7 Days to Your First Youtube Video

1. Introduction: Have you always wanted to make Youtube videos but been held back by the number of steps and skills involved? Well, I made this course especially for you. My name is Aaron Palabiab and I've been a filmmaker for well over a decade. With experience in independent feature films, TV, commercials documentaries, and of course, Youtube and other social media. You might recognize me from my past courses, from Foolish to content creator and filmmaking for content creators. Well, in this brand new course, we'll go step by step, learning skills and knowledge and digestible shocks to gradually build up to making your first Youtube video. My goal for this course is to break it down and whittle away at the resistance you face in creating your own video from scratch. So this is seven days to your first Youtube video. Starting on day one, we'll decide what content to create. Then on day two, we'll research and write your script. Days 3.4 will be dedicated to pre production to make sure your shoot goes as smoothly as possible. On day five, we'll shoot your video. And day 6.7 we'll cover editing and uploading your video. If you've taken either of my two previous courses, the fundamentals will be familiar. But the big difference with this course is the focus on actionable steps done in a defined time frame. So this course is all about learning by doing and building a foundation of skills and confidence by completing concrete steps. So whether you finish it in seven days or even a few months, you'll come out of this equip to make a good Youtube video. So I'm excited for you to give this a try. With that, let's dive into the course. 2. Class Project: Welcome to seven days to your first Youtube video. Your class project will be to produce, step by step, a classic Youtube video combining Talking Heads. Like this with Role, which is the supporting footage of the type that you see in explainers, tutorials, reviews, and video essays. So based on experience, I've seen that producing a class project is a very common hurdle for video production courses because of the number of steps involved naturally. So again, this course is designed to encourage you to complete it by taking it in small steps instead of being overwhelmed about the end goal. To help guide you along and to encourage you by visualizing your progress. I've also included a progress tracking sheet as a notion template that you can fill up and watch as you get closer to the end goal. This template also contains prompts for all of the activities included in this course. So I highly recommend you download Notion for free and use it as you follow along the course. Now doing the class project still sounds like too much. Don't worry. While I, of course, would love for you to shoot your own footage and create a unique class project, I recognize that that may still be too big of a step. So for those who want to just watch and absorb the concepts and just maybe get their feet wet with editing without having to shoot. I will also be providing the sample footage that I'm shooting for the course demonstrations for you to edit. And then I'll even provide a sample finished edit for you to follow and compare to your own project. So the process of creating this project will provide you with the information you need and the foundation to learn and apply more advanced skills in the future and eventually even branch out to other types of filmmaking. But of course, if you do create your own unique class project, please don't waste this opportunity to share your work with me and get a supportive and professional take on your work and how to move forward. All right, with that, let's get right into day one. 3. Day 1 Determine Your Why and Your Niche: Welcome to day one. This day will be dedicated to the process of figuring out and deciding what content to create. We'll start with do not be an influencer, which is focused on the fundamental reason of your content creation and how to deliver the most value. Then based on that, we'll discuss how to choose a good video topic and how to generate ideas based on that. With that, let's begin. 4. Don't Be An Influencer: In this first lesson, we'll establish your fundamentals, your mental framework to help ensure that you'll go through this journey for the right reasons and with reasonable expectations. I'll talk about the importance of defining your value and then present you with questions to guide you to find a channel value proposition that works for you. Let's start with a bit of honesty. The worst place to start, in my opinion, is by thinking I want to be a tuber, or I want to be an influencer. But not just so, but it's because this implies an attitude of doing this for attention, validation, free stuff, or money. All of which I can honestly tell you, even for the big Youtubers, are unsustainable motivations for building a Youtube channel. I can think of it as building your house on sand, unless you're extremely lucky. Reality will quickly remind you that this doesn't work. Sure. There are plenty of examples of successful looking creators who've taken the shortcut to fame for just doing the most attention grabbing things possible. But ask yourself if you would really put yourself in their shoes if you're really knew what it was like, in my humble opinion, to have a chance at being a creator, with a truly engaged, appreciative audience that makes a positive contribution to society. You must aim more than anything to bring value to others, not attention to yourself. So the best place to start, I think based on experience and based on studying other creators, is start with something you already have an existing passion skill, or special talent for. So start with something you like or do so much that it can be the engine of creativity for a channel that will last for years. This is where you can provide the most value and be the most authentic version of yourself. And being authentic is essential in a world where people have talked about almost everything already. In my opinion, the best driver of a great Youtube channel today is expertise or some other distinguishing characteristic or point of view developed from spending time in your work, hobbies, or even your relationships. Why? With time spent comes a depth of knowledge and experience that will establish credibility with your audience and make them demand to know what you have to say. Now in case you're very young, If you're a child then you probably have a favorite hobby, and sharing your passion for that may be the best place to start without worrying too much about all of the strategic stuff in the numbers. If I had to sum it up, just be very interesting. Youtube doesn't owe you anything. But you owe the audience something cool to watch that they haven't seen before. So before you ever even start rolling, you must begin with defining why your channel exists. Is it to entertain, inform, or inspire. And in what way, specifically, can you do that that's distinct from everyone else? Say I just want to make people laugh and make their lives brighter, and I have a really creative way of doing that. Or say, I want to share my experience living on a farm to teach people what I do and make them appreciate where their food comes from. Or say I want to share my travels driven by my unique interests, not just what's trendy on Instagam or whatever, to inspire others to expand their horizons. It could be I want to make the best tech reviews to help others by taking the guesswork out of buying complicated gadgets, because I research them all the time anyway. Or even say, I want to share my stories to help others avoid the most common, but avoidable problems of like couples in long term relationships. So all of those are valid and all of them have been proven to work. So frankly, there's a lot of room for expression and experimentation as you begin and continue your journey. So with that, let's figure out your unique take on your chosen niche. Here are some questions to ponder and you should write down your answers to these. What do I love to talk about that others will find very interesting? Do I spend a significant amount of time fulfilling a role or doing something in my life that gives me special insight into something. For example, your job being a parent, being a husband or wife, living with a certain condition, et cetera. Tiktok is actually a great place to see examples of the most idiosyncratic and yet relatable content from regular folks like you and me. Are you a combination or hybrid of things that isn't common? I'll tell you real examples of stuff I've seen on Tiktok and Youtube. A Canadian comedian, fluent in Mandarin Chinese, An airplane mechanic who spews obscure lord of the rings trivia. A chef with a precise cooking style and prodigious skill, but does it all with a relatable and raunchy sense of humor. Even a fit former wedding filmmaker who now hikes around the world. I hope you can guess who some of those are. But the point is you may not know it, but your unique experience and personality may be very interesting, even captivating for others. Again, my advice, don't think about being the best, but just focus on being the only. Number four, what are you really curious about? And can you use the act, creating videos as a reason to pursue your curiosity? A lot of explainer and video essay creators are basically just doing this and just taking the audience along for the ride. Number five, don't think of what would be popular alone. Think of what you can make a great video about that is already popular, at least in your niche. Of course, keep in mind this is just a starting point. It's only with continuous creating and sharing your work and interacting with an audience that you'll eventually really find your direction and you can always pivot later on when you or your life changes. I'll share with you some examples of small to medium sized channels that you can look at to give you some inspiration, my friend Emile explores who makes beautiful solo Moto camping content in the Philippines. Another friend, Pixel leaves, who makes relaxing, no face explainers about inc tablets. Moto feels an Australian filmmaker and Moto logger who makes logs, tutorials and reviews with great production value and a Ry sense of humor. Professional photographer Michael Shane Bloom and his beautiful vlogs showcasing how he takes his amazing landscape photos. A one time student of mine here on skill share, Spanish traveler Ramia de Aventura, whose passion for real adventure and funny, engaging personality took him from less than 1,000 to hundreds of thousands of subscribers in a matter of months. So hopefully, I've convinced you that you have a way to share something really good. In this lesson, we established a solid and meaningful foundation for creating Youtube videos and began writing ideas for our channels value proposition. In the next lessons, we'll generate real ideas for specific Youtube videos. See you there. 5. Choose a Niche and Generate Ideas: In this lesson, we'll build on the foundation established in lesson one. We'll talk about how to come up with good video ideas for Youtube. Generally, the best ideas for Youtube videos lie at the intersection between something that you're already knowledgeable in or something you love, and then something your target audience is actively curious about or searching for. Because in the beginning, you'll need to give the algorithm reasons to find you better. Be sure it's for a topic and or a video style that you would like to do consistently over time. If you ask me, actually, it's not a good idea to try to go viral for some random thing that you won't want to keep repeating or keep trying to top. So let's go step by step first based on the questions you answered in lesson one. Think of what kind of videos do you want to make that have a chance of being found through search and the algorithm? For example, for me, I'm a filmmaker, I love traveling, and I love writing my motorcycle. My thing is making motorcycle reviews on one hand and on the other. Making travel of logs that have a higher level of storytelling and production than the usual based on experience. It's the motorcycle reviews that have cast a wide net over time to real inviewers and subscribers. They're how I've established credibility in the Youtube algorithm and with the wider Youtube audience outside my core subscribers. In fact, the popularity of my reviews has given me a certain degree of vanity stats like hundreds of thousands of views and five digit subscribers that may make people think I'm worth following. So basically what happens then is that a small percentage of this bigger number of viewers that find me through search go beyond being casual viewers and become loyal subscribers. So we can call the videos that do this reach videos because they have a higher, wider reach in search and in the algorithm because of their more obvious usefulness for the Tube viewer. Now for these loyal viewers whom we might call fans, I can create what I consider my more personal work, which is mainly well produced travel logs and docube logs that take way too long to edit and don't perform as well in the algorithm. But for me, the satisfaction is in creating them and watching them again and again. For years to come, these have been called engagement videos instead of reach videos, because they are more engaging, being the product of one's true passions and often already entering the realm of what you can call art. So sum it up, basically, in my case, I make reviews for Reach to get a bigger audience and travel blogs for my own satisfaction and for more authentic engagement with my fans. I make other kinds of videos too, but these two are my bread and butter. Working hand in hand to get viewers and then turn a few of them into fans. What Youtube or Sara did, she called one for me and one for them. I assume most of you are probably starting from zero subscribers right now. For now, you'll have to imagine what kind of content you might create for each one for them. At the same time, you probably already know what you want to create for you. So we can pause now, think and write down a few potential videotypes that can be reach content and that can be engagement content. The next step is to list specific video ideas based on the concepts you learned in this lesson. But we'll save that for the next lesson. 6. Choose Video Ideas and Validate Them: In the previous lesson, you learned how to think of good video ideas to start your Youtube channel. In this lesson, we'll apply those concepts and list at least three or more specific video ideas you're eager to make a video about. So with both reach and engagement in mind, I've already written down some video ideas. Number one, a budget adventure motorcycle comparison compare three or four, this is definitely going to be a popular reach video. Number two, a travel blog featuring each of these motorcycles. That's already three to four more videos from that just one video idea. And again, this would be more for me, engagement type of video. And then going a different direction. I can do maybe tutorial how to pick a motorcycle for beginners. I think this would be an interesting video essay and it would lie somewhere between reach and engagement because it has high utility. But it's also still for a more niche audience. Take a few minutes now to write down your own ideas. Five is good. Ten is better. Write down anything and everything that excites you to make a potential Youtube video about. And you should also indicate whether it's more of a reach video or more of an engagement or art video. Make some ambitious ideas, but also make some ideas that you could shoot tomorrow if you had to. Because our goal for this course is to actually make one of these videos on that note. Often in life, things that don't get done now while you have momentum and motivation won't get done later and it takes more effort to pick it up again at a later time. While you shouldn't feel limited when imagining your video concepts, you should get excited. Just make sure to really put some in there that you know you can already pull off today or this week with a reasonable amount of effort. Well, moving on. Next step is optional. Very useful you can try to gauge the interest that the audience has for your topic by researching related keywords. The best potential topic for Youtube has a combination of high demand, which is search volume, but low supply, meaning few high quality videos that directly answer the question. Youtube studio has a built in research function, but it's more useful if you already have an established audience. Now we have to buddy a plug in with a free version, which is the easiest way to see if any video idea meets these criteria, you can install this as a Google Chrome extension. Let's open up two buddies, keyword Explorer. All right, over here. Now, I don't have any motorcycles in my garage to review right now, and I don't have time to travel far soon. That leaves my third video idea as one I can get started on ASAP and I don't need anything special to make this video, say just myself and some bureau, or even just photos of motorcycles that I can find in my archive or on Google. This isn't a commercial video, so it's fine to borrow photos and footage from Google or other channels. Although when in doubt doesn't hurt, ask for permissions. Let's input how to pick a motorcycle for beginners, and let's see the score. Wow, this rarely happens to me. I hit the jackpot. I got a 100 out of 100 score with very high search volume, low competition, and very high optimization strength, which I think means it's very related to my channel. So basically I've just validated that this is awesome, worthwhile idea to make a video about. Now try this for yourself, but in the end, you know, you can also just choose to do anything you want, regardless of potential audience. This is just a tool, an extra step. And honestly, I'd rather you make a video about what you really want to make. If you've never published one, then be held back worrying about some audience and some real talk. It's more stressful to have a popular video than having like some, nobody see your video. Because suddenly being found by a big audience very early can be difficult for a variety of reasons. But if you're already ready to show up for a big audience, why not swing for it? I'll be proud of you. And that's it. In this lesson, you went through the process of generating video ideas and validating them using keyword research and congrats. That's it for day one. Easy as, but very important. Nonetheless, you've put on your shoes and you're ready to warm up for the actual run on day two. We'll research your chosen topic and then write your script. 7. Day 2 Write Your Script: Hello and welcome to day two. Let's build on the foundation you set on day one with the actual substance of your content. We're going to start to do some serious work now to prepare for this, I recommend you start using a note taking app. Now my pick for this is Notion which I learned using an excellent skillshare course from Ali Abdal and this one from Mike and Matty as well. I've linked both of them in the projects and resources tab along with a new notion for Youtube course that I found recently. Notion will simplify and centralize your efforts and make your notes easy to search and go back to. But don't worry if you don't feel like learning a new app because it might take away your momentum. You can also use something as simple as Apple notes, one notes, or even a physical notebook. I do suggest using an app to make it easy to search, copy, and paste to write the scripts. Feel free to use anything free like Google Docs or whatever came with your computer so that you can write offline and away from distractions. With that, let's proceed with day to. 8. Do Your Research: In this lesson, we'll do the research for our first video, we'll start with writing down all our own ideas and then we'll use a combination of Google and Youtube search to gather more information and see what's been said and done about our topic in order to make sure we have a factually correct and new discussion in our video. Now you may ask if I know my material well enough. Do I still need to do research? Well, it's up to you. But doing even a bit of research and note taking could save you potential headaches caused by sharing incorrect or insufficient information. It will also ensure that you're adding something new and valuable to the conversation and also help save you from unnecessary criticism. In your comment section, again, I'll demonstrate the concepts using the video, the sample video I want to make for this course to begin before searching outside sources. Of course, I'll create a note in notion or any app, again, containing all my pre existing ideas about my chosen topic. This will be just a thought dump of anything and everything I might have to say. The important thing in this step is to just let the ideas flow. Don't second guess yourself. We'll revise and address any erroneous or missing ideas later on and reorganize them into a coherent script. In another lesson, I've already pre prepared this initial document as you see here, These are all ideas off the top of my head with already a bit of research for verification. As you can see, because my topic is very familiar and straightforward to me, my notes are already pretty well organized and almost a script. But don't worry if your idea isn't that fully formed yet. Please pause the video now and start writing down your ideas. Even just take five to 10 minutes. Now after this, usually I'll Google search, and in this case, for this topic, I'll mainly do a Youtube search to see what others have already said about the topic and what kind of treatment they used in their Youtube videos. This accomplishes two things. First, it either verifies or refutes my ideas from where I can decide whether to change them, stand by them, or just tweak them. Second, it shows me where I can add new and valuable ideas to the mix that will be engaging to an audience. You should pay attention to what hasn't been said by other sources, but are validated by your own experience and research. Because you'll stand to gain a lot of credibility by