What to Say in a Video Story, and Everything Else That Makes It Work

Ten seconds to make an impression. Here is what we have learned watching clients respond to them.

Profiles with a video story are chosen significantly more often than those without one. We have watched this pattern hold across years of client bookings, and what drives it is this: a video lets a client hear how someone speaks, watch how she moves, and decide whether the person in the photographs is someone he actually wants to spend an evening with. A short clip filmed on a phone in a considered setting often tells a client more than an entire professional shoot.

Most video stories we receive do not use this well. The same problems appear often enough that they are worth naming.

Ten to fifteen seconds. Not more.

Clients decide within the first two seconds whether they will keep watching. Do not start with a greeting. Do not introduce yourself by name.

Start with the most visually compelling or personally interesting moment you have: a location, an expression, a single sentence specific enough to be surprising. Videos that run longer than thirty seconds almost always do so because the person filming was not sure where to stop, and the client notices this before she does.

What to actually say

The majority of videos we receive contain some version of the same content: loves travelling, enjoys good food and interesting conversation, passionate about culture or fitness or both. These things may be entirely true and they leave no impression, because they belong to no one in particular.

Say one specific thing about yourself. Not a category, not a quality, but a detail. The city you visited recently that stayed with you. The book you finished last month that changed how you see something. What you find genuinely enjoyable about an evening in London, described in a way that could only come from you.

One detail that a client remembers after watching twenty other videos is worth more than a minute of content that passes without leaving anything behind.

Subtitles are worth adding. A significant proportion of clients watch video stories without sound, particularly when browsing on a phone. A video with subtitles reaches all of them.

Where to film

Street noise, passing crowds, wind across a microphone: these stop a video before the content has registered. The built-in microphone on a phone records the entire environment at equal volume, which on a busy London street means the person speaking arrives quieter than everything around her.

A quiet room with natural light from a window to the side is the most reliable setting. A calm café terrace before the lunch crowd arrives or a garden sheltered from traffic can also work well.

Both need more preparation than filming indoors: find a spot away from noise, check the frame before filming, and record several takes. A background that looked clean at the start often has something in it that only shows up on the second or third viewing.

A note on quality

A current smartphone is sufficient. The lens should be clean, the phone on a stand at eye level, portrait orientation used since that is how profiles are viewed.

We notice something consistently when clients come back after a booking made through a profile with a video: they almost always mention something specific the woman said. Not how she looked. Not the setting. Something she said that stayed with them before they had even met her.

A video story is the only place on a profile where that is possible, and it is what almost no one who sends us a video thinks to use it for.