A phrase I learned from my high school English teacher was "less is more," and it's a truth I've witnessed time and again in so many situations. One of these situations is combo videos. People don't make combo videos that appeal to human nature. Most videos are long and drawn out, repeating similar footage. Most videos have lots of down time, contain lots of clips that just thin the attention span of the viewer. Many videos combine footage of different formats and quality, mixing things like screen capture and handheld camera recorded footage. Almost all videos set raw footage to music and contain no additional editing beyond text. There was one video from this spring that was hyped up tremendously, but it failed in every way I've described above, and then some. The creator put a lot of work into it, and hardly anyone talked about that project after its release.
The most unfortunate thing about all this is that these directors have the talent to create great videos. It's not that they are incapable, it's that they are inconsiderate. You have to consider from a psychological standpoint what works with audiences. Think about movie trailers. They show you a variety of settings in a brief amount of time, force feeding an overload of visual stimuli while creating suspense. What I think is key is that they don't give the audience time to digest a scene because another comes right up for the viewer to grapple with.
What does the good doctor prescribe?
1. Theatrical effects. There is a fighting game montage on google video that showcases a variety of games. Melee was one of them, but they only had one short clip and it was an items combo. Still, that video was theatrical because it didn't just show raw footage. Things were edited: the clips, the overlay, etc. Here's just one idea: show a combo clip that fades before it finishes, show another one, and yet another. Then show them all finishing at once.
2. Brevity. Believe it or not, a few very unique clips will leave a longer lasting impression than 10 or even 6 minutes of dragged out video. You know a combo video is excessive when an entire song plays through and another track begins. And when it comes to music, keep it fresh. Don't just let something run through, do some kind of mixing with tracks and never let an entire song run through normally. At least play something with a twist (like an unheard remix of a popular song).
3. Quality control. Of course there are great combos on bad quality recordings. Don't use them.
There's definitely a lot more that needs to be done to break the current trend in combo vids, but those not so obvious things would require actual research studies. You know how much psychological experimentation goes on just for companies to decide where to put what on their website layout? You get the point.
