David Croucher writes:

Great, and thanks, Derek! But I take issue with some of point 6, about filming.

Creating a video is easy – if you want a bad one. To make a good video, if you don’t have professional help, is not so easy. By a ‘good’ video, I mean one that will get your readers’ interest, rather than make them cringe! I’m writing below mainly about you-talking-to-them videos, rather the ones that have you in voice-over and some other scene or a computer screen video.

Here are six tips to getting it right:

1> The BACKGROUND: choose it carefully, to include what you think adds to your message and EXCLUDE anything that distracts. Take a few still shots of you in the picture, and be critical about them. If all else fails, an outdoor picture with a bland background like bushes will work.

2> The LIGHTING really matters. Your own face should usually be well lit with fairly soft lighting from several directions (main lighting overhead near the camera and a fill-in spotlight to one side of the camera is usual). The background is best subdued so that it doesn’t catch notice, unless you want to draw attention to it. There are many ways to achieve all this, so experiment.

3> If you use PROPS, make sure they are totally helping your message and PRACTISE using them until you’re perfect. Hesitate and fumble as you’re filming and the message you project is of uncertainty or incompetence. Better not to have props than this.

4> Keep it SHORT and SIMPLE, with just one key point. As Derek says, it’s worth the time to script it carefully and hone it till it has impact. A friend was once asked to speak briefly to an international convention – and he is a practised speaker, one of the best. But he says that this capped-at-3-minutes talk was the hardest he’s ever had to prepare, and took him far, far longer than his usual 20 minute to half hour slot. A 10-second video, with impact, is very effective – but so hard to prepare!

5> Not just what you say and how well you say it, but all other SOUNDS in the video count towards the impact of the message. I’ll just mention three points:
# The AMBIENCE: you need a lot of muffling, like curtains, in an ordinary room, or it sounds like you’re talking in the bath! That’s why outdoors is good – less echoes.
# Extraneous NOISES can be a huge distraction, like a camera motor near the microphone, you rustling papers or tapping a pencil, a clock ticking or a fridge whirring across the room, passing traffic, someone walking around upstairs, sirens a way off, and so on. You generally won’t notice them, even while you’re filming, but your viewers will catch them all! Get rid of every one unless you want them there for impact.
# Vocal MANNERISMS that you don’t notice as you speak, will really nag at your audience, especially if they’re used many times during the film. You need a critical audience to catch these, and hard practice to get rid of them. Especially, you MUST eliminate all of the usual noises that people use to join thoughts – an irritating word like ‘aaand…’, or ‘um’ every few seconds, and so on. These REALLY put off viewers.

6> TAKE 2 and 3 and 4 tries, if you need them, and view each one critically before you try again. You’ll get better with every take until you get stale – so then pause for a few hours or days, review and go at it again. If top actors sometimes need 20 takes to get it right, why not you?

If you pay attention to these points – and it will take practice on every one of them – then you can make an effective video. Look on Facebook and Youtube for examples of how to do it right and wrong, and learn. Good Luck!

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Derek, Member Support writes:

David,

Great response. I agree with many of your suggestions, and thank you for increasing the length of our blog! It’s true that creating a video that is both visually appealing and gets to the point in a professional way can be challenging. Our point was to encourage readers to try it, as it is much easier to film a video now more than ever. Maybe we’ll offer tips on “how to create a video” in a future blog. Keep the comments coming!

June 7, 2015 at 6:25 PM

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jackiehj writes:

I’d even say that you don’t even need to shoot a video of yourself. I made mine on my Web site by collecting telling pictures that illustrated my message and superimposing the text they were meant to illustrate, and I chose a dramatic piece of music for the audio. I got 150 subscribers in 2 days, so it must have had its own little sucess :-) but of course making this kind of video takes quite some time:

– scripting the video: choosing the text for the message, determining for each sentence the kind of picture that goes together with it

– researching the Web for appropriate pictures

– adding them and editing them one by one

– superimposing each text, determining the length of each sequence

– again, researching the Web for an appropriate piece of music that fits the progression of the message

– above all, seeing that the message remains readable!

It does take some time, but it is not impossible to realise even if you have close to no experience creating videos (which was my case when I did mine!).

