How to Make Informational Videos Like Vox
Vox’s videos always have an appealing simplicity and professionalism, and you can always tell when a video has been produced by Vox. Of course, Vox’s video producers are some of the best in their field, but there's a lot you can learn from Vox’s video style.
In 2020, we’re all consuming the news more than ever, and for good reason. Between a global pandemic, a racial equality movement, an unemployment crisis, and a pending presidential election, it seems like simply more things are happening at once than ever before – big, important things. Media publishers have invested heavily in videos as watch time on YouTube, IGTV, Facebook, and other video platforms increases.
Vox Media publishes videos online to help explain some of the chaos happening around us. From science to economics, Vox's YouTube videos help viewers understand common phenomenon that impact human behavior and society. They have a whole playlist about coronavirus topics. Here's one, for example, about how slow motion works:
Vox’s videos always have an appealing simplicity and professionalism. They have numbers, visualizations, shape annotations, and voice overs to provide journalistic insight into a topic.
Although Vox’s video producers are some of the best in their fields, amateur video creators can emulate this production style with accessible editing techniques. In this article, I'll explain how to achieve a Vox style when making an informational video. Here’s what you can learn from Vox’s video style:
- Infographics: Data is beautiful
- Own your branding
- Be thorough
- Don’t limit yourself to the news
1. Infographics, infographics, infographics
There’s a reason Vox loves infographics so much: they’re the most efficient possible way to convey fairly complex information. And if you put a lot of thought into the presentation of your infographics, they’re much easier for your viewers to remember.
Try to make your infographic themes relevant to their subjects – this one on ocean noise & climate change, for example - uses loose graphic themes of music and sound waves to introduce methods of sound measurement. If you use an online multimedia editor like Kapwing to make your infographics, you can browse, import, and edit any photos or icons from the internet in order to put your infographics together. It’s important for your infographics to have both graphic and textual elements, as well, so make sure your text is fully customized and fits in with your theme.
Read more about how to make an infographic using Kapwing's Studio.
2. Own your branding
Creating a consistent visual brand in your videos gives them a quality of professional polish, distinctiveness, and recognizability. To make a video like Vox, you should consider making animated logos and visual elements that you use consistently in your videos. Kapwing enables you to make re-usable stylized templates for intros, outros, watermarks, and other media formats to streamline your creative process for greater efficiency and brand consistency.
Brand assets help because they are recognizable and distinct. It's easy to recognize Vox’s graphics because they reuse the same stylistic motifs: fonts, colors, animations, and themes. A good video editor will allow you to create and store all your branded content templates in an online workspace, where you can copy, edit, and quickly produce new content based on your own style templates.
3. Be thorough
For the most important part of Vox’s style, there’s really no shortcut. You have to be thorough in your research. After all, that’s really what makes their viewers stick around – your work needs to go in depth, illuminate something new, and provide a valuable insight. Even the sleekest, most professionally edited videos aren’t worth watching if you don’t bring a valuable perspective or bit of research to the table.
4. Don’t limit yourself to the news
Despite all the topical, newsworthy, headline topics that Vox covers on any given day, they always resist nailing their themes down to only the most contemporary issues. A month ago Vox sandwiched a fantastic video on the Cooper Black typeface in between fascinating videos on Coronavirus and the spread of disease. What’s more, it has significantly outperformed the more up-to-date, timely topics that surrounded it.
So while Vox’s media coverage typically deals with newsworthy topics, it’s important to keep in mind that you don’t need to restrict yourself to the news, or even just to trending topics in general. If there’s something you know a lot about, something you’re passionate about, or a topic you’ve always wanted to investigate deeply, go for it! As long as you engage with your topic deeply, add some original insight, and produce a high-quality video, you can attract viewers to any topic you wish to cover.
Remember to tag us @KapwingApp whenever you share your content on social media– we love to see what our creators are passionate about! And be sure to subscribe to the Kapwing Resources page – we’re constantly writing new tutorial and features to help you make the most out of Kapwing.
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