contributing lesser known but useful ideas backed up by research and experience. Or you may also find at this point that your concepts are very similar to others. But it doesn't matter because it's the kind of video treatment that you want that is lacking from the landscape. This is now your chance to make the content that you want to see. Often for me, I find info in lots of separate videos, but not in a concise manner. Or in a way that uses, say, proper bureau and visuals to illustrate those ideas clearly. So in that case, it's your job, and this course will help you do that to make potentially the best video about the topic, or at least the updated video about the topic. So as you go through this process, make sure to write down your notes and your thoughts in bullet points below your initial thoughts on your notepad. And of course, it's useful to save the links to your sources like the videos or articles for future reference and to credit them as well. You should also use this as an opportunity to find attainable references for your video treatment, you want to look at how different creators use Talking Heads in B roll. Observe how much they talk on camera and how they support their ideas with visuals. Do they use their own footage or do they use stock videos? Do they use wide shots, medium shots, or close ups? Static shots or moving? Do they use visuals that directly illustrate the points or just kind of are semi related to the topic? Learn to analyze videos like this to expand your visual vocabulary and then see how you can apply the ideas to your videos in an original or just fundamentally solid way. You may also find that you want to apply the style of one type of video to the subject that you're talking about in an unexpected way. My favorite example of this is this chaotic but wholesome review of the best croissants in Paris by Italian Youtuber Louis It's a riot. And such a genius mixing of genre and topic on Youtube. Are you already seeing how much value you can get from taking even an hour to research compared to just going off of your own ideas? Me, honestly, I even dive into comment sections of related videos to get a sense of people's questions, concerns, and sentiments around my chosen topic. I don't even do this as a research, I just can't help my curiosity. Anyway, all of this info is to understand your audience, your people who are out there. You don't need to use all of it at all, but you can let it serve you to enrich the conversation. You're facilitating with your video. All of that said, when it comes to research, there's a point of diminishing returns where you might be thinking either I don't have enough to contribute, other people's videos are so much better. Or maybe you're even thinking there's no way I can give all the information I need to give. When that happens, it's time to stop the research. Don't get so caught up with what others have said and done that you feel paralyzed. The most important things you need to do are to add your unique voice and to make a well crafted video. This course is one goal is to get you off your butt and make that video. So while it would be great if you could follow my advice to the letter and raise the quality of your first video, I think it's more important just to make it even if it won't be the best video ever on the topic. Anyway, Before moving on to the next lesson, I suggest that you take even just 15 minutes to do your initial research on Google, Youtube, et cetera, and take your notes. Just dump it all in there in your notepad. Having this heaping pile of information will make your script writing a lot easier in the end. Good research is your way of making sure that you'll be able to stand by what you say and that your influence will be positive and not based on misconceptions or wrong info. And that's about it. In this lesson, we learned how to research and take notes to ensure we'll have a high quality video. In the next lesson, we'll organize and refine these ideas and match visuals to them in the form of an audio visual or AV script. 9. Write Your Script: Hook and Intro: In the previous lesson, we researched and took notes for our video idea. We've shopped for the ingredients and now it's time to get cooking. We'll put those ideas together into a script. Now, I'll be the first to admit script writing is half the time, the biggest hurdle for me when it comes to making videos. I say half the time because when I don't write a script, the biggest hurdle becomes the video editing. Which is all to say that the effort you put into the previous lesson, and this and the next lesson, will make your shooting and editing so much easier. So how do you overcome the inertia of writing a script, the terror of the blank page? Well, by making use of the work we did in the previous lesson, and with good old, reliable structure, with a good script structure, it becomes almost just a matter of filling in the blanks. So for this lesson, we'll adapt Youtube and skill share star Ali Abdal's Hives framework to create a simple solid script Hives stands for Hook, Intro, Value, and End Salespitch. Ali's Hives Framework comes from his excellent free Youtube publishing notion template that you can also access via the link in the resources below. By the way, as I said previously, you don't need any special app to write a script. I just use Apple's free pages app or Google Docs and type away. Unlike a narrative film script, you don't need a specific format. Just whatever is most convenient, even Apple notes can work. So step one is to create a hook. This is the most important part to figure out in the beginning for Youtube, because you want to give the viewer a clear idea of what value they will be receiving within the first five to 15 seconds of the video. This also keeps you accountable and focused. Don't waste time on a long intro. Don't ask people to like and subscribe yet introduce yourself what you're about, and tell them what they're watching your video for. It should immediately reinforce the value proposition contained in your title and thumbnail that they clicked for in the first place. For example, I can write, Hi everyone. My name is Ern Pala Bab. I'm a professional filmmaker who travels around on my motorcycle. Today I want to talk about everything you need to know to figure out how to buy your first motorcycle. Again, quickly explaining who I am and what they're watching the video for, what they can expect. Another example, for another type of video, you can try to ask a question like so, is the iphone 22 still the best phone for creators in 2030? I'll test every feature so you know for sure, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, so it helps here to think not of the what, but the implicit why your viewer should keep watching your video. This is presumably because your video topic is interesting and you can provide the answer they're looking for. Writing the hook should be a fun activity. I suggest now to pause the video. Take five to 10 minutes writing some sample hooks from the topic you chose in the last lesson. All right, done. Okay, on to step two, the intro to the actual topic. Now it's time to expound on what the audience will learn and also how they will learn it. If applicable, frame the discussion in a way that reinforces why it matters. For example, I can say, so you want to finally get into motorcycles, but the number of choices between motorcycle types seems overwhelming. In this video, we'll discuss the different types and sizes of motorcycles, along with how to think about getting a motorcycle that fits your needs and goals for the iphone Example, I can say the iphone has long been the top choice for content creators for decades now, but it already has lots of competition. We'll look at the features, the price point, the photo, video quality, battery life, et cetera, et cetera, you get the picture. Now if you're doing something that's more of an essay, consider talking about why it matters. Something like, once upon a time, we were promised flying cars and how come that never came true. Well, it seemed like a great solution, but it's actually an awful idea and I'm going to tell you why. So these are all just ideas to help you figure out how to best hook in and retain your audience within the first few minutes of your video. If you can't answer to yourself the question of why anyone should bother to watch the rest, well, it could be valid because you're making like some kind of artistic video. That's fair. But for Youtube, this is part of your due diligence to keep your viewers watching and the algorithm appeased. So at this point, try to write down a few sentences of your intro based on one or more of the hooks you wrote previously. And we'll leave it off at that for now. We'll continue in the next lesson. In this lesson, you began writing your script with a hook and an intro. We'll finish the rest of the process in the next lesson. See you there. 10. Write Your Script: Main Value: Previous lesson, you began writing your script with a hook and an intro based on Ali Abdal's Hives framework for Youtube. In this lesson, we'll continue the process to write the main body of your script. And it's ending step three, letter V. Let's work on the value. This is the meat of your sandwich. Lay it out point by point in an organized manner and support each point with examples. It's that simple. By now, this should be easy enough. You just get the notes you gathered from the previous lessons and then copy and paste them into a new note or new document. Then flesh out each bullet point into well written sentences and reorganize them for maximum clarity and impact. An easy way to start is just to make an outline from your notes, like I've done here from this. It's just a matter of expanding on each bullet point and writing proper transitions in between. Now if you're really stuck on how to start or maybe burnt out from writing other stuff already, well it's okay to delve into the dark arts. Don't be afraid to use chat GPT to convert your talking points into an outline or even full paragraphs. Don't just ask it to write everything for you though, but feed it the talking points you've researched. And then of course, don't skip editing it to make it your own and never, ever, never, ever forget to fact check. As of this writing, AI tools like Chat GPT are still notorious for blithely, including factual errors. In terms of organization, you want to keep related points together to make your script both coherent and cohesive. It's easier to do this first with bullet points on an outline before writing the actual script. For example, for a review, you want to segregate between say, the pros and cons and between the different feature categories of a product. Don't just ramble on randomly jumping from point to point. This is the enemy of your engagement. If they don't feel like they know where you're going for a tutorial, obviously just go step by step and then show the finished product. And then maybe address common pitfalls and share tips and tricks to solve them. One way to think about it is can you organize your video into distinct Youtube chapters with clear topics per chapter? If not, then you probably have to organize. So going back to my video essay idea, I need to explain basically to beginners from scratch, from the most basic points. So I'll begin talking about motorcycle displacement, their size, and then the general types of motorcycles and how they differ. And then once they have that foundation of all the different kinds of motorcycles, that's the time that I can follow up with suggestions for how to think about picking which motorcycle is right for them. Of course, at the end, you should round out the discussion with your final thoughts and recommendations, as well as things like other products to consider or other resources to explore if the viewer wants to learn more. And that could include your own videos if you already have a bunch of them. And remember that it's best if your ending is satisfying, because this parting gift is a way to make your viewer feel good and more likely to come back for more. And finally, step four ES, our end screen sales pitch. Now this is specific to Youtube only because in a regular video the conclusion would already have been your final thoughts. The end screen sales pitch is just your invitation to a viewer who found your video valuable to come back and watch more content. It's also where once you've built up enough of an audience, you can ask them to support you in whatever way. Like Patrion a Youtube membership, buying a digital or physical product, or simply liking and subscribing. But in the end, when it comes to writing, the most important tip I can give you is don't be afraid to write a bad first draft. Don't think, just write. Do not judge or over analyze. Don't worry about it being perfect, All revision, fact checking and acting on feedback and polishing happens only on the succeeding passes of writing. Don't worry, I'm very familiar with the terror of the blank page and I still deal with it every time. It's why this course took almost two years to make. Anyway, once you have your word salad down on the page, that's when you can whip it up into something worth serving. Once you're done writing your script, let's do one more thing. You can copy and paste your text to an AV script. The template of which I provided in the class resources and I stole from Youtuber Johnny Harris. Thanks Johnny. You're the best. You fill up this left column with all of your audio, basically all of your text. This blue header bar is optional. It's a way to delineate chapters if your video is very long. We want this ready for the next lesson, where we'll be filling up the right column with corresponding visuals. Basically, paste each individual segment of text into its own cell like this. And then you can separate segments roughly by where you to different visuals, which again will match on the right side. And that does it for day two. Congratulations for making it this far. This is a lot of work and these are big steps that you're getting done. You're just knocking them out of the park. Man, am I proud of you? Look at you, look at you. On day three, we'll begin pre production, starting with listing down your shots and figuring out your gear. So for now, take a well deserved break and I will see you bright and early tomorrow. 11. Day 3 Prepare to Shoot Part 1: Welcome to day three. By now you should have a script ready and that's a big step time to use that script. First we'll use it to determine your supporting visuals and then create a shot list. And then we'll follow up with an overview of how to get your gear ready to shoot. So today is all about the first phase of revving up to shoot. Pre production, as we call this phase is so important that we'll spend two whole days dedicated to this. All right, so let's begin. 12. Make Your Shotlist: In this lesson, we'll use the script we wrote on day two to determine what visuals you need for your video. And then learn how to transpose these into a shotlist that will help make your shooting more efficient and complete. So let's begin with determining what parts of your script you'll say on camera, you have a choice of how much you want to do. You can be completely off camera and just narrate over roll, or go all the way to just completely being on camera like a recorded lecture with no B roll. So of course, somewhere in between is usually best, but it depends on what you're comfortable with or what works for your style. More talking on camera means less bureau to shoot, but more memorization and of course, vice versa. For me, I prefer to be on camera for the beginning of course, so people get to know me. Key middle points where my face can help give emphasis and of course the end to engage with the audience. Now if you have trouble memorizing or don't have access to a teleprompter, then feel free to keep it to that minimum amount to save time and energy. Now for all the parts where you'll be narrating on voiceover or VO, you have to determine exactly what supporting visuals called. All you need to illustrate your point. It's best to have bureau that directly illustrates what you're saying. But it's also acceptable, especially on Youtube, to have only tangentially related visuals just to provide the viewer with some visual interest. Remember, in video, it's always better to show and not just to tell. Let me give you some examples. Now, many talking points are obvious to illustrate. If you're doing a review, then you should clearly show the components and features of the product as you talk about them. Or show the results, like sample photos or videos. If you're reviewing a camera or a phone, however, other points will be more abstract or would require special graphics to visualize. In these cases, unless you have the ability and desire to make graphics, don't sweat it. Just find something visually interesting and somewhat related to what you're saying. For my sample video on picking a motorcycle, I can talk over both footage that directly illustrates what I'm referring to like different types of bikes, But at other times, I can just let general riding footage play while I discuss something abstract, like how to use your heart to pick a bike for something very abstract, like concepts. You should consider saying this on camera to take advantage of what you can express with your face. Now, apart from video footage, you can also use photos animated or not. You can also source footage from stock sites and other Youtube videos. Just make sure you're doing this either with a proper license or with permission, or else you might risk a copyright strike, which is not good. All right, at this point, are you already starting to imagine what shots you'll need to visualize your script? Well, keep those in mind because now I'll show you how to list down your shots in a shot list. So let's go back to the AV script that we prepared in the previous chapter. Now we're going to fill up the right column with the visuals that you'll need. All right, so what you do here is opposite this text on the left column, you'll write down the corresponding visuals basically aligned with the text you're saying to make it very easy to refer to. So again, you're looking here at an example for my video that I've already filled in. Partially, Just so you know, I copied this format from a project that I worked on with journalist and incredible Youtuber, Johnny Harris. Thank you, Johnny. So as you can see, I've separated and even color coded between on camera and off camera voice over parts for easy reference. Now this is helpful but completely optional. But the great thing about a color coded script like mine, like this one, is that you easily see at a glance what shots you'll need to copy to your sequential shot list, which we'll discuss next. So as you can see here, we have different colors for bureau that you need to shoot, bureau that you already have, and bureau that you need to gather from various sources. And another helpful way to color code, as I mentioned, is to highlight either the text that will be on camera or the ones that you will be reading on voiceover. So that you can see at a glance which parts you'll have to memorize. So in this sample script, I've decided to highlight only the voiceover parts. Now for each piece of dialogue, be mindful of how long that chunk will be. Recite it out loud if you have to, so that you know how long each clip of barrel has to be to cover that entire chunk. All right, so now you understand how to fill up an AV script. I suggest you pause the lesson now and start filling up your own AV script, even just one or two pages, so you start getting the hang of it to save time with the color coded formatting for the bureau part, you can do what I'm doing here, which is to copy from the legend at the top and then just paste and then basically retype whatever you want to put in there. And that's it. In this lesson, we learned how to create a shot list by filling in one column of an AV script. In the next lesson, we'll organize this further into a scheduled or sequential shot list. 13. Arrange a Sequential Shotlist: In the previous lesson, you filled up your AV script with your shots. We can already shoot with this, but in this lesson we'll take one step further to make it even more organized and easy to follow. We'll copy those shots to a sequential scheduled shot list that we can check off. As you can see in this example, S means wide shot, MS means medium shot, and CU means close up. Having a mix of these different shot sizes helps to make your edit more interesting and seamless. You can choose to shoot your burel sequentially as they appear in your video. But it's more efficient to group shots together that can be shot using the same or very similar set up. For example, all indoor shots together, All outdoor shots together, all shots in the same location or set up together. This will save time and effort going back and forth between locations and set ups. So my shot list in this case doesn't contain a whole lot because I deliberately picked a video idea that I already have a lot of existing material for. But another shot list for all new shots might look like this. Just as an aside, this isn't the format we use in professional filmmaking for shot listing and scheduling. But it's a more efficient and easy to prepare format that's practical for solo creators. All right, now it's time to start working on your scheduled shot list. Now notice that mine I've decided to put together all the on camera spiels in one big shot in my shot list, even though that represents obviously several clips. Because that's just going to be even one set up, even though it will be many different takes. So it's actually up to you how specific you want to get to help yourself remember everything that you need to get. You can also just save time by giving one general name to a shot such as say, product B roll, which might comprise three to five different shots of the product. But you can also be as specific as if you're making a verbal storyboard frame by frame describing every shot as it appears in your imagined edit. It's really up to you and basically how organized you want to be and how precise you want to be in your eventual edit. And that's it. In this lesson, you learned how to create a simple production schedule. Essentially, the prep work you've done here will help make your shoot as simple as checking boxes off a list instead of running around wondering if you got what you needed. All right, so I suggest don't move on to the next lesson until you've gotten all your shot, listing all your paperwork done. But once we've got all our paperwork done, then in the next lessons we learn how to get our gear good and ready to shoot. 