In a previous blog post, I recommended diagramming the structure of your tech marketing explainer video using a tool built into Microsoft Office. That was about putting across all the essential messages. Another good way to come up with a story about a technology solution is to find the diagram that tells the story and extract what you need. By “the diagram” I mean the one that’s probably on Slide 9 of the sales deck or Page 6 of a white paper.
Making technical concepts visible
Diagrams of solution architectures, processes, even the vision behind a strategy, make a great starting point for developing a video. These illustrations — whether professionally created graphics or napkin sketches — are the distillation of hard thinking by bright people who know the subject. This is the best they can do.
How you turn a diagram like the one shown here into a story depends on your storytelling purpose. In this case, the message about “DevOps style automation” is a key pillar of the messaging. But it the technical details are not central to the story here. The video on the left below is based on the diagram, but it shows where the benefits of DevOps apply, without showing how it works.
In the second video example, the technology being discussed is so new that, at the time the video was in production, no simplified diagram existed. That became our job. The result is shown here. There is considerable technical detail crammed into this 30 seconds.