So you want to make videos? Fantastic. You want people to watch them? Slightly trickier. But fear not, I’m HERE TO HELP.
First...what sort of video are you making today?
Great.
Writing: so many things to say.
Briefly: practice. Find your own voice. Edit mercilessly. Write, rewrite, rewrite again. Listen to critique. Writing isn’t so important for freeform videos or tutorials or whatever, but if you’re a reviewer or a vlogger, writing is what keeps people coming back.
Now you need to be seen and heard.
You don’t actually need to appear on screen in your video if you don’t want to. You can instead do voiceover on top of clips, animations, or funny stick figure drawings.
If you do want to appear on screen, you need a camera. You can use a webcam to start, or a smartphone or digital camera. Sunshine is an excellent way to light the place if you work on its schedule. Get the camera as near to eye level as you can, and generally make sure you can be seen.
In addition, LOOK at what’s in the shot with you. This is now your set. Please pick up your dirty laundry and put the washing on. Whoever you live with will thank you because you smell less, and bonus: your surroundings look nicer on camera. TIDY UP.
This also goes for your personal presentation.
Don’t think we can’t see that you just rolled out of bed and didn’t wash your hair. You don’t have to appear in a three-piece suit, and frankly I’m not sure how many of my younger viewers even know what that is, but you should try to be well turned out. Brush your hair, at least. Clean shirt. That sort of thing.
Because your potential viewers are like a hottie on a first date with you. A hottie with really good eyesight. You have to make a good first impression, or you won’t get the chance to make a second one. With me?
Sound is...so, so important. Especially because if you make vlogs, people don’t tend to watch so much as they listen while flitting between other tabs like an Internet butterfly.
So: don’t fight your voice, work with it. In all cases: SPEAK UP. STOP MUMBLING. I MEAN IT, YOU AT THE BACK. ENUNCIATE. PROJECT, don’t shout. Think Julie Andrews.
In addition, get your mic as close to you as you can. Maybe cover the walls and floors of acoustically-crummy rooms to try and improve them, (throw your duvet on the floor, or get a rug or something) and consider using (soft) background music (edited in, not while you’re filming), to disguise horrible room tone. In that case, be careful of YouTube’s copyright robots.
It’s also vital that you sound INTERESTED. Engaged. Like you care. Because if you’re bored, so are we. Oh, the Back button. *click*
Editing: Vlog-style editing is actually reasonably simple, but it can be tedious. Because the best edits are EXACT. They don’t leave lots of umming, ahhing, awkward pauses... Except on purpose.
BONUS: try making your episodes shorter.
Why? So you can fail faster. That sounds rude, doesn’t it. GO FORTH AND FAIL! Let me explain.
If you make short episodes, they take less time to write, shoot, and edit, and people are more likely to watch them all the way through. Also, you learn faster because you can experiment without a huge time investment. And it forces you to be concise.
Make short episodes. Try things. Watch them back and think: well that part was awful, but that worked really well. Fail. Succeed. Start small. Work your way up. And then you too can look back on your earliest videos and think ‘wow. I really have improved since then.’
And that’s a pretty good feeling.