14. Prepare your Camera Gear: Previous lesson, we created a shot list. We're officially done with all the paperwork and writing. In this lesson, we're prepare to shoot first by preparing our mobile phones with the correct video settings to get you started and cut through all the confusion when it comes to gear, I recommend getting the following as a starting point. First, a mobile phone from anywhere from the past five years or so that can shoot in ten THD doesn't matter if it's iphone or Android. As long as it can shoot decent looking video. And then get any of these cheap wired or wireless level ear mic systems. Basically this lapel mic like I'm using here, a full length tripod, preferably one for video. But even one of these ball heads that you use for photography will do. It's a nice solid tripod. You don't need a panning head because you'll be shooting yourself. Of course, if you're using a mobile phone, a decent phone mount like this crab tripod from U Lanzi that is compatible with a tripod like this. This one uses the universal Arco Swiss mount. So you can just swap out the plate from any of the standard photo tripods and put it directly on here. You might be wondering why I don't recommend getting a shotgun mic like this one. Well, while these are good for logging and pointing at various things, you can't get these close enough to your mouth to get great clear sound while also being able to frame video freely for the best composition, especially for this kind of Youtube video. If you already own a DSLR or mirrorless camera like this one, then of course feel free to use that. Whichever way you should start practicing making videos with whatever you already have or what is easily available to you. So now I'll show you how to set up an iphone 12 and an old Android phone from 2016. And you can use these examples to figure out how to do it on your specific device. All right, to set up your iphone. First let's go to your settings and find camera. Okay, so open this up and I suggest you select here 108 Phd at 30 frames per second. I recommend ten PHD 30, but you can choose 60 if you prefer that very lifelike look, it will just require more processing power to edit. You can also choose four K, 24 or 30, but that will be very processor and disc space intensive, so I don't recommend it right now. Again, you don't need to buy any special camera app at this point unless you really want manual control if you already know how to do that. But for now it's not necessary and of course you don't have a choice. You can leave it on auto focus as well to avoid any mistakes. All right, now let's do the same thing on this old Android phone. I mean, it's so old, it doesn't even have screen recording, so I have to use this camera, okay. So in this case, you actually have all the settings built right into the camera app, even manual settings. So we'll open up here. Settings switch to the video tab. You can see here, video quality, we have full HD and we can choose between 60 frames per second. And it doesn't say what the frame rate is here, but it's actually just 30 frames per second. This is an old phone. It doesn't have 24 frames per second on any of the resolutions yet. But anyway, this is exactly what we want. One more thing, because this gives us access to manual white balance. I would like to go for manual white balance instead of auto white balance. So we have a consistent look from shot to shot. So you will choose daylight for standard white light, daylight like this. And you would choose incandescent or tungsten if you're working with warm lights to compensate. All right, But auto white balance is fine if you don't have a choice or you'll be shooting in mixed conditions or you just don't want to worry about it. Okay? Another really important thing, Make sure that you have a lot of free space on your phone, download and back up your existing videos, then delete them from your phone if you have to. And on an iphone, make sure to empty the phone's recently deleted folder or else you won't get back any more space. So you should prepare to record at least half an hour to an hour of footage, which is precisely why I don't recommend shooting in four K because it eats up space at about four times the rate. Okay. With that out of the way, let's set up the phone on the tripod mount. So it's usually going to be this kind of clamp thing here. Of course straightforward. We just put it up here, okay? And then make sure when you're ready to shoot that the phone is level so it's not crooked like this. You can point it somewhere where there's a horizontal line. You can just make sure it's straight. Or you can use this option. Open your camera settings again and then just hit the check mark on level. When you open up your camera again, it'll have this line and you'll know it's level. When the line isn't broken, it becomes a straight line that's colored yellow. When you're also ready to shoot, you might want to leave it plugged in. If you plan on recording long takes, it's easier to shoot yourself on the selfie camera, so I can see myself here, but it's always higher quality to use the rear camera. But that also makes it hard to frame up yourself and make sure everything looks right on camera. So if you don't have anybody to help you frame, then you don't have a choice. You have to record and check and adjust things until you get it right. That's just how it is. But if you just want to practice, you want to see yourself easily, then it's perfectly fine to use the selfie camera so you have a monitor. Al right, with that, I invite you to take the time now to get familiar with all the available video settings on your phone. But basically, since this is probably your first Youtube video, I really recommend leaving almost everything, if not everything, on auto because I want you to get through this with a minimum of fuss. The point is just by doing this, you'll be able to build the foundation and vocabulary you need to take on more advanced and in depth courses that will help you become more proficient in things like setting exposure and all the other more advanced camera settings. For now again, let's just take out all the obstacles that are preventing you from shooting. Al right, in this lesson, we started repairing our gear by setting up our mobile phones. In the next lesson, we'll set up our microphones, then do a quick test of the full set up. 15. Prepare Your Microphone: In the previous lesson, we set up our mobile phones to shoot. In this lesson, we'll set up our microphones for the best results. And then finally, we'll do a check to make sure everything works fine. First, let's connect the lavalier mic. If it's wired like this one, then you simply plug it into the headphone jack of your phone directly or into the adapter if your phone no longer has headphone jack like so. Then from here you basically just run this cable underneath your shirt, then bring it up here and clip to your caller or lapel like I'm doing with the actual mic that I'm using. Now, obviously your phone is going to be about a meter or a few feet away from you where my camera is now. So if you're using a wired leveller, you'll have to get one with a really long cable like this one from Boya that I used for many years. And avoid framing too wide so that you can just kind of run the cable below and hide it as best as you can. And then do the same thing, you run it up underneath your shirt and clip it here. Now of course, if you want to avoid that problem entirely, then you're better off using a wireless system. Although again, this is much more expensive than a simple wired microphone with a long cable. It is just way more convenient. So speaking of which, I recently discovered this full Am X Five wireless mic system. It's one of the most affordable and full featured wireless systems I know of. It's basically like a cheap version of the famous DJImic. Out of the box, It works with both phones and Maireless cameras. You have everything you need to connect. But anyway, if you're using a compact wireless system like this, the transmitters already have a built in microphone and the receiver is what you will connect to your phone or camera. So of course, make sure to turn on both the receiver and the transmitter. In this case, in the full Am, they turn on automatically. When you take them out of the charging case, of course, make sure they're charged. The versions that work with phones can directly connect via the charging port using one of these adapters. But otherwise, once again, you'll need to plug it via the microphone cable to the headphone jack or the adapter for this one. All I have to do is connect my adapter like so, and then stick it here to the bottom of my phone, and that's already working. And then all I have to do is plug the transmitter here, or use the magnet, if it comes with one, to hide it underneath my shirt. So just so you know, in professional production, we hide this mic as best as we can. So I suggest not doing what I guess is kind of the norm for creators nowadays of wearing the transmitter outside like this. I mean, it's fine, absolutely fine for Youtube. But just in terms of professional filmmaking discipline, it's not nice to have it so visible like this. But if you do wear it on the inside, there is one downside to that, which is it makes it easy for it to move. Instead of pointing out like that, it points into your body and that makes it sound very muffled. So that's something you have to keep in mind and watch out for. But anyway, once your mics are set up, the next thing you have to watch out for are your audio levels. Now the good thing is on most mobile phones, the phone handles all of that automatically. But if you're using a mirrorless camera or audio recorder that only offers manual audio levels, you'll need to do a sound check and then you can watch these audio meters. So as you're doing your sound check, you have to just make sure that they're hitting between minus six and -12 Even if you raise your voice, you don't want it super loud that if you raise your voice a little, then the audio starts to clip. Basically you're talking too loud for the microphone. But basically once you have that shot in the can, as we say in the film industry, you're going to want to transfer to your computer so you have a bigger screen and bigger speakers or listening to your headphones so you can make sure. It's fine. So again, on a Mac you can use Android File Transfer to download your videos from an Android phone, or you can just air drop the test clips from your iphone to your Mac. A better way to download big files from your phone to your Mac is to use the built in image capture app for reliable wired downloads. All you have to do is connect your iphone to your Mac via lightning, to USB, open image capture, select the relevant clips and hit download. On Windows, you just plug in whichever phone you have and navigate to it using Windows Explorer. And then look for the folder usually called DCIM to find your media, drag and drop it to your computer and then play back your footage. Make sure audio is good, make sure you have all those things. Like you don't have a crooked horizon, your exposure is fine, et cetera, et cetera. And that's about it. It's actually relatively simple. We're going to put in more work and attention to our lighting and production design in the next lessons. But for now, if you want to dig deeper on the topic of gear, how to use it, how to set it up, and different kinds of gear available. Maybe if you just want to look forward in your journey, you can hop over to my previous courses where I do much more thorough breakdowns on the kinds of camera and audio gear and which may be right for you. Again, you'll find them linked in the class resources and congratulations, you are done with day three. You've laid the basic groundwork in day four, we'll continue pre production by basically preparing your little home studio. We'll figure out our lighting and we'll design our space. And then we'll learn tips for being comfortable on camera. So see you on day four. 16. Day 4 Prepare to Shoot Part 2: Hello and welcome to day four. Today is a fun day because you'll get to exercise some creativity and new skills without actually having to shoot yet. We'll work on everything that the camera is going to see and make sure it'll be its best. Yourself included. Okay. First we'll learn how to prepare a good shooting space that has good depth and lighting while conveying your personality. And then next, we'll learn tips for feeling comfortable on camera. So when you're ready, let's get after it. 17. Light Your Space Pt 1 Fundamentals: In the previous lessons, we got our content written and our gear ready to go. Now we need to put in some work to make our space look as good as it can. And don't worry, you don't need to invest in a whole actual studio to have a good space. You just need to put in some thoughtful work. So an ideal shooting space should be well lit, have depth, and convey a bit of your personality. It doesn't need to be fancy, but we won't settle for drab either. So in this lesson, we'll begin with figuring out where and how to shoot with the best lighting. First off, you want to find a space that has some distance between you and the wall behind you. So this will allow for a little bit of background blur because if you're too close to the wall, then your camera won't be able to have any blur. And basically this helps us to create more separation and depth to give us a more three dimensional looking frame. Now, a common mistake I see a lot of beginners make is to just shoot against a blank wall. Now this isn't just flat and boring, but it also Mrs. the opportunity to convey a bit more of your personality. Now, the best place to start, if you don't already own lights, is to find a space in your house or wherever you live that is already lit by a large window, preferably with a set of curtains to diffuse it. Now this main light is called your key light. Now don't worry if you don't have video lights yet. I used window light for many years before using video lights. My first and still most popular skill share course was all natural light start to finish coming from my windows over there. And honestly, I still think it looks really good. And the reason for this is that the most natural high end look can be achieved using very big light that's diffused through something. In this case, we have the biggest light source of them all, sunlight being diffused through curtains. The downside is that it won't be perfectly consistent though that's not required. And of course, you'll be at the mercy of the weather and how much sun you get at a certain time of year. You can pause the video and try to look around and see where in your home you can shoot where there is some good natural light. Hopefully there'll be one spot that is both well lit during the day. It has decent depth and at least some potential to be designed. Now if it comes down between picking a place that's already designed like your stuff, is there like I have here, or a place that's already well lit, It's up to you whether it might be easier to move things to a lit area than to say, professionally light a dark corner. Understandably, if you don't have that option and you need lights, then it's best to start with inexpensive battery powered LED lights. Like what I have here, what I'm being lit through this diffusion. These are cheap non wall lights. The model numbers are shown here on screen. And it's best to get bi color lights that can be white, daylight color, sunlight color, or warm the color of indoor lights depending on your environment and what's best for you. If you're asking me, can you just use normal household or outdoor fixtures, I suggest you only use purpose made video lights. You see normal lighting fixtures often exhibit undesirable flicker, as you can see in this sample clip shot on an airplane. And they also tend not to reproduce colors well. And for that reason, it's really best to go either with sunlight or dedicated video lights for the best results. Moreover, make sure not to mix white daylight with warm indoor lights and especially fluorescent lights. You might be wondering, because to your eye, it might seem like fluorescent lights are white, just like daylight. But the truth is they have a greenish tent and it just doesn't look good, especially with skin. That's why whenever I'm shooting indoors and I'm asked if I want to turn on more of the fluorescent lights or even the warm lights to increase the illumination of the scene, my answer is always no. But you can mix sunlight and dedicated video lights, which is precisely what I'm doing now in my space with sunlight coming from here and here. But my main consistent key light being provided by my LED lights over here. Moving on, when lighting a person such as yourself, you need to use the right quality of light. And that's usually best when it's soft light, like what I'm being lit by right now, as opposed to sharp hard light. And I'll show you what that looks like by going behind my diffusion material. Do you see the difference? Now, even when you compensate for exposure, there's just a harshness to this that's not as nice when the light is soft and the harshest light you can get, usually say with like a big outdoor spot light, or with especially things like noontime sun, You want to avoid shooting in that as much as you can or otherwise find a way to soften that light. To soften a video light, you can choose to buy a purpose built soft box like this. So again, the light shines through here. Just make sure the one you're getting is compatible with your specific lighting fixture. Or you can choose to bounce the light against a white wall or ceiling, a reflector, or like a big styrofoam board. These are tricks that we still often use in professional lighting. Basically, the idea is to make the light less harsh and directional by spreading it out over a bigger space and distance. Instead of letting it be a concentrated point of light, like a spot light or a flashlight, I have decided to use this really cheap backdrop stand to hang a professional diffusion filter called a 216 so I can have a very big surface area to shine my lights through. And it's so big that I'm actually shining two lights through it. So remember, the bigger and more distant your light source, the softer it is. And the more concentrated and close your light source is, the harder the light is. We generally want to use soft light when lighting people, but we want to use hard light for more dramatic applications. Just remember though, that soft light comes at a price whenever you shine light through a diffusion filter. Whenever you spread it out over a larger space, and whenever you make it more distant, you are decreasing that light's intensity. So when you soften the light, you definitely need a light source that's strong enough to still provide good illumination even after it's been diffused. So if you're still working with small light fixtures, this is something you'll have to balance. But the good news is these little LED panels that I'm using already have a relatively soft light to begin with. Unlike our old traditional video lights, which were very bright and harsh and always needed some kind of filtering to look good. And it's for that very reason that it's a great idea to work with the sun because it's the brightest and most powerful light source out there. And it gives you basically a lot of leeway to make it softer without losing too much light depending on the time of day and where you are. All right, this lessons run a little longer than I expected, so we'll leave it off there for now. And in the next lesson, we'll talk about how to properly position your lights for the best results. 