So you want to build a reveal video...

[Jessica Boucher]

It's that time of year again...your team wants to build an amazing video to show off all the hard work that you've created. You want it to be impressive, giving a preview of what teams should expect from you at your first event. You also want it to be powerful, giving the FRC community something to talk about.

I can't tell you how many reveal videos I've seen. I've been here through the days of reveal photos, to the refusal of showing anything before the event, through the minibot iteration saga, and up to the point where we're making parody videos of reveal videos. I'm by no means an expert in video editing, but I can tell you what I feel makes a good video, and I encourage others to jump in and share their thoughts as well.

1.) BREVITY. Want to know what my favorite reveal video is? Killer Bees 2012. It's twelve seconds long. You can google all you want, but the attention span of humans on the internet is shorter than you think. Ideally, keep it under 2 minutes.

I love the Killer Bees video because I can pause it, look at it, and make a decent guess as to what they can do at competition. Want to do a slide show of your kids? Verbally thank all of your sponsors? Throw that into an extended cut. Movies do this all the time, it gives the brand extra exposure, and the super fans will watch both because you're probably going to throw some extra robot footage in there too.

Alternatively you can show the fun stuff at the end, after you've shown the robot. Make it obvious - do a thank you slide to your sponsors and then cut to the fun stuff. You're respecting the time of your fellow teams.

(Side note: don't fit your video to the length of a specific song you want to use. Audio editing is super easy to do as well.)

2.) Functional display. Your video should tell a story, but not in the way that you think. A match has three distinctive parts: auto, tele-op, and end game. Your auto may not be done yet (but if you haven't given your robot to your programmers by now, do it!) or you may want to hide that before competition, so this can be skipped. However, if you do a scouting video specifically for Champs, you definitely want to show auto.

For tele-op, think about the tasks a team could do, and how frequent you think you'll see robots being able to do that task. Then, inverse it. You've got a great drive train? Awesome. You're going to be driving through most of the video, so don't spend too much time on it. Instead, show how you get over different obstacles, especially the more advanced ones.

What about shooting the ball? I like to think of a rule of threes: Once proves you can do it, twice proves you can do it with some consistency, three times is overkill. Unless you're going all Russian Ark on us and doing an elaborate single cut (which if so, YES PLEASE), it's easy to assume that you're cutting out the scenes where you missed.

I haven't seen a team do this yet, but I would love Youtube links to specific functions - to do that, pause the video at the time before the function is shown, click on the "Share" button, and then select "Start at". Then copy that link.

End game should go last. It makes sense - the end game is arguably the most exciting part, and from a storyline perspective it should go last.

3.) Keep it interesting. There's three reasons robot videos go viral: 1.) The team is a big name and can get away with putting out whatever 2.) The robot is amazing 3.) The video is amazing. Out of all those three, the easiest one to make happen is the last one.

This is arguably the nerdiest essay I've ever written, but I hope you've enjoyed it and I look forward to a lot of discussion below. Video is easier to create than ever before, so there's no reason why you have to build just one. Make one for your sponsors, make one for your parents, and most importantly, make one for us. We can't wait to see what you've been working on.