Explainer videos students actually watch to the end.

We make a lot of educational video — reels, shorts, explainers, longer pieces — for schools, educators and organisations. The single most common brief is "make it engaging", and the single most common mistake in what we're asked to fix is length. Here are the rules we work to. Most of them are backed by a now-classic review of the research on educational video by Cynthia Brame; the rest are what the edit suite has taught us.

The six rules

• Shorter than you think. Attention drops off steeply after a few minutes. If a concept needs twelve minutes, that's three videos, not one.
• One idea per video. If you can't say the idea in a sentence, the video isn't ready.
• Signal, don't decorate. Arrows, highlights and on-screen labels that point at what matters help learning; motion graphics that don't, hurt it.
• Talk like a person. A conversational voice outperforms a formal one — the research is consistent on this, and it matches what teenagers tell us.
• Put a question in it. A pause with a prompt ("what do you think happens next?") turns watching into thinking.
• Make it usable without sound. Captions aren't an accessibility add-on; most short-form video is watched muted.

The short-form question

There is a live debate about whether the short-form habit fragments attention, and some 2026 research suggests it can. We take that seriously, and it is why the rule is "one idea, done properly" rather than "as short as possible". A ninety-second video that leaves a learner with a complete thought is good. A fifteen-second clip that leaves them with a vibe is content, not teaching.

If you're commissioning video for learning, ask to see the storyboard before anything is filmed. The storyboard is where the thinking happens. The camera just records it.