18. Light Your Space Pt 2 Light Placement: Whatever your light source. Basically, you want to keep it about a third to the side and above you because you want it to give your face a good contour with no undesirable shadows. Like you'll get, for example, from shooting outside at noon. Or if you turn on a light bulb that's directly above your head. So you'll have to adjust your light or your placement relative to the sun for the best effect. Now for standard Talking Heads, like what we're doing here, it's actually good to have the light a little bit closer to the center. Because if you move it too much to the side, which is actually just a matter of rotating, see, see how easy it is to work with light. I just rotate my face and I change where the light is. But yeah, if you move the light too much to the side, then it tends to look a little bit too moody and dramatic. Move it a little bit to the center and that's where you get kind of a nice solid lighting for Talking Heads. And just as another tip, if you're going to light from one side of your face, you want to light the side of your face that is further from the camera. And this provides a more flattering effect. Meaning the shadow part should be closer to the camera, because watch what happens. If I switch it around and the shadow part is further from the camera, It tends to make my face look a little fatter. So keep it a little bit to the center and then a little bit to the side for that flattering shadow on the near side of your face. So apart from how the shadow looks on your face, one thing to watch out for, where you'll know your light placement is good, is having just this little shadow under the chin. This shows that the light is at the right height. It gives your chin contour and you're not having the shadow underneath your nose or underneath your eyes. Just keep it underneath the chin to create that contour. Yet another sign of good light placement are these. These are catch lights. The reflection of the light source in your eyes that makes your eyes and basically the rest of your face, look alive. You won't get this if your light source is too high or off too much to one side. The movie, the Godfather, for example, is famous for purposely not putting catch light in the actor's eyes, but that's to serve a dramatic purpose. We're not doing the Godfather here, we're doing a Youtube video that's best to stick to these tips. Now, depending on the shape of your face, you might want to adjust the light for a more flattering result. A more central light, like I have here, flattens features more. But it might make your face look bigger. While a more side on light emphasizes shape and texture. But might also emphasize skin texture more than you'd like, especially if you're using a harder light source. For example, in TV commercials, they usually do beauty shots quite flat and central, so lit centrally with a soft light at the top and at the bottom, which makes skin appear more uniform and flawless. For narrative films, you usually get the opposite. You have more directional light for more realism and drama on that note, for a more professional look. But this is purely extra credit, and I wouldn't worry about this. If it's not an option, it's best to light from the general direction of where the natural light is already coming from in your space. This is what we call motivated lighting because there is a motivation for the light to come from there. And it makes the audience kind of buy into the illusion more that the artificial light is actually natural sunlight. To sum it up, when working with light, especially natural light, you need to develop the skill, the instinct of figuring out where to place the camera and the subject in relation to the light. For the best results for Talking Heads like this, just make sure not to have a strong light source behind you. Because this kind of silhouette, you cannot correct this properly in post with any kind of color correction. And also don't put it too much to the side where it just gets moody. Well, here I'm still helped by the window light, But if I put it to the side here where there's no other lighting, then again we're getting shadows where they're not supposed to be. A quick pro tip to working with natural light is to employ open shade if you have access to it. Open shade is just somewhere indoors, but with one or more of the walls open, letting in sunlight. So here you have soft light by virtue of having a big bright source, the sun. But all the lighting will be indirect because you have a roof over your head and you'll just get bounced light from the sun, which results in, what did you learn? Soft light. All right. I hope these tips have enlightened you. I'm sorry. It made you excited to play around and experiment with what you've learned. Now you can take some time to try to figure out your own lighting and how to get the best result. Once you've nailed it, admire what you've done, because you've learned how to actually make yourself and others look good on camera, instead of settling for just shooting whatever wherever. With your lighting fundamentals taken care of in the next lesson, we can now focus on making your space look nicer, or what we call production design. 19. Design Your Space: Now that we've learned to light, let's focus on production design. Which is how everything you actually see in the frame is going to look when you're designing your space. It's good to do it with your camera already framed up so you know the extent, called the limit, of what you're designing for. You may want to adjust this limit to make your job easier to show less stuff, but without losing too much of the environment or just framing too close to your face. This is why I like shooting on a medium telephoto lens with a shallow depth of field. Because particularly if you have a big mireles camera, it cuts out a lot of the distractions by using a medium narrow view and lots of background blur. For reference, compare the frame of my main shot that you see there with what you would actually see on a wider shot with my phone. So we have this blank white closet here and just lots of junk on the floor on my bed. So using this lens allows me to cut out most of that, but if I am using a phone, then I would frame it up somewhere like that. And just clean it up further to de emphasize the cluttered. Look at the back. So let's frame up your camera. So you should frame yourself sitting there, already sit in the center of the frame if you're going to talk straight to camera like this. And then make sure that the camera is about just below eye level to about eye level. Make sure that the horizon is level, as we covered in a previous lesson, and that it's neither pointing up nor down noticeably, because that kind of looks awkward. You can also frame yourself sitting to one side as I do with my computer set up because that's how the space is designed and that's what looks right for that space. Once you've figured out you framed yourself up, you might have to go a few times back and forth between sitting and checking your phone. So what you might want to do is just roll your phone already or your camera and then try to arrange yourself as best you can. And then later on, watch the footage again to see if everything looks right. But once you've got your framework out, now you can take a look at how you can add, subtract, or move things around in your background to make it more interesting on camera without being distracting. So you don't want anything here taking away attention from yourself or whatever it is you're showing on camera. And if you're design oriented, it's great to be deliberate about your color schemes too. Because frames with a unified color palette look beautiful and it's great for the viewer to see. Now a little bit goes a long way. In my case, this side of my room is already designed like this. And I have my toys, some prints and some books, so I can convey a little bit of my personality as well. So for you, you can strategically place some objects behind you to add design while removing all very distracting objects. Just design this in a way that expresses something about you. Of course, as we do in production, feel free to move furniture around to get the best looking frame if you're allowed to. Of course, it's really up to your creativity and determination. And again, this is one of those realm sub disciplines in filmmaking that can be really fun and a great way to express yourself and develop some skill and design sense. Meanwhile you know things like I don't know, laundry, hampers, clothes, dishes, random house junk. They should be all moved out of your frame. Even just out of your frame. Like I've done here, I'm shooting this in my bedroom. You should just move them just out of your frame for the duration of your shoot. As you may have seen when I was turning the camera around in the last chapter, there is a lot of junk surrounding this little square where I'm shooting to make it look good enough for this shot. And honestly, you can probably tell I'm no design expert, so you don't have to be. Just go with what looks nice. That won't take too much attention away from the main subject, which is probably you. And also watch out for stuff like random poking stuff in the background that looks like it's poking into or out of your head. Or for example, any loud colors, designs, or text that clash. And again, call too much attention to themselves. An easy and popular choice is your actual computer workstation. Like I mentioned earlier, though, you should clean it up a little because I'm sure this is your workspace. And 100% I know there will be clutter there. And of course, figure out the lighting as well, because usually these little computer knocks tend to be quite dark. But of course, it's not just your space that we need to design. Can you think of anything else that will be on camera that needs some attention? Hm, yeah. We also need to talk about you, let's talk about your wardrobe. Yes, this matters, even in a Youtube video. So basically just dress in clothing whose shade contrasts with the background to create separation. You don't want to be wearing a white T shirt against a white wall or a gray shirt against an off white wall. So you know, you can wear a light color against a dark background or vice versa. And also you should be conscious to avoid wearing shirts with thin stripes or very fine lines, because cameras often have trouble resolving these details, especially after a video is compressed for Youtube. And so that just kind of looks weird. And of course, you probably want to wear something that conveys something about you, whether a graphic related to your topic or your hobbies, or simply something that shows off your sense of style. When in doubt, just dress neatly. Of course, don't forget to wash your face so it's not oily. A little bit of foundation isn't a bad thing. And then fix your hair a little or wear a hat, I promise it's worth the effort because I posted entire courses where I didn't fix my hair. And one more thing. A lot of you will probably want to do some top down shots for demos in B roll. And if you want to do that, you can get one of these inexpensive arms. Okay, I can barely make it fit in my shot. So basically you use this part to attach the arm to say, a table or a shelf. So I'll attach it to the table here just below me. Attach your phone here to the end and make adjustments. And as you can see, the phone is pointing straight down, which will allow you to get a perfect top shot, which just isn't possible with a tripod. Because of the shape of the tripod, you'll be avoiding the near leg of the tripod. And for a great example of this, check out my friend Pixel leaves on Youtube because almost all of her shots are just top down shots as she never shows her face. And they're so well designed and take note that she can make it look this good shooting purely on an iphone. And if she can do it, you can too. So before this day ends, frame up your camera so you can see the limits of your shot and start playing around with and designing your space already. This is one of the most fun parts, one of the most creative parts. You're basically doing what they do in Hollywood. Just, you know, in your own little way. In my own little way. And once you're done, well, congratulations. We are almost ready to roll. In this lesson, we learn basic production design to have a good looking, clean, and expressive background in shooting space. There's just one last thing we need to work on before shooting. Can you guess what it is? Well, it's yourself. In the next lesson, we will learn some tips for getting comfortable on camera. 20. Get Comfortable on Camera: In the previous lessons, you learned basic lighting and production design. In this lesson, we'll learn how to get more comfortable on camera in five steps, beginning with step one. Embrace the awkwardness. Being on camera feels awkward at first, and that goes for everyone. So don't feel bad. Don't beat yourself up. Just embrace it. It's a natural part of this learning process. And recognize that even the most seasoned on camera talents had to start somewhere. And some of the best ones you see on Youtube. Now, trust me, they had little to no natural ability. And you can naturally check this. Just go to their channels and look for their oldest videos. As with everything, practice makes perfect. So the more you do it, the more comfortable you'll become. So step two, practice on your own and get feedback. So if you need help, you should begin by filming short videos just for yourself. You already have a script. We already prepared your space, so why not practice? This allows you to get familiar with the feeling of being on camera. And importantly, it gives you something to review and work on. You'll most likely find things and little ticks that you never noticed or find that the energy you think you're conveying doesn't translate on camera. So don't let this make you more self conscious, just adjust as necessary. You know, I've found that the irony is that it takes practice to be more yourself on camera. And most people will err on one of two sides. They'll be a little bit, maybe too much, which I think is where I am. Or they'll be conveying too little, which is what a lot of shy people end up doing. But either way, as you gain confidence, you can and maybe should start showing your videos to someone, your partner, close friends, or family. Just make sure they're supportive of what you're doing because their support and feedback can be invaluable in refining your on camera presence in body language and even boosting your confidence. Moving on, step three, you should plan and prepare for being on camera. Fortunately for us, we've already done all of this extensively in Dase 12.3 Part of this was figuring out which parts to say on camera and which parts to do on voice over. Now you should make sure that you're able to deliver both on and off camera spiels with a consistent tone that sounds natural. Because most people I've found when allowed to read a script, instead of memorizing it, their tone of voice just suddenly changes, suddenly sounds very robotic when they read or they have this artificial sing, song tone, which doesn't really sound good, it's not convincing. And as a viewer, it's kind of off putting to listen to somebody who talks like that. So again, you need to practice to overcome this tendency. Learn to read text as if you're saying it in the moment spontaneously. Overall preparation just removes stress. It makes things easier and it makes you more free and confident on camera. And this confidence translates to a better energy and relaxation in front of the camera when it starts rolling. Now once you've got all that handled, we can move on to step four, which is focus on authenticity. You know, it's a social media cliche by now, but still it's true. Authenticity is the key to connecting with your audience. Remember our discussion in day one about not being the best but being the only Be yourself. Embrace your personality and let it shine through because this is your ultimate and sometimes only competitive advantage that no one else has. Viewers will have a hard time connecting with you if you aren't being your true self. And people on social media can smell that a mile away these days. So don't try to be anybody else. Don't try to be loud if you're actually quiet. Don't try to be quiet and serious if you've got a vivacious personality. Another great tip I picked up from Youtuber Sonny Leonard Doozy that I also always repeat is don't focus on yourself, but focus on the value you're imparting to your audience, at least your imaginary audience. For now, this will help you get out of your own head and to hold your space on camera as your lovely unique self. Again, I really find it's true that it takes practice to be yourself on camera. So if it helps record yourself, you know, make your class project and be assured that your succeeding videos will get better and better. Which brings us to step five. Do the work, review and improve on the next ones. As I said, the more you practice, the more comfortable you'll become. It's that simple. Pay attention to details like your body language, your voice modulation, your overall presentation style, and make adjustments to enhance your on camera presence over time. Remember, getting comfortable on camera is a journey, a process talent undoubtedly will help others get there faster. But ultimately, it's work that will make you as good as any pro out there. Embrace the process. Be patient with yourself and maybe most importantly, have fun. As I said in my previous skill share course, have fun because you transmit to the viewer the energy that you feel. So breathe, smile, laugh at yourself if you have to. And just enjoy it, because you don't have to do this, you get to do this. In this lesson, you learn the simple truth to getting good on camera, which is practice and embracing the process. That concludes day four, and wow, that means you're ready to start rolling. On day five, we're going to shoot our first Youtube video. 21. Day 5 Shoot Your Video: Welcome back. I'm glad to see you back because it's day five and it's a big day. After four whole days of preparing, we're finally ready to shoot. We've done all the preparation to ensure that the shoot day will be a matter of checking boxes. So this is going to be fun. So in the first lesson, we'll learn how to shoot our talking heads on camera, and in the second lesson, we'll learn how to shoot our B roll. So without further ado, let's get rolling. 22. Shoot Your Talking Heads Part 1 Before You Start: With the preparation we did in days one to four in this lesson, all that's really left is to roll the camera. So we'll go through shooting all of our on camera talking heads Now. Based on my own experience, it's a good idea to clear out at least 3 hours for this. Don't do this in a rush, especially if it's your first time. This is going to ask a lot of energy and focus from you. So set your phone to silent or do not disturb. Even turn it off if you can. And make sure to look around and turn off any noisy appliances. If you have to turn off like electric fans while you're rolling, then you should do that. But if it's hot, then you can just turn it back on. In between takes the idea would be to do it in an air conditioned room because the constant noise on the air con is easy to remove or just leave. And again, before you hit record, make sure you have a lot of remaining space on your phone or camera memory card. Because if you start rolling, it can take a while to clear out and then there's a risk you could lose some of your files when it mixes up with your old video files. So again, you just don't want to lose this momentum. But of course, if it happens it's fine, Just keep going with your set up ready from our work in days 4.5 You can record a test shot now to make sure that your lighting and framing are on point and that your audio is good and at the right level in your camera. So with the camera level horizontally and neither pointing up nor down too much compose it. So that your eyes are roughly level with the upper third of the frame. And don't forget to leave sufficient head room as well. So record your test shot and play it back to check the framing and the audio and adjust as necessary. Don't rush this part, because if you don't get it right, you could find yourself spending half an hour or more getting tired, talking on camera, only to find that your focus was off. Your audio was bad, there was chunk in the background or even there was something in your teeth or on your face. Any number of things that a test shot could have avoided. If you're using a mirrorless camera or any camera with a shallow depth of field, that gives you some background blur. Okay, there's additional stuff we need to check. It's essential that you make sure that your autofocus is focusing on you and not on your background. This tends to happen if you have bright contrasty objects in your background that the camera likes to latch onto. An external monitor or a tilty flippy screen is essential for you to be able to see this. Now you can also try using your camera's monitoring app on your phone, but it comes with some limitations. Now if you don't have any of those, then you don't have a choice. You'll have to roll and check every 10 minutes or so. Or of course you could just set it to manual focus. To be able to do that, you need to put some kind of placeholder at the same distance from the camera as where you're sitting. And then set focus based on that. And then once you've set focus, you have to always be conscious not to lean so far forward or backward that you go out of focus. Modern cameras like the one I'm using don't have a problem with this in general, when you do that, just roll the camera with you in the frame, play back, check focus, and adjust. Now I'll be honest, I shot so many tutorials and even full courses like this without a monitor. And it's not fun. So this is why I encourage you to start shooting with your phone first. The deep depth of field means that everything in your frame will be in focus at all times. It may not look as sexy, but it's a lot less prone to mistakes. Have any and all props you need nearby, lay them on a table in front of you, or just out of sight as necessary to avoid delays in looking for them. When that's set as one final step, of course you're going to be, maybe you'll get a little bit sweaty setting up your lights and all your production design and all your props. So before you roll the camera, go to the bathroom, freshen up so you can look great and feel confident on camera. If it makes you feel more comfortable, you can put on a bit of makeup or at least blot out any oily patches on your face. Of course, check your hair. You can keep a glass of water or a tumbler nearby to help you keep your throat fresh, especially if you're not used to this yet, and don't forget, if you live with others, then politely let them know not to disturb you or make too much noise for the next few hours. Alright, the lessons getting along again, so we leave it there for now, and I'll see you the next lesson for part two of Shooting your talking heads. 