How to Produce a Useless Right-Wing Documentary
In the bad old days, it took a lot of money and time to produce a 30-minute Right-wing documentary. Documentaries were filmed, which was costly.
Almost no one ever saw these documentaries. They had no impact. They were the Right-wing equivalent of the public school videos they used to show us on topics such as brushing our teeth. (For some wonderful examples of these tax-funded films, click here. I dare you. I triple-dog dare you.)
These days, YouTube lets dedicated ideologues produce documentaries three times longer. Maybe six times longer. Video makes it cheaper per minute to produce documentaries.
Then they are posted on YouTube. Maybe a million people will see one of them. Result? Nothing measurable. It has no impact.
They have no impact because they are produced by people with zero knowledge of direct-response marketing. Fools and their video budgets are soon parted.
This was posted recently on a GaryNorth.com forum with respect to a three-hour 9-11 conspiracy video:
I don't like video references. What are we supposed to do give a video analysis? At least with concise and well written articles as on Lew Rockwell we can do a proper analysis of a written text. I grew up regarding videos as entertainment.
The person who posted this is on target.
SEEING MAY NOT BE BELIEVING
I have been writing on a professional basis since 1967. I have written many kinds of material, but in most cases, what I have written has always been designed to persuade people of something. I write to persuade. Therefore, I have to use rhetoric.
Anything worth changing your mind about is worth reading about. Anything so momentous that somebody would spend 1,000 hours or more to create a documentary had better have convincing proof outside of the video. Seeing can be believing, but it isn't always successful. We have videos of planes crashing into the twin towers, and yet there are a lot of conspiracy buffs who do not think that the twin towers went down because of the planes crashing into them. They also think there were no pilots inside the planes.
Where did the bodies go? The people never returned.
If videos do not prove the case, then what should? That is why there is such a thing as irreducible complexity in life, including history. We cannot "get to the bottom of this." The bottom is deeper than the historical record, which is incomplete. There were videos of 9-11. There is no agreement.
The #1 advantage of written communications is this: footnotes. Footnotes for centuries have been the key for historians to deal with historical facts and theories. Footnotes lead to more detailed arguments. They lead to specialized monographs and highly concentrated articles whose details overwhelm anybody but a nonspecialist. Footnotes enable you to verify the general summary of whatever it is the original author is arguing for.
When you see an article with no footnotes, you should regard it as simply an introduction to something. It is useful only in catching your attention sufficiently to persuade you to read something else. When you see a video that does not have a reference to a book, a website, a detailed article, or something that has further verification, don't waste your time with the video, except for entertainment. You may get a brief overview of something, and this is legitimate. If the video is highly effective in terms of visual presentations, and if the video is not more than about 15 minutes long, then you can get a survey of the particular thesis. Your time is valuable. You want an introduction. You want the high spots. You want the strongest case you can get. That's what a video is ideally suited to provide.
Here is the best informational video I have ever seen. It is less than two minutes long.
It is short and to the point. It gets across a simple idea: Obama's rhetoric about a budget cut was meaningless -- almost silly. The producer used representation as his tool: pennies. It worked. Anyone will remember this. It does not require footnotes or graphs. It is a stand-alone video. It will be around forever.
It is entertaining. It is short. It is brilliant. It does not call us to action. It immunizes us against the idea that politicians are serious about budget cuts.
A THREE-HOUR VIDEO
Anybody who produces a three-hour video but no book or website is wasting his time and mine. He does not know how to communicate. He does not know how to attract a large audience and keep 20% of it until the end. He does not know how to get disciples. He is not building a mailing list. He does not know about people's lack of attention. He has wasted his time. He has wasted the time of the person who has donated the three hours necessary to start the video and finish it.
Any time you see that a video is longer than 20 minutes, scroll to the end. See what it calls you to do. If there is no action step at the end, skip the video. It is not serious. Do not waste your time.
The mind cannot follow video presentations for three hours. You have to think about what is being said. You have to look at supporting evidence. You have to mull things over. There is very little in life that would provide a payoff to a viewer that is large enough to justify three hours to watch a video. Almost nobody will do this. Certainly, nobody who is going to take action will do it, because the video is supposed to be a mere introduction. It is supposed to cover the highlights. It is supposed to persuade somebody initially of a position, but if it does not provide detailed non-video verification of whatever this position is, then it was produced by an amateur. It was produced by somebody who does not know how to persuade. Above all, it was produced by somebody who wants to attract the attention of people who have a lot of spare time on their hands -- people who are not serious about following through in a detailed way to study the topic, and who will not commit their lives, fortunes, and reputations to get to the bottom of something.
Furthermore, if you're going to get to the bottom of something, you had better be ready to commit time and money to reconstruct the establishment that deliberately misinformed the public. It comes back to the old rule: you can't beat something with nothing. Anybody who produces a three-hour video, but who does not have a plan of action to do something positive, is simply a conspiracy-monger whose primary result will be to paralyze relatively ignorant people who are easily scared by undocumented video clips. Why would anybody want to attract somebody like this? Why would anyone spend thousands of hours to produce a video, if the only person who will be converted to the cause is lazy, easily scared, dependent on entertainment, does not like footnotes, does not want to commit to reforming whatever it is the producer is trying to expose as lying, and who cannot remember five facts in the video two days later? What's the point?