September 6, 2015 at 11:52 PM

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David Croucher writes:

Thanks for that good idea, Jackie, and for the tips on how to make it work.

I tend not to use these – though they work well – for two reasons: the time it takes, as you say; and the copyright problem, which can also be time consuming to solve (which is why I have collections of free images and music).

So a suggestion to any writers who plan to use images and music on the web:
If you use stuff you find on the web for a small presentation locally and offline, it might be OK (educational use?) But if you put up something on the web for anyone to find, the owners of any copyright you break will quite likely chase you, and if they’re a big corporation, you may well get a punitive bill which you will have to pay to avoid being chased in court for stealing their property.

Fair’s fair: if YOU make a great commercial presentation which then gets wide circulation, you’ll be pretty angry if other people rip it off and present it as their own work, when you could be improving the income from your hard work by charging them a small sum to use it legally. So give others the same respect. Still pictures, video clips and music are all likely to be under copyright. Google and other search engines do make it quite easy to discover if copyright exists; and how to get permission if it does: it will cost more if a wide audience is expected or if you could make a lot of money using their work.

But don’t just cheat: do as you would be done by!

September 8, 2015 at 11:02 AM

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jackiehj writes:

Hi there David :-)

I am well aware of the copyright issue. I used quite a lot of free stuff to make my video. However, copyright is tricky both ways: once a copyrighted piece has been edited first, the edited piece is no longer under copyright. This goes so far that for text, changing a single comma is enough for the edited piece to be considered a different text! For images, cropping, changing color, hue, lighting, resolution… would do the job as well. Time to learn how to use Photoshop ;-) If Coca-Cola copyrighted a lot of different versions of their famous logo, they did it for a reason!

Of course it means, once again, some amount of additional work and time… Whichever way you go, this route is not for the lazy ;-) But I think it is rewarding :-)

Thanks for having taken the time to comment on my two cents’ worth.

September 10, 2015 at 8:58 PM

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David Croucher writes:

Hi, Jackie.
I had to research this one again to be sure, but sorry, you’re wrong about copyright: sue-yo-ass-off wrong!

“once a copyrighted piece has been edited first, the edited piece is no longer under copyright. This goes so far that for text, changing a single comma is enough for the edited piece to be considered a different text!”
This is simply not true, Jackie. There are computer programs out there solely to ‘spin’ text: changing as many words as possible without changing the sense. The aim is to make the work unrecognizable, so the the re-publisher doesn’t get sued. Apart from the fact that the text produced is terrible, it doesn’t break copyright; if the original author can show derivation, which isn’t difficult, it’s damages time! That goes for long quotes and editing of any kind. You’ll be relieved to know that your copyrighted articles (and scripts of your videos) are pretty-well bomb-proof copyrighted simply by the fact that they got published. Getting those damages paid is another matter, of course.

“For images, cropping, changing color, hue, lighting, resolution… would do the job as well. Time to learn how to use Photoshop ;-) ”
Same goes for images. The changes you suggest may make it harder to catch the copying, but once spotted, it isn’t hard for an expert to absolutely prove the theft, and usually easy for a normal human to say, “Yeah, that’s a steal.”

There’s lots about this on the web, but here’s a quick quote from US Copyright Law (similar throughout the world, and copyright applies worldwide):

§102. Subject matter of copyright: In general
(a) Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. Works of authorship include the following categories:
(1) literary works;
(2) musical works, including any accompanying words;
(3) dramatic works, including any accompanying music;
(4) pantomimes and choreographic works;
(5) pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works;
(6) motion pictures and other audiovisual works;
(7) sound recordings; and
(8) architectural works.
(b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.

Finally, this Amex article (why them? I dunno) gives a quick summary from an expert:
https://www.americanexpress.com/us/small-business/openforum/articles/sharing-vs-stealing-5-myths-and-legal-truths-about-online-copyrights/

September 11, 2015 at 12:26 PM

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jackiehj writes:

Now THAT’s a relief for sure :-)

In fact this is where I got my info from. In a former life I worked in the field of technology transfer, and one of my colleagues was a certified lawyer and claimed that IP issues were her speciality, and that’s what she told me about text so being no lawyer myself, I trusted her word. So much for trust!