23. Shoot Your Talking Heads Part 2 Filming Tips: And now finally you can hit record. I suggest that you roll long takes to save energy from getting up too often from your spot, But be sure to cut and check every now and then that the camera is still running and that the files are being saved properly, that your framing and sound are still good, nothing's moved out of place, and of course, that you have it run out of space on your memory card or phone. Believe me, every single one of those has happened to me more times than I care to count. Then if you're using natural light, as I suggested, you should be aware if it's starting to get too dark. If you don't have a monitor like I have here, it's going to be hard. So again, you have to get up and check it. Now for this kind of video, I suggest that you shoot it sequentially, where possible, to save time sorting things out in the edit. But of course, if it makes more sense logistically to shoot in another order, then that's probably better and will take less energy. So as you roll along and you get through your line, sometimes you're not going to get it all right. Don't be hard on yourself for making mistakes. It happens to everyone, especially if you don't have access to a teleprompter, which I already started using. Just so you know, I shot my entire first scale share course without a teleprompter and it was so tiring. But it also turned out great because it looked totally natural. Bloopers and all. As you get through this, especially if you've memorized things, don't be afraid to add, modify, or subtract entire lines of dialogue. This is a natural part of the shooting process and it's a form of editing before you even edit. And many lines that you wrote will probably not sound natural now that you're saying them out loud. Now, how much do you have to get right in a single take? Well, it depends on how much you plan to say on camera versus voice over and your own comfort level. If you're really having a hard time, you must at least get a few sentences at a time straight so that you don't have too many rapid cuts in the edit, which isn't good for the viewer. Here's a useful tip. You can opt to shoot either with two angles on two cameras if you have them, so that you can cut between them to smooth out jump cuts, you know when you cut the camera. Or you can shoot in four K on one camera and then just crop in when jumping to a separate part so you can hide the cuts between parts. You couldn't say continuously. If you use a good enough camera, you won't notice much of a loss in quality. But of course, the best way to do this is to shoot in four K, but edit in H D so you can make full use of that extra resolution. Now if you do opt to use two cameras, the second camera should be at least 30 degrees of an angle away from the first camera and at a different focal length. That is zoom, So it doesn't look like a jump cut when you're switching between the two angles. Now for the parts of the script that will be voice over, I suggest that you record them in the same setting using the same equipment as your main talking heads. The reason for this is you want to keep the sound and tone of your voice consistent, which helps to maintain a fluid edit. So be conscious of still maintaining a natural tone of voice even when you're reading your lines. What I do is just to have myself on camera reading it so that it sounds exactly the same. The downside to this is it consumes a lot of unnecessary memory since I'm recording video and not just audio. But it's great for efficiency and consistency. Of course, be prepared to face technical issues, whether it's your gear not working correctly. You know, your sounds bad, you lose your camera's focus, your lighting changes too much, there's loud noises, that's probably the most common thing, or even people bothering you, any number of things. It's almost certain to happen, especially if it's your first time doing this, but that's okay. Be patient and just have the attitude that whatever happens you can figure it out. Feel free to take a lot of breaks. This will be tiring. But it will feel incredible once you're done and you have it all in the can. Speaking of which, once you're able to get through the entire script and you've double checked your shot list, that everything in that setup is done and you can move on, Copy your footage immediately to your computer and never, ever, never, ever delete footage from your phone or camera without making sure that it's backed up to an external drive or two. Make sure your footage is physically in at least two places, not including your phone or your camera. Then once you've got it tacked up, skim through it. Or better yet, watch the whole thing. This is your chance to make sure that you have everything you need and you have good takes for every segment, for both the sound and the video before you put away your entire setup, just in case you need to go back and add or revise certain parts based on what you've seen. Especially if this is your first time, this is a must. This initial review is also a good time to see if you will need any additional shots based on how your talking heads turned out. You may decide that you didn't like your delivery somewhere or you want to change a line. Maybe you said something that you turned out to be incorrect or a certain part will be better supported with roll instead of being on camera. Whatever happens, basically add these to your shot list to continue next time. So just so you see them, here's how my shots for my sample video turned out. Hi everyone. My name is Aaron Palabab. I'm a professional filmmaker who travels around on my motorcycle. Today I want to talk about everything you need to know to figure out how to buy your first motorcycle reminder. You'll get access to these shots in the event that you still aren't feeling up to shooting your own footage yet. So that you can use these to edit in the succeeding lessons. And that's about it, honestly. The ball is mostly in your court for this lesson, but I know that probably you'll run into things, things you'll need to troubleshoot. So please let me know in the discussions below if you have any questions, concerns, and if you have any urgent troubleshooting that you need to get out of the way so that you can finish shooting your talking heads. And I'll get right to you when I get the chance. In this lesson, we went through the process of shooting your talking heads and you learned some tips for getting through the process smoothly. In the next lesson, we'll go over how to shoot your supporting footage. Your broll. 24. Shoot Your B roll: In the previous lesson, you shot your talking heads. Now it's time to fill in the rest. Let's check off the remainder of your shot list and shoot all of your roll in general you want to shoot roll that directly illustrates your point and of course you want to shoot it in as good quality as possible. The point of shooting great appropriate roll is, in my opinion, twofold. First, it's to illustrate your points as clearly as possible to your audience. Second, it's to give yourself the material you need for a seamless, visually pleasing edit. With as few jarring jump cuts as possible depending on your topic. This can be as simple as pointing the camera at various objects, but here are some pointers to have better Broll. First, make sure you use a good light source to properly light your barrel when shooting objects, you should move your table or work surface close to the light source. Don't forget, it's better to still have these frames neatly production designed. Then make sure that each clip you shoot lasts at least 7 seconds. So that you have allowance at the heads and tails of each shot In the edit. I usually roll every barrel shot for at least 10 seconds. Now here are ideas for various types of burel shots. Probably the most common kind of barrel on Youtube is just a simple close up to show a specific detail of what you're talking about, like a product, a feature of its design, something it does, et cetera. The great thing about close ups is they also cut seamlessly with your wide medium shots, like your Talking heads. These can be handheld even, or stating on a tripod, or moving on some kind of stabilizer depending on what you need to show. But always keep the movement steady and slow in shooting a close up or else it will be too shaky. Relate that the close ups are cutaways. If you're doing a demo or a tutorial, you're doing something with your hands. Then a cutaway is a closer view of what you're working on that gives a better look at it so that your viewer can see exactly what's going on. One of the most common examples of a cutaway is the top shot. This is great for various kinds of demos. In this example, it's much better to see how the coffee is being poured from the top of the coffee brewer than seeing it from a wide shot in front where you can't see the coffee bed. But basically anything can be roll as long as it supports what you're talking about. And as I said in a previous lesson, if you're talking about something more abstract, then you can think of something creative to represent that point visually. If you're not seeing it on camera, give your audience something visually to chew on to help make your discussion more memorable. Now here's some more tips for shooting good footage so that you can get quality B roll. Employ a stable, moving shot if your frame has depth, but there's not much that's moving inside of it. Gimbals and stabilized cameras, like most new phones, are good for wide shots, while sliders are better for controlled moving close ups. Locked or static shots, which is just what you call a shot on a tripod is very clean, you can use it for anything. And they're best applied too to close ups because you need that stability. Or if you have a wide shot where there's a lot of movement happening in the frame. Of course, tripod shots are also best for when you're shooting cutaways to demonstrate something. Panning and tilting shots are also great to reveal more detail, especially on a close up. But these generally only look good if you have a proper video fluid head on your tripod like this one by small rig. Then you have specialty shots that require more advanced knowledge and or gear. Such as time lapse, drone shots, slow motion, which is just shooting at a higher frame rate like 60 frames per second. You can already use these shots if you know how, but don't worry about it. If you don't get build the fundamentals now get fancy later. If you already have some experience shooting video, then of course you can use existing footage you have from the past. As bro, I do this all the time. In the example of my motorcycle explainer, that's going to be the sample class project, I'll be using mainly footage that I already have from my many Moto logs and explainers. I will also include some graphics and imagery from the Internet to illustrate points that I can't shoot or don't have material for yet. And of course you can use stock footage. This is a common option for video essay creators these days. There's lots of reasonable options for stock subscriptions, such as the popular service story blocks. Some websites even offer free stock footage. However, personally for Youtube, I'm not really big into using stock because for me, it looks generic and impersonal unless you're using stock footage to specifically illustrate what you're talking about, such as stock footage of a weather phenomenon that you're explaining in your video. And so those are just some ideas to help you shoot higher quality Breall. I can't actually tell you how to shoot because you're the one who knows what Breall you're going to need. And if you're going to use my sample footage, don't worry, there will also be appropriate Breall for you to use. One more thing, when you're done shooting your Breall before you pack up your whole setup, don't forget to snap a photo or several photos you can use as either your whole thumbnail or as elements of your Youtube thumbnail. We'll go over thumbnail creation on day seven, but it's best to get your ingredients now while you still have your entire set up. And that's it. Just lots of different ideas for how to approach getting good B roll. In general, I'd say to aim to get both quality and quantity. You need them. Quantity gives you more options in the edit and quality just helps to make a better video. Bad looking be roll I think can be worse than not using any beer roll. So do this. Well, in this lesson you learned the importance of good be roll and got some ideas for what to shoot, how to shoot it at high quality, and where to get it if you can't shoot it. The ball is now in your court, you've learned everything you need to learn, and it's up to you to shoot everything. So I understand day five is a really big day. So give yourself all the time you need. Definitely take a day or two, or three or more to get through this entire process of shooting, but don't take too long. I emphasize momentum is key when you're trying to complete a high effort, high focus project like this. That said, I congratulate you in advance for getting through such a big day, for making it through all of the hurdles and resistance that kept you from getting beyond this point. Until now. You've got it all in the can and now you're ready to get cooking. You should congratulate yourself and celebrate getting through this shoot. Kick back a little, take the rest you need and when you're ready, day six is up next, which is where most beginners stall video editing. I know this is a daunting step for many, but you've gotten this far and you've prepared well. So I'll do my best to guide you through it so that your footage doesn't end up languishing on a hard drive for months and years. All right. So I'll see you on day six for the edit. 25. Day 6 Edit Your Video: Hi everybody, Welcome to day six. By now, you've shot all your footage, and you can't wait to see it turn into the video you've envisioned. So today we'll take on one of the most essential and exciting tasks in filmmaking, video editing. I know this can be intimidating, but I promise it'll be worth it. So first, we'll get familiar with one of the most widely available free video editing programs. Apple's free eye movie for Mac. I recommend learning to edit on a computer and not just a phone, because this gives maximum creative freedom and will prepare you to take on more advanced projects in the future. In addition, it really helps to have a lot more screen space, so anyone with a Mac should have a copy of movie. However, if you're on Windows and you need to find a free, decent editing program, I'd recommend looking into Power Director essential. You can also opt for using Vinci Resolve. That's on Windows and on Mac, which is a full fledged professional editing software that is available for free with just a few features limited compared to the paid version. However, Resolve will be a lot more intimidating for a beginner and even I haven't learned how to use it yet. So for this course at launch, I'll only have lessons for movie, but the principles will apply to a lot of other editing programs at the same time. Please let me know in the discussions below if you'd like me to include a chapter on Power Director or maybe another Windows based editing application in the future, and I'll get right on it anyway. After we get to know movie, we'll go step by step to build your video edit. First we lay down your talking heads to build the foundation. And then we'll put your bureau on top of that and then we can add titles and other stuff. And again, if shooting your own footage is still daunting at this point, you can work with the sample footage I've made available for you to practice editing. Again, it's in the class resources. By the end of day six, you'll have your video content all laid out and ready to be finished on day seven. So let's begin. 26. Import and Organize Footage: In this lesson, we'll go over how to import, organize, and work with your footage in Apple's free movie software. Learning movie also happens to be a good stepping stone to eventually learning final cut Pro Ten, the pro editing software famous for fast fluid editing for content creators. Before you proceed, make sure that you have enough drive space, at least 20 gigabytes, because movie will consolidate all of your video files into one big library on your computer's internal drive, in your movies folder. So when you first open movie, you'll see the workspace divided into different sections. Mainly the library, the viewer, and over here, the time line. Here. The library is where you organize and manage your video projects. You can create multiple libraries to keep your projects organized or simply use one library organized into separate events, which are usually labeled by date. In my opinion, it's more organized if every project is a separate library so that you can use events to organize your footage not by date but by type. So let's import our footage. If you're using an Android phone, you have to use the free Android file transfer app and connect the phone with its cable. You may have to watch for a notification from your phone asking what USB mode you'd like to use. Make sure it's set to file transfer or file transfer 3.0 here it's asking me now if I want to use USB for file transfer, I'll say yes. And now you see I have my Android file transfer. So usually what I would do is not go to the movies folder, but go to the DCIM folder, go to camera. So right now there's nothing in here, but all I have to do is just select the files and dragon drop them somewhere onto my hard drive to any directory on your computer for now. Now if you shot with a camera that has a memory card, you can insert it now to your memory card reader. The import dialogue will pop up automatically. If you're in movie, we'll import this later. But first, let's look at how to import from an iphone. On an iphone I can use air drop, but if I have a lot of files, then I have to plug it into my Mac. You'll probably get this dialogue where it asks you to trust this computer, input your passcode. Then, as we discussed earlier, you can open up image capture to download the files, or you can also hit Import here. Then instead of clicking here on Untitled, where you have your memory card, you can click here on your phone. As you can see, you can just select the relevant files to Import and hit Import Selected. Now if you're choosing to edit using my sample footage, click on the link and the class resources. Now if you haven't already and download my footage, you'll find my footage conveniently divided into two groups, Talking Heads and B roll. If your files are on your hard drive, you can just click here to import and then look for the folder where your files are. Then we can choose to import All. Now this will actually copy your video files into the movie library. You can choose to delete the files from their original location. To save space, I would refrain from deleting the originals from your phone or camera until your project is finished. If you can just leave them where they came from, if they're on a separate drive, then all the better. Now if you don't see the import dialogue, when you plug in your iphone or SD card, all you have to do is click here to bring it up. So once you're done importing, feel free to eject your SD card or phone. Now we have our footage in the movie library, but as you can see here, we don't have any events. So usually when you create an event, it's created based on the date and time the footage was shot. But in my opinion, this isn't a very efficient way of organizing your footage. What's better is to create an event based on the type of footage. So as you can see here, my default event is the date today. Instead I'm going to replace that, I'm going to call it Talking Heads. And then I'm going to create another event called be roll. Right now, I don't have any bell yet, so what I'll do is I'll select all of my talking heads, I only have four, and drag them here to Talking Heads, which will make it easier to find later. And later when we get our bell, you'll find it all under this event. So as you can see, when I click on the event, it only shows the clips classified under that. Now if you don't see your library list over here, just look for this icon. Just click on it to hide and show the library list again. You can also change the way clips are sorted in your library here by right clicking the event. Right now it's sorted by name, but you can also sort it chronologically from old or oldest to newest. And this is handy when you have a lot of footage over a lot of different shooting days. So, for example, if I do, from us to oldest, you can see now that we have a year here in the library list to help us sort out our footage. Another thing you can do here in the browser, as you can see here, is you can scrub, as I'm doing here, to preview the footage. While this isn't very useful for Talking Heads, it's very useful for when you're shooting a long B roll. Anyway. Now that we have some clips, we can drag them into the time line. So let's just drag two, let's drop them down here. This, the timeline is the heart of your project. Where you put together, rearrange, and edit your clips to create your final video. You can hit Spacebar to play back, or you can just scrub through by moving this line here called the Current Time Indicator. And this is a unique feature to Apple's editing software that makes it easy to just basically skim through your timeline. Something you just need to be aware of is that most of your clips should be the same frame rate and resolution, so that movie knows what settings to use. So if we click over here to Settings, we can see it's set to ten ATP. It doesn't give us any manual control over the frame rate, which is why I suggest keeping the frame rate to just what we're using, which is 30 frames per second. And any clips at more than 30 frames per second will be automatically interpreted and played back as slow motion by movie. If you don't want movie to do that, you can go over here to settings and then just turn off applies slow motion automatically. So moving on, getting familiar with the rest of the interface of movie. Over here is the viewer where obviously you preview your clips and the edited video in real time. But it also has the button to record a voiceover. You can use this as an easy option to talk over your video if you didn't record voiceover during your shoot. Now on top of the viewer is the tool bar. It contains various tools and options for editing and enhancing your footage. And so we can leave off there for now. We just need to get familiar with movie so that we can start working on our footage. So in this lesson, you learned how to import and organize your footage in movie and got familiar with the basic interface. In the next lesson, we'll go over how to actually edit your clips. 