I am working on a project this year where I am interviewing graduates of the IMPACT 360 gap year program located in Pine Mountain, Georgia.

The audience for these videos is high school graduates who have not gone to college or have completed only one year of college, as well as their parents.

While there are many questions that this audience will have depending on their situation, there are a couple of questions that most will have for a person who completed the program.

I think the best question about anything you do is WHY? Why is the question that gets to the heart of most any story? Why should the audience care?

So the first question I asked Nathan McFarland was why he chose the IMPACT 360 gap year program.

The second question was how did IMPACT 360 help him in his ultimate purpose for college–getting a job.

The last question I wanted him to address was how this impacted his college plans. Did this one-year gap program add more time to his college years?

I wrote to Nathan, gave him the overall questions, and asked him if he could try and answer these questions in two or three minutes.

The first take was great, except for people walking by and talking over him. After that, the only reason I needed to do more takes was so I could get my assistant to help keep people quiet for the three-minute interview. So take a look and see what we did for this interview.

Thank goodness for the Ken Burns effect. While Ken Burns did not invent this technique, he made it famous with documentaries like the one he did during the Civil War.

Here is a screen grab from Final Cut Pro X, where I edited a still image into the video. The great thing about this technique is you can find photos of people before you talk with them. So, for example, we asked Nathan for pictures of himself at Florida State University that we put into the package, and IMPACT 360 had some photos of Nathan in the program that we also included.

The effect of moving around a still image helps create a motion that helps move the story along. You do not need to use this; sometimes, it works against you. I think sometimes we overuse this technique, but it is helpful.