one video. You may also search for videos that already exist .. you can also pick an existing video from another field, thereby starting a conversation, in my case for example. for a video on assessment of a gymnastics competition. Other ideas that I have gained.:

• Shoot a talking head video but provide some context before and after the talking head (as in the video above with Bart)
• Use existing footage with and voice over
• Screen Cast with a screencast program like Screencast-o-Matic record a powerpoint to tell your story
• Use a series of pictures and tell your story
• Work with images. A nice idea is to use Fiverr.com and ask someone to draw images
• Make animations powtoon of videoscribe
• Film an interview
• Film  2 or 3 mensen in conversation

Any good inspiring examples of do-it-yourself videos?