27. Edit Clips and Create Titles: In the previous lesson, we got familiar with movie and learn how to import and organize clips. In this lesson, I'll show you how to actually edit your clips. All right, so we've already got our two talking heads here in the timeline. We can hit command minus and command plus to zoom in and out. And then let's start with basic trimming. Basically all you have to do is drag one end of the clip to trim it, drag the other end. You'll notice here as well that when you drag the end of one clip, the beginning of the other clip follow suit because this is something it shares with its big brother, CP ten. It's called the magnetic timeline and it makes editing really efficient. And they move together whenever you make an edit. Another more precise way to edit a clip is to split it. Let's say see here we have some dialogue here. We could put the current time indicator here, so we know that it starts over there and we hit command B. Now we've split the clip then usually what we would do is take out this part. So we split this, click on this, hit back space, and then we've edited our clip. Another version of this. For example, we have this chunk of dialogue in my talking heads. Again, I'm judging this from the wave form over here. So I'll split this then I'll split it over here, and then just delete the remaining. Okay guys, quick edition here. Something really important that I forgot to put in my original recording of this. Now let's say we've cut up a bunch of our clips. If you want to reorder them, it's simple. You just drag it drop and all the clips will automatically adjust. Now when you're working with voice over, there's a different way to deal with it because movie doesn't allow you to drop the voice over into the primary story line. For example, if you needed this part to be just voice over, you need to fill up the space in the time line, in the story line with at least a temporary piece of video. For example, let's put this down here. Let's drag it to be the same length as the voiceover. We can take out the audio for now and later. You can put the appropriate piece of roll over. This voiceover for example, like this. Read that out over there. Or we can just drag it directly here and there we have our roll over our voice over. Now as you go through this process, if you make a mistake or didn't like what you did, really simple, just use the usual command of command Z to undo. And you can undo all the way back several steps. Moving on, so let's pretend this video is edited and there's a bunch of, let's add some transitions to add transitions. We go here above the browser and we click here on Transitions. We can scrub through them to preview the effect. Fade to white, it's fading to white. Fade to black is fading to black. Spin out iris, iris page girl. And there you get the idea to apply a transition, we simply take one here. Let's take a classic cross dissolve. We put it here on the space and then when you play back, which is space bar means more acceleration, fork and or top speed horse power at the low end you can find it'll dissolve to the next clip. And then if you didn't like the transition, if you want to use a different transition, all I have to do is click here and then hit backspace, and then the transition's gone. Now for our purposes, honestly, we won't be using too many transitions. And I advise you to avoid it as well, unless you want to show something like a significant passage of time, a transition to a different location, et cetera. Because honestly, it looks very amateurish to use unnecessary transitions. And when you do use them, I generally would advise that you stick to using basic dissolves, such as a cross dissolve between two clips, or a basic fade to black, or a fade to white at the beginning or at the end of your video. Moving on, we can add text and titles by clicking here over our browser. And just like the transitions, you'll see several presets that you can preview by scrubbing. All right, let's pick just a really basic one. Let's use a standard lower third, which you would have for, say, interviews, introducing characters, or to show information. Let's drag it over here. Let's zoom in again by hitting command equal command plus, basically. Then you can click on the title and change the text. If you can't edit the title, just make sure to double click it to pull it up here. You can change the font here, you can leave it on Auto size. You can change the alignment. Click select bold italic, Put a drop shadow and change the color color. Then you can change the color of your text here. It's just different ways of selecting the colors you want there. You can take a spectrum on different specific colors. Here I'll just pick plain old white. Then you can change the duration of the text simply by dragging the heads or the tails, the physical ball where you want them to be. Then if you change a bunch of stuff in your title and you don't like it, you can, you can double click here. Or instead of double clicking, you can just click on here in the tool bar. And then hit Reset. And then it resets everything. Then you can hit Check to apply your title adjustments. There are some limitations in working with titles in movie that you need to be aware of. First is that certain titles have elements that you can't change. But I think the bigger thing is that you cannot manually move and title around by dragging it across the preview screen here. You will have to pick a title, a title type that has pretty much the look and location that you want. If you're looking for something that's just standard and universally applicable, I suggest looking at standard lower third for something that's here at the bottom. If you want to change the location, you can only basically change it by changing the alignment. The paragraph alignment here, again, that's left, middle right, or justify. Of course, you can also delete the lower title just to have a single line of text. Just experiment. Take a look at all the different kinds of titles and see which you like best. Again, I would advise simpler is usually better, like fancy stuff like this, Star Wars style. It's cute, but it's not very applicable to a variety of projects. All right, let's leave it off there for now, and in the next lesson, we learn some tools to enhance and manipulate your footage and audio. 28. Learn Various Tools in iMovie: All right, so for now let's delete our title. I movie also offers some basic controls for modifying and enhancing your video and your sound. So they're all here in the tool bar above the viewer. So if you click here, you have some automatic color controls If you hit auto, so you can see here, it kind of automatically graded my clip. Let's undo that. Match color is a way to match colors between two clips if you want them to have a better consistency white balance. This is handy if, for example, you didn't set the white balance correctly in your camera and your shot is either too warm or too cool, then you can simply use this eye dropper to select a color, a neutral color, like white, gray, or black. So let's do it here. And it'll set the white balance correctly for that. And then we can hit check to confirm for Naldo. We'll undo something you need to know. Also the clips I'll be giving you won't be in this flat color. I'll pre grade them to have a standard look, and then you can work on that so that you don't have to learn how to create a very flat image. So this is more for professional and advanced use. Next up, we have more manual color controls. This tool bar controls exposure. Take note that you shouldn't push these settings too much because the footage coming from your phone and the footage I'll be giving you doesn't really stand up to too much manipulation. Unlike say, a high quality raw photo over here. This controls saturation, basically how vibrant your colors are. So we can pull it up like this to make it more colorful or pull it down a little to make it more desaturated, closer to black and white. All right, but for now, let's just reset everything. And then this last slider just controls color temperature. You can make it warmer or cooler, but again, I would suggest only tweaking, don't go beyond about here or about here because it is usually just too much, particularly for the quality of footage we're using. Next is crop. Now this is more useful say if you're working with photos. Ken Burns automatically like zooms in and out from your photos. So as you can see here, it's very easy. We set the start and then we set the end. It slowly zooms in according to what we set. Okay, I'll undo that. Going back to crop, we don't want to use Ken Burns crop to fill is when you're using footage or photos that are vertical or just not 16 by nine the size of the project we're using. And you want it to fill up the entire screen then fit just makes it fit to the screen. But if it's not exactly the same size it's going to show black bars on the side. Unlike crop to fill where it will leave out any black bars next up. We don't need this for tripod shots, but this is to automatically stabilize shaky video and you can control the amount of stabilization with this slider. And if you get that little jello looking stuff when you stabilize your footage, then you can just also check here to fix rolling shutter. Now, we don't need to do that for this because these are on tripods. This controls the sound. If you recorded your sound levels correctly, you shouldn't have to mess with this too much. But a cool feature on movies, you can just hit auto and it automatically raises or lowers the sound to about the right level. We have noise removal, I wouldn't mess with this too much. The quality of noise removal in the software is not that good. Then here you have equalizer. Just the voice enhance, music enhance, base boost, Treble, boost, et cetera. You don't really need this, but you can play around with this to see or to hear if it improves your audio in a way you like. Next up we have speed controls. Again, this isn't very useful for this project, but this is where you would go if you want to slow down footage, if you want to do a freeze frame, do a custom speed or you want to speed it up, generally, I wouldn't mess with this unless of course you have slow motion footage in which case you can actually slow it down a certain amount. And again, I movie by default interpret slow motion footage already as slow motion. So if you have 60 frames footage in this 30 frames per second timeline, it'll come in here as two times slow motion. Then finally, we just have an ability to apply various filters. Again, I don't think this is very useful for us. It's better off that you just color grade manually. It's much better too, if you shot footage in a way that didn't need color grading. But we didn't go through that prior to shooting, when we prepared our camera setting. So I'm assuming that basically you're going to leave your colors more or less as is. And just so you know, this final tab here is just clip information and that's it. In this lesson, you got familiar with how to work with your footage, how to use transitions, titles, and various tools to manipulate and enhance your footage. In the next lesson, we'll finally lay down our actual video, starting with its foundation, the Talking Heads. I'll see you there. 29. Lay Down Your Talking Heads: Previous lessons, you learned the basics of using movie to edit. In this lesson, we'll apply all of that and lay down the foundation of our Youtube video, our Talking Heads. First, of course, you should look for all of your talking heads, which should be easy enough to find if you organize them using events like we talked about in the first lesson. But also if you've got them imported, then you could just easily find them using the thumbnails like I did here. I haven't imported my bureau yet. So they're going to be really easy to find. But even if you had a bunch of bureau here, it would still be easy to find because it would just be a bunch of talking heads. All right, so take all of them, drag them into your time line like so. Now here's what I suggest you do watch all of your footage first so you know what you have and you can compare your best takes. So right now I have 14 minutes of raw footage, but a great tip to save time is as you skim here, you can clearly see from the audio wave forms where I am talking, fast way to do this would be, so let's check this wave form, this is how to take, okay. So this is just side comments and stuff. So all I have to do here is click here. I can zoom in if I want to be very precise. Put my current time indicator here and then hit command B and just delete that. Basically do that for all the rest of the Takes Command B, command B. Just follow the wave forms, cut out all of the dead air so that you just basically have a lot less footage to watch, right? Command B. Command B. I'll finish doing this, we'll come back after I'm done. If while you're doing this you find you cut out too much, don't worry. You can just, for example, if I deleted this, I can just drag it back out to restore that part. All right. I'm done cutting out all of the dead air more or less, which cut 3 minutes. So now we only have 11 minutes left. So as I said from here, you should watch the entire thing so you know what you have. And of course, rearrange anything that's not in the right order. And then what you should pay attention to now is if you have two takes of the same thing as I do here, what you should do is put them side by side and listen to both of them to see which one is best. And of course, you're paying attention to things like how's the sound quality, how's the delivery, and also which take is in focus. So if you're starting out, it really might be a good idea to do several takes to anticipate and be able to cover missed technical mistakes like missed focus. For example, here I have two different takes of my ending spiel. I prefer my ending on the second take, so I'll delete the first take questions. All right, so I'll delete this. That's the first take. I have one, my name is, oops. And then now I'm back here. I'm going to hit function back, which is home. And then just follow this process until you have one smooth take of everything. And then of course, if you recorded your voice over on camera, like I suggested, include those already where they belong according to your script. And then if they don't have a visual or if you're reading, we'll cover those up with Ball in the next lesson. Edna. As you're going through this process, remember you don't have to put everything that was in your script, in your video, because during the edit you may notice you don't need it. Or you may notice that you didn't say it the way you wanted to say or that you outright said something that turned out to be incorrect. That's fine, Just cut it out. Now if you cut something out but you need something to replace it, that's when you can record new voice over. A few more tips for working on your talking heads. You can already shorten your video by cutting words and sentences closer together, by removing arms. And as for more brevity, anticipating that you can cover those jump cuts later on with Errol. So what is a jump cut? A jump cut is when you cut between two frames without any way of smoothing the transition. So for example, this is a jump cut, getting a motorcycle that far. So first let's talk about the difference. So that's not actually a bad jump cut, because the composition between those two is almost exactly the same. It's almost what we call a match cut between two clips that are composed almost identically. But if you're doing things where you're moving around the camera more, then you want to cover up those jump cuts. So for this type of talking head, we usually cover our jump cuts with B roll or a second angle, or a slight punch in to simulate a second angle like this. All right, so to punch in, let's click on the Crop button. Hit Crop to Fill, And then crop ever so slightly. And then of course recompose so we have a good frame. And then now it's not as much of a jump cut or needs and goes first. Let's okay, I think actually to cover up the jump cut, we need that to be a bigger crop. But again, you need to watch out because if you crop too much and you're not editing a four K clip in a ten ATP timeline, then the footage might noticeably degrade if you crop in too much. So it just depends on how you shot your video, but this is just so you know how to smooth out a jump cuts. Let's talk about the difference. Okay, that looks pretty good and we're not losing too much quality. It actually simulates kind of a second camera doing a close up. Let's see that again about getting a motorcycle that fits your first. Let's in general, it's best to have as few jump cuts as possible. Or at least never more than one for every few minutes, because this is jarring for the viewer. Another thing is during editing, honestly, I sometimes change entire sentences by splicing them together with other sentences that I never intended to to either shorten how I said something, make it more concise or correct something that I totally misspoke and then I just cover that up with beer roll. So sometimes they'll be like a very short word from one clip in between two other longer clips. So of course that's going to be a lot of jump cuts, so I should cover that with roll. And I mean that's basically it. It's really simple. So just go through this whole process. Apply the tips that I gave you until you have your basic assembly with no more than one take of every part ready for your ball. Now our video has a solid foundation on which to build everything else, so I think this should be pretty straightforward. After all the preparation we did in this lesson, you learned how to edit your talking heads. Now you should be ready to lay down the rest of your video, which we'll do in the next lesson when we put our ball on top of our talking heads. 30. Insert Your B roll Part 1: In the previous lesson, we laid down our talking heads which are the foundation of our video edit. In this lesson, we'll illustrate the concepts we're talking about and hide our jump cuts by placing relevant bell. So first let's import the sample footage I provided and drop them into here, The Broll event. I won't be providing you with actual raw footage but rather compiled clips from the many logs and reviews I've already shot. Along with some still photos thrown in so that we can practice working with stills in movie. You'll also notice if you look at the file names, that these are already numbered and labeled according to the order in which they'll appear in the video. But you'll notice here that we have an arrangement that isn't according to the number of the file name. So what we should do here, make sure to right click here on the browser, Sort clips by and select Name and ascending. Now the clips will be in the order in which they're meant to appear in the video. The reason they're numbered, of course, is to make it easy to just paint by number according to what I'm saying on camera in the talking heads. And another thing you'll notice is that several of these clips aren't single clips, but rather montages that are meant to go together. As you see here, I'm skimming through this one clip and it contains a number of related clips. And also finally, my Talking heads down here, the entire script is set on camera, there's no voice over. So honestly, I could technically just post this full video without bureau. But we need to do better than that, especially for an educational video like this one laying down bureau at this point Couldn't be simpler, especially if you shot listed. Well, you should already know basically what goes exactly where. So here under my bureau event, you can search and scrub, basically using the thumbnails to find the right clip. Now for example, if you have a longer clip and you need to use only one part of it, say just this one clip, you can just set in points and out points by scrubbing to the part you want to go to. Pressing, going to the end of that part and pressing and you can drag just that part into the timeline. Now we don't need to do that. And we can reset this in and out point by right clicking and press Select the entire clip. All right, now let's begin laying down our B roll. All right, so I'm talking about the number of choices between motorcycles. So I selected this clip. All right, and one quick thing just to note, if you find that your current time indicator isn't snapping, it should by default, be snapping to the starts and ends of clips. If it's not doing that, just press N, So I turn it off now to turn off snapping, so it's not sticking to the ends of the clip. And I press N again to make it stick right anyway. So if I play this back without turning off, the sound is overwhelming. Hey, I understand. Obviously the sound interferes. So we can turn off the sound just by pulling this little bar down to zero in movie and it's Big brother, final cut pro ten. When you drag Brol on top of a clip, it behaves differently. It acts as a connected clip. So what does that mean? That means when I move the clip underneath the associated bel goes along with it, there's like a stray frame there that shouldn't be there. To cut that out, let's just use the direction arrows on the keyboard to scroll to the part that's black. Zoom in a little bit, trim the clip, and then no more black part. So you'll probably find that on several of my clips. So always make sure to remove that little black frame from the end of my sample clips. Okay, I know that this piece of bureau goes with talking about cylinder size, so let's look for that part physical. All right, so we're talking about the cylinders, so let's drag this down here. Turn off the sound, which is the physical volume of the cylinder or cylinders in its engine. Okay, Again, we have that little black part. Just take that out. Sorry about that. So just remember when you use my footage alway, take out the black part. Now working with still photos instead of clip is a little different. So let's drag it down here and let's see what I movie did with it. As low as 50 C, one to five. So I movie automatically applies what's known as a Ken Burns effect, which is this slow zoom in 50 C up to about 100. So this is okay with me. But I want to customize the way it zooms in by clicking here on cropping. So here we've selected Ken Burns, and then we can move the start and end point. I want to move the start point down to show the entire motorcycles and do the same with the end. Another thing we can do with sales, what we can't do with video is we can make it as long as we want or as short as we want. And