I think I see what you mean by article spinning software. Are they those articles that mix up things and place an expression about the topic of an article in the midst of a totally irrelevant context – not to mention spelling, grammar and syntax mistakes by the dozen? I came across such articles on review sites. Yikes! How they can even be called “articles” is beyond my comprehension. Surely their “authors” don’t even read the software’s production to let those pass as such! :-(

Once again thanks for taking the time to research the matter and set things right :-)

September 13, 2015 at 5:31 PM

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David Croucher writes:

That’s it, Jackie. If you google it, you’ll find lots of spinning programs for sale – and they’re all rubbish!

Years ago I got fascinated by Amazon Mechanical Turk. This is, in effect, a hiring website where people get paid a few cents for performing simple and sometimes not-so-simple tasks that would be almost impossible for a machine to do (a kind of super Turing Test). Amazon hosts these for the commissioner. One set, now stopped, was to identify street furniture, utility covers, signs and such things on a Google Street Level photo, so that the utility companies could buy the data for their employees to use. I think now that we were training some powerful Google computers to take it over!

It’s amazing how many of these tasks, though, were for rewriting a paragraph of text so that it was completely different but said the same thing. I got quickly bored, but you can see where this is going… Still, I earned over $200 doing the Google thing, enjoying myself as I did so. Take a look at the tasks available today, though – there are plenty of spinning jobs that would make a stolen article hard to spot (though provable by analysis).

September 13, 2015 at 6:08 PM

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Md Sarwar writes:

Thank you very much for publishing this kind of Blog. I like your Blog very much.

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Kay writes:

Thanks for awesome blog. Preparing to shoot some videos to promote my new book. Currently working on the scripts – So l concur about taking time.And it will be great to get other companies to notice.

And @ David—Thanks for the video creation tips.

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James writes:

Video testimonial is also one of the option which engages customers and they get to know about services offered by you in the past.

Thanks for sharing such a wonderful tips.

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Gaurav Barot writes:

I won’t chip in like what Mr. David Croucher did in the comment above, but I would just add that videos impart more credibility to a squeeze page and video testimonials hits the bull eye almost every time. And the days to fear video planning and making is well nigh over. Now, you can shoot it with even with your decent mobile phone. I still remember the time when I have to go out to hire a camcorder to shoot a video and after not getting one, shot the video with my Fuji camera (digital) in video mode. Yep, after much ado.

Good informative blog article.

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jessica07 writes:

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Chloe Mica writes:

The blog is amazing, thank you for sharing your ideas.

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Sudesh Abrol writes:

Thanks for sharing useful tips.

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CEO JEREMIAH writes:

Great article.
Thanks

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Duane Marchant writes:

I am in the middle of trying to prepare my first video and the suggestions were awesome and give me new confidence.
Thank You
Duane H. Marchant

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David Croucher writes:

Extra tip, then, Duane.

As I said at the end of comment 1, find an example on YouTube of a video that’s similar to what you want to do (subject probably doesn’t matter, it’s the personal delivery that you want to emulate). Then make your video with this one in mind, and keep doing takes until you’re fairly happy.

Next, get a ‘next friend’ – someone who will critically analyze your performance and suggest improvements. You don’t want a sycophant who will go, “great!” and “you’re the best!” to any mediocre performance. You want someone who respects you enough to SAY where you could improve with love, and – if necessary – tell you to start again or to take performance lessons. If you have no-one so useful, do what web page designers do: drag in someone off the street and offer them $10 to look at your model performance and then yours, and critique the hell out of you. They might be cruel, but it WILL work!

August 13, 2015 at 2:37 PM

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David Croucher writes:

Extra thought: look at TED Talks on YouTube. They are almost invariably well presented, though a lot longer than you’d probably want for marketing.

August 13, 2015 at 2:41 PM

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Mohan Thualsingam writes:

Great post as I learnt many things about s’page. Kudos to David for detailed step-by-step guidance.

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David Croucher writes:

Thanks, Mohan. There are several decades of hard experience of amateur video (school-based) behind this – and it’s sooo much easier today on the technical side. (But no easier at all on the artistic side!!!)

September 16, 2015 at 3:31 PM

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