Strictly Come Dancing is clearly a Saturday night juggernaut of a TV show. It works as it has a huge budget for set, props, costume, make up and production and technical team, can attract some of the biggest names in popular culture to get involved, and has the best slot for a TV audience – Winter Saturday nights.
The winner of the 2016 series was Ore Oduba (above left), with Louise Redknapp and Danny Mac coming second and third.
But ultimately it’s popular as viewers know what they are going to get. The familiarity comes from how the studio is set out with the judges panel, the dance floor and band performance areas, the raised platform where the dancers who just performed go to chat, and of course Claudia and Tess. In broadcast TV talk it’s called formatted TV – just like a Subway restaurant has a format to it’s layout of every restaurant.
Lets apply that to website video.
Yes, we really can.
If you are committing to a series of videos, we can take huge lessons out of formatted TV shows like ‘Strictly’. It takes a good few videos before the audience get familiar. And when people know what they are going to get, they feel comfortable.
Staying with Saturday Night TV, these are Jonathan’s views on 2016 X Factor.
A very good example of this is a series of films called ‘Will it blend?’. Now with 908,000 subscribers the videos started 10 years ago and up until recently every video comprised of putting in weird and wonderful items into an industrial grade blender to see what happened when the blender was switched on. Every video is almost identical. People know what they are getting. They watch.
Will it blend takes random objects and places them in a blender, to demonstrate the power of their blenders.
Your video ideas might not have the budget of Strictly Come Dancing, but we benefit from learning what works. So keep a format to the videos you make – in script, graphics, style of filming, music, and each new film that you put live means the audience get to catch up with a familiar face.
Author: Jonathan is the founder of Bellyflop.tv and has been making films for Youtube since 2006.