if we extend the length, it's just going to extend the length and basically slow down the zoom in or out. You can also make the Ken Burns zoom out instead of zooming in simply by looking for this button, the reverse button, And that reverses the start and end frame. But in this case, since we're focusing on the motorcycles, we want it to zoom in. Let's watch that Peds that range from as low as 50 C up to about 101 to five and usually 150 CC. These small bikes are cheap and make power. Ou all right, so I could cover up that whole thing just with this, but I want more variety so I'll show it in it there. So I want this clip to cover until the next cut, so that I don't have a jump cut as we talked about. So basically I have two choices. I can either move this here or stretch it here. I'll go with the stretch options as low as 50 C, up to about 101 to five, and usually one. And let's turn down the sound. These small bikes are cheap and make power in a friendly way. That's perfect for beginners. Now let's move further ahead and try to use a vertical photo to see what happens when we use a vertical photo. All right, so in the sequence I've put here, first I have a horizontal photo. Let's put this in again. We can change the cropping, change the Ken Burns. You also have the option to just leave it completely still by choosing crop to fill and then just moving the crop. Just make sure not to open it up and then show the black bars on the side. It's better not to have the black bars, although if it can't be avoided it's fine too. So I wanted to focus completely on the bike this time instead of Ken Burns, we just have a still bike image. Again, that's crop to fill instead of Ken Burns. So let's play that back. Sport bikes, they have aerodynamic firings. That All right, now that I'm going to talk about the handle bars, I want to use my vertical photo. Then let's just finish that clip with this showing the power of the sport bike. Let's see what's happening here. See what's happening here is that it's basically zoomed in to take out the black bars. I movie did a perfect job of selecting which parts to start and finish so that we could see the handle bars I'm talking about. But another way to deal with a vertical photo is to actually just live with the black bars. Now let's see what happens if I do that low aggress. Now we have a problem because there's a clip underneath it that's showing up behind basically where the black bars were. So how do we solve this problem? Stay tuned for part two of this lesson coming next. 31. Insert Your B roll Part 2: Now we have a problem. Because there's a clip underneath it that's showing up behind basically where the black bars were. So what we need to do in this case if you want to use a vertical photo with black bars behind it instead of the underlying video. Slightly more complicated. So what we should do here is we need to split the clip again. Option B here, go to the end option B. And then we need to right click the underlying clip, select Detach Audio. In other editing programs you would be able to disable or change the opacity of the clip, but movie doesn't seem to allow you to do that. So then making sure that the audio and the photo are the same length. I'm going to add the photo down here to the primary timeline and then move the audio to connect to the photo. Then delete the visual. At the now very sharp and stylish. They have low aggressive handle bars. Now I can use the vertical photo foll with black bars without any video. That shouldn't be there. But I actually prefer how it was originally. So let's hit command Z to undo. Now hit undo to go back to how I like it. Okay, so as you can see here, there's a little bit of space that shouldn't be there. So I'll stretch this to cover up the space higher in the rev range, so you have to rev them out to feel the max. Another type of media or role that you might work with is the transparent PNG, like this. One of the Honda RM that I found online. As you see here, the default Ken Burns thing that I movie is doing looks ridiculous on this right R M. So what we can do here is let's go, let's go to crop to fill. It still looks ridiculous even though it's not zooming in anymore. Then we go here. This is a special menu here on the tool bar that comes up only for the beer roll. This is the video overlay settings, where we can change the opacity of the cut away or we can change its size by going here. Let's go to picture And picture. This is how we can move a graphic around by default to make it clean. Movie makes it dissolve in. Okay. But as we notice here, the image is cropped. So let's go back here to crop. Let's make sure we have the entire bike in the frame, Then we go back here, Select picture in picture, we can leave dissolve on to make it clean. And now X RM, it's just a little bit too small. We can drag it to make it bigger and put it here in the space where it's most visible. Let's play that back. Dax RM. That looks good. Now we can fade it out there site and the Honda R. And it's that simple. Those are just different ways to deal with various clips. As you lay down your Broll. Just follow this process to lay down your Breall and soon you'll have a nearly completed video. So I'll finish laying all this roll down so that I have a final product to share with you at a different time. But for now I want to talk about some other things you need to look into. For example, it's common during this process of laying down B roll that you realize that you might be missing some B roll or that you want to add to or rephrase some of what you said in the Talking Heads. So this is where you can of course, look for or record additional roll and at the same time record additional voice over. If you have a mic that works with your computer, it would be most convenient to use that connected to your computer and then use the native voice over recorder of movie. By clicking here, this will allow you to talk over your clips. For example, here, let's disable my audio. Just for example, if I added these clips of B roll, I could simply hit record here. There's a countdown then, yada, yada, sport bikes and stuff. I forgot to say some stuff about sport bikes, yada, yada, yada. Using the video recorder makes it really easy to talk over exactly the visuals that you're going to put voice over on. So that's assuming you have a good mic that you can connect to your computer. Otherwise you can record to your camera with the mic you used for the talking heads or using the voice recorder in your phone, using a good mic. Then you can copy that file, tear computer, and import it to eye movie, and then drag it where it belongs. So for example, it would appear here as just an audio clip and you drag it down here underneath your new role. And that's it, it's pretty simple. So after your first passive laying down all your beer roll, you should go over your video multiple times to revise and polish it so that it's concise, clear, and to make sure that you use the best options for your supporting visuals. And then once you've got some headway in your edit, let's say you just finished laying down your talking heads or you just finished laying down your role, You should back up your movie library to avoid any potential heartache. So to do that, you need to find where your movie library is. It is usually here in the movie's folder. And it's this one, this icon. And basically you just copy this file to an external drive or automatically by using a time machine backup. All right, so by now you have a basic grasp of how to lay down B roll and how connected clips work. The difference between working with video clips and stills in movie. But feel free to step back in the video if anything was unclear. And of course, please don't hesitate to ask me questions in the discussions below if you need any clarification or if you're troubleshooting any technical issues. Editing really is a very technical process and it is absolutely normal to be stumped every now and then when you're trying to execute your vision using only the tools that you know for now. But hopefully you're able to use what you've learned in the next few hours or the next couple of days to successfully lay down all of your B roll. In the next lesson, we'll go quickly over adding titles and other enhancements to finish up your video. 32. Add Titles: In the previous lesson, we laid down our bureau and polished our edit a little bit. In this lesson, we'll add some titles to show or emphasize information and to share things like your social media links. A simple, clean title from the presets available here in movie with a good type face I think will serve best. So I want to add my first title here where I define what I mean by motorcycle displacement. So I'm going to choose just a standard lower third. And this is perfect for me because it has both a title and a subtitle. Unlike the other lower thirds like this one. Let's stretch it out over the entire clip. Let's add our term. Let's say it's displacement. Let's say here as you see, a nice feature here in movie is that it automatically changes the font size to fit into basically the template, so you don't have to worry about alignment and stuff like that. Let's play it back. The physical volume of this, as you can see, it also has an auto fade in and fade out or cylinders in its engine. Bigger usually means more mass and weight, but it also usually, when I start talking about different kinds of motorcycles, for example here, range from as low as what I can do. Actually, if I already have a good template, tap on the old title. Hit Command C, Go over here, hit command V, and then I can just change the text so I don't have to drag it from the browser all the time if I want to use the same format every time. Small bikes, and then let's put it until here at the end, range from as low as 50 CC up to about 10015 and usually 150 these small bikes. So again, I want to emphasize you want to keep it clean for the titles. It doesn't look good if you use something like this. Cheap, it make power in a print. It just looks a little bit childish. I'm sorry, just keep it tasteful. Basically, you get the idea and you can just add text where you think it's appropriate. Honestly, it's not really necessary, but I think it helps to keep your attention and increase comprehension overall when you're doing a video like this, that's informational. Other parts I would add, text obviously, is as I go through every category of motorcycle from here I copy, then I paste here, I'll say medium, small bikes. I'll say 200 to 300 plus CC now because it's so small. Actually, just the thing I'm running into here is that because we have this auto font, for some reason, this lower font got a little bigger than I wanted it to be, Whereas this is about the right size. In this case, I will just manually make the font smaller just to get the right look, et cetera, et cetera. When you watch the video, you'll get a better idea of the different kinds of information. I also want to see how you execute this on your own. If you use my footage to edit, I want to see how you interpret the use of text and how the video is organized. All right. You know how to lay down your titles. In the next lesson, we'll talk about how to enhance your audio and video using movies built in tools. 33. Enhance Your Video and Audio: Another thing we can do now is to enhance our video a bit by working a little bit on the colors. Our talking head already looks good. Let's say if we go up here, you see this magic wand. This is like an auto color or auto, auto improvement basically. And if we see what it does, it brightens up our video and contrast a little bit. I mean, this is okay, but it's not really necessary. But it's good too if you want to see where your video is at in terms of is it a good standard exposure and color in this magic wand, we'll give you an idea of how close you are to that. But in my case, I actually like how it looks already, even if it's slightly slightly underexposed. But when we look at our barrel, for example, because they come from lots of different sources, they don't look very consistent. And there are some that look a bit more washed out than I'd like, such as this shot. For this shot for example, we can go here, let's see what it looks like if we just do auto evens out the white balance. That's okay. That's one tool you can use. We can try to match color to another clip that I like. Maybe this clip since it's very vibrant. Let's see how that goes. Not too bad. It's a little bit of an improvement as well. But let's see what else we can do now if we work on it manually. What I would do is pull this back, pull this down. This controls your shadows. I can pull down my shadows a little bit. Red, I think means we're crushing the blacks too much. Then highlights. Not too much, just a tap. The rest are the intermediate mid tones. You can individually tweak the mid tones, as you see here is just like three different controls for the mid tones to tweak it to your liking. Now, a normal beginner mistake would be going overboard. Like I said, like you put your contrast way up here, it just looks super weird. The video falls apart and then it gets too warm and then it gets too bright. Don't do this. Okay. Again, subtle changes would be best. Hit reset, then, oops, I reset everything, including the audio. Again, let's do it. Remove the audio. Bring down maybe not the blacks, just the lower mid tones a little bit. Give it a tiny bump of saturation. That's going to be subtle, but a bit of an improvement. Maybe I need to brighten it up a little bit as well. You get the idea. Just tweak settings and learn the language of the different tools. Okay, this clip is another good example to work on because it was shot at dusk. I think it lacks a little bit of pop here. I can work on the color temperature, make it just not this warm. It took to, you're like a Hollywood in some foreign country look just a little bit of extra warmth to neutralize that color. Make that T shirt match how it looks here. Right now, a little bit, Maybe just a tiny bump of saturation. Bump up the high lights, not oh, that's way too much. Even this is already way too much. Because you can see here that my T shirt is just becoming pure white. So let's bring that down just a tiny bit. And then, same thing with our shadows on the other end. Bring it up, bring it down a little bit. The one way we can compare is by looking at this is our edited clip. And then go looking at the raw clip on the browser, which is the decent change. We just made it a little bit warmer and less blue and sad. We added just that little bit of contrast that was missing. Apart from that, we can also work a little bit on the audio. Let's look at the different audio tools. Let's go here to click on audio. Usually your audio levels will be a little bit low. Whichever way if we hit auto then did you notice? I'll do it one more time. Do watch the waveforms. If I hit auto, then it just brings it back up without clipping it, without making it too loud. And so this is an easy way to ensure that your dialogue levels are where they should be. Real nice tool in movie. If you know a little bit about audio two, you can use the equalizer and kind of play around with it. There's like voice enhance music enhance bass boost. This isn't really necessary, but again, it's another thing you can play with if you want. And again, I would really use this reduced backup noise because the quality of the noise reduction in these programs isn't that good. And that's it. In this lesson, you learned how to play titles, how to automatically and manually color, correct your video, and how to tweak your audio for the best results in movie. And that is it for day six. By now, you should know everything you need to know to be able to put together polish and almost finish your video with that already. I want to say congratulations, You are so close to the finish. And if you've made it this far, and especially if you followed along doing your work along the way alongside me, then I salute you. That's a big accomplishment and you should be proud of yourself. Next up, finally it's the last day, day seven. It's time to finish and publish your video. I'll see you there. 34. Day 7 Finish and Upload Your Video: Hello and welcome to day seven. This is it, the final stretch. And in just a few short lessons, you have a finished video ready to share with the world. In the first lesson on day seven, we'll go over finishing your video by putting music and then exporting it. And then I'll show you how to create a title, a thumbnail, and then how I upload and publish the Youtube and share it with the world. So ready to cross the finish line together? Let's go. 35. Finish Your Video: In the previous lessons, we finished our cut by laying down or Talking Heads and roll and polishing the video. Now it's time to finish by putting music and exporting it to a format that we can upload to Youtube. So I've got my finished video here and we need to find some appropriate music. Honestly, for unexplainer like this, no music is better than bad or inappropriate music. So to be honest, this step is optional. But good music can also help make a video more engaging. So it's worth trying out. Now, if you want to find completely free music with absolutely no copyright issues, Youtube actually provides it. You can just go to your Youtube studio log into your Youtube account if you already have one or create one. Now if you need to, and then just go to the sidebar, click on audio library. And then here you've got a bunch of tracks that you can try and listen to. You can search using these different categories. You can sort by title, artist, or duration. And then once you've listened to some, I suggest you download the ones you like pass or at least star them to make them easy to go back to on this list. And then if you want to download the track, you just go over here to the right and hit download. You can also try searching Youtube or Google for copyright free music, as there are some more available out there that might be right for you. Now for higher quality music, it may be a good idea to subscribe to any one of a number of quality, affordable, subscription based, royalty free music sites such as Epidemic, Sound Audio, the music bed and art list dot O. At more. Basically, for the price of one subscription, you get unlimited access to music for Youtube use. And some websites like audio even offer commercial use at no extra cost. In any case, for a video essay like mine, I'll usually want something upbeat but not intrusive. And definitely not anything with lyrics. Never use music with lyrics unless you're doing some kind of montage where no one is talking and it's perfect for the mood. Now I can take a page out of Youtuber Johnny Harris book by looking for something under the Beats genre in whatever service I'm using. These are good tracks for more cerebral videos like mine that don't need any drama. So I already have a music track here, well, this one, so very chill kind of low fi, just a nice relaxed background. So let me plop it down here in my video. And then always make sure to lower the volume so that it doesn't overpower the track. I would lower it more than say the automatic options would do. So let's have a listen professional filmmaker who travels around on my motorcycle. Today I want to talk about everything you need to know to figure out how to buy your first motorcycle. And so for this kind of thing, again because I don't need several moods, I can just basically loop it by doing command C and then pasting it at the end. And the good thing about these kind of more low key pieces of music is that it's much less noticeable when they loop. So I'll make sure to have it start again around where the previous track fades. And then have a listen instead of foot pegs, and they're super practical and cute. The most famous examples of scooters are the iconic Vespa. Yeah, it's pretty subtle. I'm not sure if you can hear it, but that's the whole point. It shouldn't be very noticeable at this point. I also need to echo Johnny Harris tip of not using undeserved music with your video meaning. Don't use music with more drama and emotion than what you're showing on camera because it just sounds weird. Just listen and compare this. So now let's try plopping down this more cinematic piece of music and listen what happens. I'll have it also a little louder, so you notice the difference of what an inappropriate mood does to a video. Listen to this 200-400 CC. This is kind of the awkward middle between small bikes and big bikes. There's less choice here, but you generally get more power but still at a small beginner, friendly size of motorcycle. Weird, right? So just avoid doing that. When in doubt, use more low key music or like upbeat music that doesn't have too many like sharp sounds that will intrude in your dialogue or just no music at all. So one more thing is you see here now I have my original track again, I looped it three times at the end of the video. You can make sure to see this, drag this handle to make it fade out smoothly. So let's have a listen next. This has been Aron Palaba. Take care and ride safe. So this is important too. If you're using kind of louder, more dramatic pieces of music where it would feel weird to just suddenly cut them at the end. You can use this fade and extend it for as long as you need to. But if you have a longer video that has distinct moods, then it's a good idea to use more than one piece of music to note the changing moods or segments of your video. Or even to have breaks of silence between pieces of music, because a single piece of music can get monotonous, which is why it is a good idea if you're going to loop your music to use an unobtrusive sounding track that doesn't call attention to itself. And finally, with the music laid down, your video is done and it's finally time to export it to a file that you can upload to Youtube. So this is how to do it. Go to file share. And don't pick social platforms because this is too low resolution and you go to file. All right, then you can call this how to pick your first motorcycle, Youtube. Then description doesn't really matter. I can just delete that tags. I'll just put my name. Whatever format, video and audio resolution. The full resolution, which is ten ATP quality high is good enough. Let's not use Pros. It'll take up too much space. Then let's pick Better quality, since we're not in a hurry. Then we click next. Choose where to save it on our hard drive. I'll save it in the movies folder right now, because that's where my movie library is. And then I'll just click Save. Then if you want to monitor the progress, you see the circle up here. You click that. Then just see that little pie start to fill up. All right, so we'll wait for this to finish and we'll skip ahead to when it's done and there is our beautiful exported video. We can use Space part to preview. Hi everyone, my name. Skim through it, make sure everything is there. If you have the time, it's usually a good habit to open your video and watch the whole thing to make sure there weren't any mistakes. Now if you want to see this finished product so you can compare it with your own edit of my sample footage, then you can check out the link to the finished video in the class resources to compare your work with mine. But I don't suggest you do this until you try to have a crack at it yourself to do from start to finish with all the barrel, the music, et cetera. I suggest, I highly recommend that you give yourself that chance to be the one to figure out how it should all be put together. And that's it. In this lesson, we finished our video in movie by adding music and exporting our video. In the next lessons, we'll create the title and then the thumbnail, and then upload it to Youtube. 