In the Blink of a (video call) Eye
Video calls are funny.
On one hand, video calls are remarkably accessible.
If you have an Internet connection, you can talk face-to-face with someone on the other side of the globe… for free! You have Skype, Google Hangouts, Zoom, Facetime, WhatsApp, and many other options... mostly free!
While there’s certainly room for improvement in the user interfaces, video calls are relatively easy to use. Even my parents, who don’t know how to send a text message, have no problems making video calls.
On the other hand, video calls can still be kind of… awkward.
They are not quite as intuitive as the old-fashioned phone call, and they don’t have as consistent social norms and rituals as old-fashioned phone calls either. Video calls don’t have the standard niceties of “Hello, may I speak to ____?”
(Sidenote: If you’re old enough to have grown up talking on the phone for hours, you might wonder why voice conversations seem less expressive/intimate these days. Episode #3 of the Ways of Hearing podcast has a fascinating explanation of technological factors, with the switch from analog to digital transmission.)
People often don’t look good on video calls:
And eye contact on video calls —often not great. And weird. This is largely a design problem that is not currently well-solved. Think about where the webcam is on your laptop or mobile device, and where the eyes of person you are talking to are on your screen. They don’t align like they do in-person. There are tricks to mitigate this, but good video call eye contact is not intuitive at all in 2018. (I’ll talk more about this in a future post.)
I regularly have meetings via video calls with people based in various parts of the world. They are a critical part of how we’re able to connect on a human level and think together.
I accidentally learned a key concept about video calls when working with our Kenyan partner, on a project that made online learning more available to NGOs in Kenya. In our project, the production of online courses had its own set of skills, many of which are related to video literacy, storytelling, and structuring peer learning.
While we had video calls on Skype a couple times a week, the insight came not so much from these particular video calls, but from the video literacy subject matter of our project.
It was relatively easy to teach our partner video shooting, and they were quickly able to good quality shots, with good framing and decent lighting, with smartphones they already had. (Phones can get great results!)
But it was trickier to help them learn how to do video editing. And I’m not even talking about learning how to use Adobe Premiere Pro — not a trivial learning curve (but I do love Premiere!).
I’m a slow and not great video editor, but I have a decent intuitive sense of what makes a good cut in editing. I could not explain it well it all though.
While looking for resources, I came across a classic book that I’m guessing most film school students read: Walter Murch’s “In the Blink of an Eye.” It’s a quick, fascinating read, and I highly recommend it even if don’t think you’ll ever do any film or video editing. It’s a great book on how humans notice things, how attention can be influenced, and how our brains process what we see and hear.
Did you ever wonder why film editing works at all? Given that it’s a collection of a bunch of different shots from different angles, why does good editing seem smooth, natural, and not usually not jarring?
Film editing takes advantage of how we perceive things every day — editing in many ways emulate how our attention constantly shifts while maintaining continuity across those shifts:
“To me, the perfect film is as though it were unwinding behind your eyes, and your eyes were projecting it themselves, so that you were seeing what you wished to see. Film is like thought. It’s the closest to thought process of any art.
“Look at that lamp across the room. Now look back at me. Look back at that lamp. Now look back at me again. Do you see what you did? You blinked. Those are cuts. After the first look, you know that there’s no reason to pan continuously from me to the lamp because you know what’s in between. Your mind cut the scene. First you behold the lamp. Cut. Then you behold me.”
— John Huston, as quoted by Walter Murch
So what does this have to do with better meetings via video calls?
If you have a basic understanding of film editing and how our attention shifts, you’ll start to notice how it works in person, and you’ll eventually be able to apply those principles in how you structure a video meeting.
Video meetings work best when they give a logical avenue to shift our attention in desirable ways, in ways that we’d naturally do in person.
Think about it — when you are participating in a meeting in-person, you are not staring at a one person’s face for 30 minutes straight. Nor are you continuously starting at their PowerPoint presentation the entire time either.
Think about what a fair number of webinars look like. It can often be a disembodied voice talking over a bunch of slides. Not the end of the world, but doesn’t as naturally allow your attention to shift around, say between the slide deck and the face of the person talking.
Or sometimes you get the opposite effect when you are continuously looking a at a single angle of a talking head shot. It gets to be really monotonous fast, because it doesn’t give you a natural way to shift your attention within the context of the speaker.
Did you ever wonder why TED Talks work online? The main reason is that the talks themselves are good, and have ideas worth spreading! But they also have great video editing. The editing is allowing you to, as Huston says, see what you wish to see. It’s allowing you to shift your attention in ways that seem natural and desirable.
One broader design challenge is:
How might we structure our video meetings in ways that allow us to shift our attention in desirable and natural ways?
I’ll cover some specific techniques in future posts.