The average person's attention span is about 25 minutes. A really skilled speaker, or a really skilled video producer, can keep people focused for longer, but their ability to remember what is in it will be minimal. Anything beyond about 25 minutes in a lecture is there for entertainment purposes, or perhaps review purposes, or something rhetorical -- persuasion, not facts or logic. But you cannot burden the average listener with new facts or theories for longer than about 25 minutes, if you expect the person to retain the information.
In the Ron Paul Curriculum, the main teaching tool is a 25-minute video. Occasionally, somebody goes over this, but never over 40 minutes, and rarely that long. The student is limited to about 25 minutes of listening, and then he should be reading for about 25 minutes. After that, you should not expect the student to remember anything.
In every video, there is a 5-minute review of the previous lesson. Every fifth lesson is a review of the previous four. This is in addition to the daily reading assignments. There is a weekly essay. Yet with all of this, after 180 lessons, students will retain only a rudimentary understanding of the course a year later -- maybe three months later. It takes repetition, reading, and writing to communicate the basics in a way that will be recalled.
Anybody who produces a video that is longer than 45 minutes is going to find that the average viewer, two days later, remembers virtually nothing about this video. If the video keeps introducing new information -- new images, or new screens full of data, or new anything -- without extensive review, it is not going to be effective. It has wasted the producer's time and money, and it has wasted the time of the viewers. The viewers won't remember much about it. They will remember the experience, not the facts. They will not be able to verbally piece together the facts into a narrative comparable to the video. The mind does not work this way. To get facts assembled together in the way a video does this, you would need to have in a video requires enormous concentration, careful screening, consideration of facts, strict attention to the narrative, and a lot of rehearsal.
A speech, a video, or even a short article should not try to persuade a person of more than five facts, and even this is a stretch. You have heard the phrase, "You can count this on the fingers on one hand." That is about the limit of what you can get across in a speech. Five points is it. If you try to get more than five points across, or five basic ideas across, you are going to fail. You can do it in a carefully constructed article or chapter, but don't try it in a speech or video. Speeches and video are for recruiting -- persuading a person to move forward in a detailed program.
CONCLUSIONS
Stand-alone videos longer than 25 minutes will fail. Ideally, a YouTube video should be under two minutes. If you need more time, use a pop-up that takes the viewer to a longer video. After this, take him to a website.
Assume that you will lose 80% at the end of the first video. People just don't care. But you get two minutes to persuade them to care enough to watch another video.
If you want to change a person's mind, but you don't offer a way to take action, you have wasted your time and his time. If an article is part of a series, this is different. You are calling the person to read one article, and then you expect him to read another article. That's like a chapter in the book. I am speaking of stand-alone documents. Anybody who produces a stand-alone document that tries to persuade somebody of something new, had better offer him something else to read, or a website to go to, plus an action step. Otherwise, it's just entertainment. It is not worth three hours of almost anyone's time.
There is nothing wrong with entertainment, but don't expect people to commit their lives, fortunes, and reputations to defending a video. It is not going to happen.
A CLASSIC WASTE OF MONEY AND TALENT
The best example of wasted money and talent to produce a libertarian documentary that I have ever seen is this: Aaron Russo's 2006 video on the Federal Reserve and the income tax. At the end -- 146 minutes -- there is only one call to action: register on freedom to fascism com. He forgot the www. I went to the website. I found this.
Yet Russo had produced Trading Places. He was a Hollywood entertainment expert. But he had no idea of what an information video should do or can do.
Early in the video (3:15), Russo cites the infamous apocryphal quote from Meyer Rothschild about controlling a nation's money. "Give me control of the nation's money supply, and I care not who makes its laws." There are variations of this on the Web. "Allow me." "Permit me." There is never a footnote to a primary source. Anyone with any knowledge of banking history would have known that this quote is bogus.
So are lots of other quotes in the video. A list of them is here.
The video cites what it identifies as a verse in "Revelations." There is no "Book of Revelations." This is a mistake that humanists with no knowledge of the Bible make all the time. It is a tip-off that they don't know what they are doing.
He died with $2 million of IRS liens against him. Presumably, the IRS collected from his estate. It always does in big money cases.
The video is deeply marred by the brief interview -- just before Ron Paul -- at the end of the video (146:30). It was a call to be adults, "to evolve or perish." The caller was a suicidal waste of a man, who was destroyed by his own fruitless pursuit of conspiracies: Michael Ruppert. He blew his brains out on April 13, 2014. Before this, he had abandoned his online disciples, and had fled to Venezuela in 2006 because of what he claimed were forces seeking to kill him. (He was also getting away from a $125,000 sexual harassment court judgment against him.) Then he came back to a rural area in northern California. He lived in a mobile home owned by someone else. He left his organization, CollapseNet, $12,000 in debt to the IRS -- he was a tax resister. He had abandoned CollapseNet in 2012. The site's owner is ready to shut it down, as of December 1, 2014. He had spent his media career abandoning those people who had been attracted to his message. Then he abandoned life.
A documentary producer must screen the people he interviews. By 2006, it was clear to most analysts that Ruppert was unreliable.
He didn't know what he was doing with this video. He was in way over his head. He asked for no editorial advice from anyone who had been at this for 30 or 40 years. He asked no one with skill in producing a documentary. He meant well, but he wasted his last days on earth on this project. Russo died of cancer shortly after the video was released.
The video has some good interviews, but so what? The video has had no impact. It has changed nothing.
The interview beginning at 30 minutes is worth watching. This is what tax protesters are up against. You have never seen anything like it. It ends in Yiddish . . . with Russo supplying the translation. Take seriously the translation.