How do you film a video for beginners?
I've worked on courses. I've been struggling with releasing this one for the longest time, and my friend Graham Cochrane always says go ugly early. It's the same concept. For me, it's like 6 out of 10 it's not where I want it to be, but for the person that it can help for them, it's a 10 out of 10. So I keep having to tell myself it's really easy for me to tell you, “No, it looks great, sounds great. Ship it, this is great!”
But then for me, as I struggle with perfectionism for my stuff, it's a fine line, but it's a constant struggle.
Our videos, we can always edit them. We can always do something else to tweak them, to make them better. But at the end of the day, if we believe in our message and the thing that we're teaching, if we believe that that can help people, we are doing a disservice to the world by not getting it out there. It becomes an excuse.
How do you take a good video of yourself?
The three key elements to video production are sound, video, and light. Those are the three main things. So, a mistake that a lot of us make is with lighting. If we have mixed lighting it can cause problems. People always say to sit by a window, and you get the natural light of the sun coming in. That's a cool idea, except for if you also have your kitchen light on which is a different temperature color than the sunlight. Then you've got this blue light on one side of your face and this orange light on the other side and it looks terrible. It is so gross you do not look flattering. I don't care what anybody says
it needs to be fixed or shut the light off, or don't sit by a window like use one or the other.
Video Production Equipment
Shoot with some kind of soft light. You can get a very inexpensive softbox for 30 or 40 bucks that will cast a very soft light and you don't have to use any other lights. That soft light is such a key in making your image just feel natural and look good.
For audio, you can use the mic on your smartphone. But if you spend like 50- 100 bucks, you can up-level what it sounds like. If your visual looks amazing, but your audio for whatever you're teaching is not good, there is scientific proof that people they will check out. They're not going to hear the stuff
that you have to say. So. as much as I love to create beautiful imagery, I know that when it comes to educating people, if the audio is not good it's one of the worst things that you can do.
Shooting with your smartphone is fine. It's crazy what these phones with cameras can do. People want is that cinematic Hollywood look. Essentially it's this thing called depth of field or aperture. That's the stuff in the background that gets blurred out. Now, the new technology and the iPhones, have this cinematic mode where it like blurs out the video stuff behind you. So it does recreate that I've seen it when you're moving around it
looks kind of clunky I don't like it just feels fake.
So I like the actual real camera with the real lens but that costs.
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