I hadn’t thought about this before but the medium does have a big impact in how I approach a project. The two biggest differences, in my experience, have come down to differences in how much control I have as a creator in how the audience will interact with the piece.
On one hand, blog posts require much less investment on my part but that comes at the cost of having much less control over the audience experience. I would liken it to setting up an art exhibit. You set it up, put it out there but have little control over what people do while they’re there. One of the first, and hardest, lessons I learned while in my PhD program was how to write with the assumption that someone is going to read the first and last sentence of every paragraph but nothing else. Everything in between is something extra for the engaged reader but the main ideas are the bread holding the sandwich together. I try to apply that to my blog posts as well.
In contrast, a video is more like a guided tour. You have near total control of how your audience is going to move through the exhibit which has its own costs and benefits. You can make sure your audience hears every part of your script but that also means you have to work to hold their attention. Unless you’re covering a topic they’re already interested in or you’re popular enough that your audience is mostly watching for you, those first 3 minutes can be make or break. For my own sanity, I don’t look at the metrics but I’ve heard that if someone is going to bounce it’ll probably happen in those first three minutes. After that, most people will stick around until the end. I write and edit with that in mind and it is stressful.
It also means you have to fill all that space. I have lost an embarrassing amount of time looking at a vacant 20 seconds of timeline and having no idea what to put there. I’ve gotten better at it though and try to write my scripts while thinking about the visuals. It does mean that some ideas get left on the cutting room floor because I’m not sure what visual to accompany them with but that’s what blogs are for.
Like all people who grew up watching their parent’s VHS tapes of The Muppet Show, I was cursed with a style of humor that doesn’t translate easily into text. With a video, it’s easy to get your tone across via pacing, visuals, sound effects etc. It’s much harder when it comes to writing. I spend a lot of time in editing thinking about the tone I’m trying to convey in my writing and how to set it via word choice, phrasing and sentence structure. It’s something that I do think I’ve gotten much better at over the course of writing those blog entries but I have a long way to go.
I asked my very handsome wife/editor about this and she pointed out that she even edits my work differently depending on the medium. If she knows that something is going to exist only in text, she puts most of her effort toward syntax and punctuation. If it’s a video, she lets those things slide and focuses on bigger picture ideas because she knows I’ll be able to get my intended tone across with voice and visuals.