If you’re a scientist thinking about creating short science videos, you’re probably wondering how they can have the biggest impact. One really powerful way to go is to focus your video, not on informing your viewers, but instead on motivating them to do something specific.

Take a look at the short video above. If you watch carefully, you’ll see that this video of Stanford University’s self-driving DeLorean actually provides no information at all! But the video nonetheless provoked such an intense interest (in us anyway) that we wanted to immediately learn more about the project.

We are not saying that you should provide zero information in your video. What we are saying is that any information you provide should be placed in the context of providing the motivation for your audience to do something specific.

Here are just a few specific “calls to action” around which you might focus a particular video:

• To read more about your research
• To be more concerned about a particular issue
• To take a closer look at your website

SciFund Challenge has a lot of advice for beginners on how to structure your science videos for maximum impact in our Video for Scientists class. Here’s the relevant section of the class material.