36. Title Your Video: In the previous lesson, we basically finished our video, but to make sure that this video has the best chance of being seen. In the next two lessons, we learn how to create a great title and thumbnail for our video. Creating a compelling title and thumbnail are super important to give your video the best chance of being seen. We want to entice viewers curiosity without resorting to click bait. I mean, clickbait can work for sure, but in the long term, it will leave a bad taste in your viewers mouths and will lower their trust in you. The opposite of what you want to have a successful Youtube channel. In the case of both your title and your thumbnail, you don't just want to tell the viewer what is in your video, but you want to convey, at least imply, why they should watch your video. Try to think of the most interesting element of your video, at least to a certain target audience. And then think of a title and thumbnail that will emphasize that for the title, try to keep it under 60 characters with the most important keywords upfront. For example, don't think saying just like top ten productivity tips when you can say something like beat procrastination With these ten productivity tips implying the importance of that. Or maybe even something a little bit click baity, like this mindset shift will transform your productivity to kind of entice a little bit more curiosity. Just if you're going to have a title like that, be darn sure that you're going to deliver on that value or else your viewer is just going to get really annoyed. Okay, so what I have here is just a note I use, no shun, but you can literally use anything, even a piece of paper. And a good practice for writing titles is keeping the things I've just taught you in mind about how to make a good title, write at least five to ten different titles. So this is just kind of a classic brainstorming process where you just really dump everything that you can think of that might make a good title, and then you can compare afterwards. And then you can even get feedback from others to figure out which title would get them to click the most. So don't just go with kind of the first title you thought of and then call it a day. So put in the work to think of several titles and maybe even your final title will be a combination of the ideas from several of your titles. So as you can see here, I have a bunch of options, but they're all kind of really basic because, well, the premise of my video is quite basic. I think it kind of sells itself if you're the target audience. And just a few comments. This last one, the secret to choosing the perfect motorcycle for beginners, I think that definitely wins in enticing curiosity. And it definitely is click bait because in my video, I don't give any particular secret to picking a motorcycle. So it's a risk on my part. If I use this title, I'll definitely get more people to click on it. But I don't actually tell them any secret to choosing the perfect motorcycle. So these are the kinds of things you need to balance, because without a curiosity inducing title, you also have a hard time getting people to view it. So I think of these as you can see, there's kind of varying levels of them being curiosity inducing. I think the one that really reflects best what's inside the video is like between numbers 7.9 So I'm going to think about these and go for one of these when I finally post my video. Now honestly, these are a little bit plain when it comes to titles, but I think my video has a very, very clear value proposition. And if I overpromise on that, I really think it's not worth it. I will end up just having viewers annoyed at me. Instead of just promising what I have, which I think is already a lot and high value for somebody who's looking for this information. And that's it. Some quick tips on how to think of a good title for your video. So if you already have your video, or even maybe if you only have your script, your concept, take the time. Now, write down five to ten titles, keeping these concepts in mind and then compare them. Afterwards, even try to see what people think and gradually you'll hone your sense for creating great Youtube titles. And that's about it. We've got our title more or less. In the next lesson, we'll pair that with a good thumbnail. 37. Create Your Thumbnail: In the previous lesson, we nailed down the title for our Youtube video. In this lesson, we'll work on one of the most important aspects of getting noticed on Youtube. Your thumbnail. Honestly, like the title, there obviously aren't any hard and fast rules here. But let me put it this way. You want a viewer to know what your video is about without even glancing at your title. It's easier to absorb all the info from a thumbnail with a short glance than reading a title. You know that old saying about a picture being worth 1,000 words. So you can convey a ton of info and subtle hints of what your video is about, even its mood and tone using your thumbnail. Definitely don't take this for granted. It's probably even more important than your title and maybe more than anything will get people to click or not on your video. To begin with, I might use no shun or again, any notepad to verbally sketch out ideas for my thumbnail. And maybe give me a rough guide to play with. And it'll help guide me to figure out what are the right images and elements that I need for the thumbnail. But this is totally optional, especially if you're more of a visual thinker. Now let's open up my thumbnail so that you can go through how I think about attention grabbing thumbnails. So just like with clickbait titles, there are lots of cheap tricks to thumbnails. Like, you know, say, take this image and you'll have an arrow pointing at some indistinguishable object. You know, with text saying unbelievable or can't believe I missed this. And honestly, that stuff works. But again, me, you know, just for integrity's sake, I can't stand doing that. I prefer to stick to the fundamentals that I'll talk to you about, which is first of course, use high quality images. You can use a relevant screen, grab from your video, one of the most common approaches, or you can just take a nice photo related to your topic. In this case, I went kind of more of an in between approach. Which is a photo taken using the same set up from my talking heads, but obviously not from my video. And it's composed in such a way that I can build on it with additional elements. Avoid using a nice photo that doesn't have anything to do with what you're going to show in your video, because people will expect to see what was in that thumbnail image again. Ideally, if you're going to use something like this, you have shot it during your shoot in order to maximize your set up. Another thing to pay attention to is pick an image, of course, that leaves room to put text cleanly without obscuring any important detail in your image, like your face or the product you're featuring. In this case, it is a clean composition, but it's kind of a busy frame. So we're going to need to use Photoshop to clean it up later. And then as you can see here, I've applied one of the oldest thumbnail tips in the book. And the reason why every other Youtuber is doing this in their thumbnails, that is put faces. In this case, it's probably going to be your own face. Faces don't just draw attention. Again, we're human, we're drawn to faces. But also your facial expression can be powerful tool to entice curiosity. Because it can convey a lot of subtle information on how it's used in conjunction with your background image, the text, and your video title. In fact, many channels like Revzilla for their Daily Rider Motorcycle Review series, their host Zach always uses some kind of really ambiguous facial expression that just keeps you guessing about what he really thinks about the motorcycle. And it really works in enticing that curiosity. Another thing to consider is to enhance colors in contrast to make your thumbnail pop. Maybe it looked fine when it was a moving video, But for a still image, it might need a bit of a bump of contrast. You know, more bold and bright colors and contrast when relevant. And also avoid relying on Youtube colors red and white so as not to blend with the interface. Let me show you how I built out my thumbnail here. So I have my base image here. And then I used AI in Photoshop to erase the print on my shirt so that we have a nice blank canvas. And then again, I used Photoshops AI to erase the background so that I have a nice very bright attention catching, but still pleasant background. And in terms of the facial expression, I didn't choose to go with something ambiguous. Again, honestly, on Youtube, if you have a negative facial expression, that will probably, that will probably attract more views. But again, it's not my style. I want to be really honest and I think my channel has kind of a really pleasant personable mood and tone. So I just have a nice natural welcoming smile for my facial expression. And now basically, I have a nice canvas for adding other elements. Speaking of, the next important element we can add is text. So here I have just basically what my video is all about. My video is very, very clear about its value proposition and its target audience. So I don't think it has to try too hard with the text, but of course, you know, so many videos have click paty examples of text like, I never knew this or I can't believe this. Again, with those arrows pointed wherever, again, please avoid doing that unless you really, really deliver on that promise. Of course, you should use legible fonts and colors in contrast with your background, as you see here, which is why I erased the shirt. Because if I hadn't erased the shirt, it wouldn't be very readable. And remember, don't make the text too small because these will be displayed super small on mobile devices, which is actually why I'm editing this small and not on full screen on a mobile device. The thumbnail can be as small as that, which is why I'm using such a huge bold font. Another small tip. Avoid putting anything here in the lower right hand corner because that's where the running time will be displayed once it's on Youtube. All right, and then just rounding out my thumbnail, I took a bunch of little motorcycle graphics from the Internet, mask them and Ta. Again, I think my thumbnail is nice and attention catching. It looks very pleasant and welcoming. And it could not be clearer what my video is about. And this style, I think is very appropriate for how straightforward my video is and also for my style, my personal brand as a creator, I think it fits. I understand that not everybody has Photoshop, so if you don't have Photoshop, I suggest you try using Canva. It's free, There's lots of great templates there for making thumbnails, and it also has a lot of these powerful AI features for cutting out your background and lots of different elements that you can use. I have another bit of homework for you. Go to your Youtube home page or subscriptions, and take a look at the thumbnails of the videos being recommended to you. What about them makes you want to click? Or maybe not to click? What do they have in common, or what do they do differently, was still remaining effective in making you want to click. Thinking about this will help you figure out ways to make thumbnails that are appropriate for your content and your personal brand. And that's it. In this lesson, you learn how to create a good Youtube thumbnail. In the next lesson, our final lesson, we're going to open Youtube studio and get our video ready to publish. I'll see you there. One last lesson. 38. Upload and Publish Your Video: Welcome to the final lesson of the course. In the previous lesson, you learned how to create a good thumbnail. In this lesson, we'll learn the basics of using Youtube studio to upload your video. I suggest you do this from the desktop and not from the mobile app to be able to access all the features and to have more room to easily edit your text. You can click on your face and then select Youtube Studio here. Or you can simply type studio.youtube.com on your browsers address bar. So if this is your first time opening Youtube studio, it's a great user friendly app with tons of ways to optimize your video and your entire channel. It's worth spending time learning all its various tools. But for now, all we need to do is focus on just properly uploading our video. Click here, Upload Video. Then you can select your files here or simply drag and drop, which is what I'll do. Then while we're waiting for it to upload, we can already work on optimizing the video here. We can type our title, or we can copy and paste it from Notion and paste that. Next up the video description. To be honest, this isn't super important. But it's helpful to the viewer to put a short summary of your video. Say of course, this is also where you would put links to more information or to your other videos or to other people's videos that you mentioned. You can also put links to support you on sites like Patrion or Merch sites later on and of course, affiliate links to make a bit of extra cash, et cetera, et cetera. There's almost no limit to what you can put in the description. But for your viewer, the most helpful thing to put in your video description would definitely be video chapters, especially if your video is over 5 minutes long. These will help with viewer engagement, so people know what info they're getting and where to find it immediately to put chapter is actually all you have to do. It's a type in the time code. For example, 00 is your intro. Then I'm just going to put this here. I don't remember the exact time code. Let's say 230 is motorcycles by displacement, then 340 would be motorcycles by body type. There you get the idea, we can upload our thumbnail. Make sure that whatever format you created your thumbnail on, you exported it as a Jpeg. And we can upload our thumbnail. Here, I'll go to where I created my thumbnail. Upload my thumbnail, and there it is. Looks great. I think if I do say so myself, then if you already have a bunch of videos, you can add it to a playlist. In my case, I would add it to my right. Xp Moto logs playlist, my logs playlist, my reviews playlist. Then generally you should put it's not made for kids unless it's especially made for kids because if it's made for kids it has additional restrictions for Youtube age restriction. We can leave that show more if it's a sponsored video, you should definitely check this to stay within Youtube's guidelines. You can leave this checked up to you if you want to leave these checked, it's not really a big effect. And now tags, you should think of tags as what might people put in the Youtube or Google search bar to find the information I'm sharing? So put the most important keywords first. It may be a few general ones At the end, they say it's generally better to have your first keywords as your title. I don't know if that still holds true, but let's put it here anyway, how to pick a motorcycle for beginners, different things like that. Then maybe later I'd put stuff like my name, the name of my riding playlist and you get the picture. Avoid putting keywords that are just going to be there because you think you'll get more search results. The Youtube algorithm is way smarter than you think it is, and putting these might even hurt your search visibility. Okay, moving on, I generally leave these as is. And then it's up to you if you want to allow people to remix. And then this one I'll change it to autos and vehicles, although it doesn't really matter that much. Then I have my comet moderation to strict. That's just how I like it. You can hide how many viewers like the video that might help you or it might not. We'll go to the next tab. You probably won't have this yet because you're just starting out. Of course, I turn mine on and later on I can decide where to put my mid roll ads. I try not to put too many. This is where you report on if you have anything that might be of concern to an advertiser. I don't have any. So I'll say none of the above. Submit rating video elements. So here's where you can add subtitles, you can add an end screen. So if you already have other videos, adding an end screen is a great way to help viewers, binchwatch your content. So let's see if I just import them from my latest video. I don't want to put them over my face, so I'd have them here. And this little circle is just so that they can hover over that and subscribe this to start a little early. So I want this to start so much for around the time that my Altro starts. So yeah, I can just have these here stagger the appearance for watching. Please let me know if you have any questions in the comments. Yeah, so I have one set to best reviewer and the other set to a video that I want people to watch. People binge watching your videos through whatever way, whether they're recommended or they do it through your end screen is one of the biggest ways to gain authority in the Youtube algorithm. Everything is fine, no copyright issues because I have a license for the music. And then finally we are here. I want to leave it on unlisted and then save if you edited my sample video. Do not make this video public. Okay, just leave it on unlisted, copy the link, and then paste it into the class projects so that I can check your work. So what I then do is I open the video page by clicking here. So what I do now is a last check to make sure everything is okay. If I have time, I'm paranoid. I'll watch the entire video again. I'll leave a little like, so that you know, it's just not so lonely. And a good practice is to leave a pin comment for engagement. Something like, just for purposes of illustration, I won't put a link. And then I'll click here and then pin the comment. So the Pin comment can be anything you want it to be. It's usually some form of engagement or a message from you so that people scrolling down to the comments immediately have something to read from you. Once I've checked this, everything is in order, then I can go over to visibility. But once you hit public, and then you hit Save up here, boom. You published your first Youtube video. Whether you did it in seven days or seven months, you deserve to celebrate that. Because that was no small feat. And definitely don't forget to share it in the class project so that you can get thoughtful, constructive feedback from me. And yes, this includes even if you used my sample footage, because I'd like to see how you were able to apply what you learned and help you troubleshoot any issues that you may have encountered. Whew all right. I can't believe it. We're done in the next and final lesson. I have some parting words for you as you continue on your Youtube journey. 39. Parting Words: Congratulations, you've just made your first Youtube video or you're well on your way to. This is a big step And whatever direction you decide to take on your Youtube journey in the future, you can look back at this time. That you broke through resistance and made this contribution to the world and to yourself. And I want you to know that I am grateful to have been part of your journey. And I do hope that you'll take the time to create your class project and share it with me for my feedback whether you shot your own footage or you used my sample footage. And I also hope that this won't be the last Youtube video or any kind of video that you make. You'll grow and evolve in ability and style. The more you do this, as you go through your Youtube journey and you start to get comments from your audience, you should accept their feedback with an open and humble mind. After all, being on Youtube isn't just about making art for yourself, it's about making content for an audience. So listen to what they have to say. You don't have to believe everything, but you should adapt your insights from them to your advantage. And by the way, if you enjoy this course, could you do me a little favor and leave a good review? Because it really helps not just me, but also your fellow students who are looking for a good instruction. Of course, honest feedback is welcome as well to help me improve and make better courses in the future. Of course, don't forget to follow here on skill share for updates and more courses. And please feel free to get in touch with me on my social media listed on screen now. Now if you want to dive deeper into becoming a content creator or filmmaker, you can also check out my other two courses here on skill share. With that, I want to thank you sincerely from the bottom of my heart for investing your time and energy with me. I can't wait to see what you create again. I'm Aron Papa and until the next time. Peace.