That seems to be the trend in videos these days. It drives me crazy when they show a car and it's 0.2s in a tunnel, 0.3s on a mountain and so on. You can watch a whole video and still don't known it looks. But together with music and sound effects it's cool.
- Long single-shot videos of someone doing something complicated. Boring, but useful. Typical use: how-to videos.
- History Channel style. Video of important stuff with occasional interpretive graphics and explanation. Tough to balance but can be done well. Expensive to produce. Tends to oversimplify.
- Classic industrial film. See anything from the Jam Handy Organization. The Internet Archive has hundreds of these films. Good at getting concepts across. Blah by modern standards. Narrated, but not much talking head time. Minimal animation of details. Many stock shots.
That field needs some design work. If the goal is to explain (not sell), the industrial film model, modernized, has potential. It takes more production effort than a blipvert or a PowerPoint video, but less than a History Channel video.
Top of the line in explanatory videos: "Victory through Air Power" (1943) [1] This was made by Disney for one purpose - to convince President Roosevelt to go with heavy land-based bombers as the main weapon in the Pacific war.
Classic Jam Handy: "Around the Corner", which explains how an automobile differential works.[1] (Skip the first three minutes.) If you watch this, you will understand how a differential works, and won't forget it.
An explanation of Microsoft's new UI with similar clarity would be helpful.
