The one-minute video: why short wins

By Alastair Greener, presenter of Present Yourself in a Minute · Updated 5 November 2026

Make one point per video, keep it under a minute, and make several. The one-minute video works because a viewer can decide in seconds whether to stay, and a clip that finishes is the one that gets acted on. The Present Yourself series by Alastair Greener puts the practical version in one tip: keep videos short, and make more of them.

Why one minute, and not two

A minute is long enough to say one thing properly and short enough that someone scrolling will stay for the whole of it. Go past that and you start making a second video inside the first. If you have two points, you have two videos. By the second point, some viewers will have left, so the second point reaches fewer people than it deserves.

Plan a one-minute video in four steps

1. Write the point in one sentence. If you cannot, the video is not ready to shoot. "Our first hire paid for itself by the spring" is a point. "Hiring is important" is not.
2. Open with the point or a question in the first three seconds. Do not warm up on camera. The audience has not yet decided to watch, so give them a reason in the opening line.
3. Give one example or story. Make it specific and short. One customer, one job, one mistake.
4. End with one action. Alastair's keynote model sorts calls to action into three kinds: do, think or feel. Pick one for each video. "Book a call", "check your own figures" and "notice the thing you always skip" are each a single, clear ask.

A worked example

A fictional joiner, Tom, wants to explain why he sands oak twice before the oil goes on. His one-minute script runs in four parts.

• Hook (about 5 seconds): "Oak looks finished after the first coat. It is not."
• Point (about 10 seconds): "The second sanding is the one people skip, and it is the one that decides how the oil takes."
• Example (about 30 seconds): Tom shows the same board, sanded once and then twice, with the oil applied to each half.
• Action (about 10 seconds): "If you are oiling your own table, do the second pass. Then tell me how it looks."

That runs to about a minute with no padding.

Common mistakes

• Two points in one clip. Split them into two videos.
• A logo animation or a slow title card before the point. The first three seconds decide whether anyone stays.
• Cramming a whole talk in and speeding it up. Cut the content instead, because sped-up speech sounds rushed and is harder to follow.
• Filming only in landscape for a feed that plays vertically. Shooting in both formats on the day saves cropping later.
• Ending on "thanks for watching" with no action. The viewer needs to know what to do next.

Making more of them

Record once and cut many. A single session can give you a long episode and several one-minute clips, each with its own point. As you record, keep a list of the points and note where each one starts, so you can find it in the timeline when you edit. Our one podcast episode a month of clips guide shows the same method run over a schedule.

A Content in a Day booking from Granary (£1,395 +VAT) returns one fully edited video podcast episode, ten retouched headshots and six captioned short-form cuts from one produced day. If you want that set without editing it yourself, Content in a Day is the route. For a single short clip shot in the barn, shooting vertical and horizontal in one day explains how to get both formats in one set-up.

The picture at the top of this page is an illustration, not a photograph of a client or a real job.