YouTube for Beginners - How to Start & Grow Your YouTube Channel

1. Welcome to the Class: Getting started on YouTube is actually pretty hard. You've got to be comfortable putting yourself out there. You've got to actually be able to speak to a camera. You've got to understand how cameras work, how editing works, how to do titles and thumbnails, and how to actually figure out what the **** to make video is about. But to be honest, you can learn the basics of that in under four hours, and that's what we're going to be doing in this class. Hey, friends. How is it going? My name is Ali, and in this class I'm super excited to share with you exactly what you need as a beginner to YouTube to get started with growing your channel. I started my channel way back in 2017, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing at the time. It would be really cool to start vlogging. I just made videos about the stuff I enjoyed, and I learned a lot along the way through lots of trial and error. Like with any other channel, things started off slowly for a year or two, but after consistently publishing around two videos a week, by my third year on YouTube, I was making $3,700 a month just from YouTube ad revenue. By my fourth year, that grew to $16,000 a month from YouTube AdSense, and I ended up making about 10 times as much money on YouTube, as I was in my day job working as a doctor. Five years and hundreds of videos later, I've grown so much more comfortable making YouTube videos. The channel has grown to over 2.7 million subscribers. In 2021, we did $4.3 million in revenue across the whole business. Now, if you're just getting started with YouTube, those numbers are going to seem absolutely ridiculous, but I'm only flexing them to make the point that even the YouTubers you know who have millions of subscribers, and millions of dollars in revenue, they all started from zero just like you. In this class, I'm going to teach you everything you need to know as a YouTube beginner to get started with kick-starting and growing your channel. We're going to cover absolutely tons of stuff, including how to figure out what the **** to actually make videos about, and how to get over the fear of getting started for the first time. We're going to talk about the difference between filming on your phone, versus a $500 camera, versus a $1,500 camera, versus a $5,000 camera setup. We're going to talk about all the different audio options. Should you record with a built-in mic? Should you use a lavalier? Or should you use a shotgun mic? All these options. We're going to talk about lighting, and what lighting options you really need as a beginner. Hopefully, by the end of the course, you will know what type of content you actually want to make on your channel. The way I'm going to teach you all this stuff is in a very step-by-step fashion as we make a new YouTube channel from scratch, and do everything like figuring out what to make content about, how to actually set up the channel, how to make the channel branding and cover art, and stuff look really good without paying a penny. We're going to talk about how to plan, script, and film your first video using just your phone, how to edit it efficiently and upload it to YouTube with a decent title and thumbnail, and how to sustainably grow your channel while hopefully having fun along the way. If any of that sounds up your strain, I'd love for you to dive into the class, and I'll see you on the other side. 2. Class Project: Welcome to the class. Thank you so much for diving in, in this little lesson I'm going to tell you about the class project. That one is pretty simple. By the end of the class, I want you to have made your YouTube channel, sorted out the channel cover art and profile photo, and uploaded your very first video, filmed just with a phone. If you don't have any camera, that's totally fine, you can film it with your phone. The video that I'm going to make throughout this class, step-by-step is just filmed with my phone. I'm not going to edit it and upload it to YouTube with some title and thumbnail. Then if you post that in the class projects section, then that'll be cool and you'll be able to give other people feedback. I'll be having a look and checking out people's channels. If I like the vibe of some of them, I might even hit the subscribe button. I hope you enjoy the class all the best. Really the main thing I want to emphasize is that it is important that we actually do this thing because it's all well and good, learning the theory about being a YouTuber. But until you've made your channel and uploaded that first video, none of it really matters. Hopefully, we can do that by the end of the class. Thank you so much, and I hope you enjoy the journey. 3. Why Start a YouTube Channel?: Welcome to the course. I'm very excited to dive right the way in. In this lesson, we're talking about why should you start a YouTube channel at all. To be honest, if you're watching this class about how to start a YouTube channel, you're probably sold on it already. But I think really, there's two things to keep in mind around why you should start a YouTube channel. The most important one is that it is a good thing to do anyway regardless of how well it does. Because most of the benefits you get from a YouTube channel, are internal personal growth type benefits. Then of course there is the other category of benefits that everyone knows about that you can get if the YouTube channel actually goes well. What are those internal personal growth benefits of having a YouTube channel? Well, firstly, it's a great excuse to do things that you enjoy and to share them with other people. That is just a fundamental part of the human experience. If you have a hobby and you want to talk about it, or if you have something to teach and you want to teach it, even in a way it doesn't really matter how many views you get on your videos, you've already going to get more than one view, therefore your video is helping someone in the world out there. That's just a nice feeling to be able to share that stuff with people. Secondly, having a YouTube channel actually does help you learn a lot more about your interests. When I first started YouTube and I was making videos of helping people get into med school, I was quite interested in the topic. Similarly, when I moved forward to helping people study for their exams, the fact that I was making videos about it, encouraged me to learn so much more about it. This is a fundamental part of what makes stuff intrinsically motivating i.e. what makes things fun, is that when we can teach things to other people, it helps us improve our own skills at the thing because now we're not just improving it for ourselves, we're also improving it to share with other people. You generally find that people who are the best in the field end up mentoring or teaching others because they're like that. This is great because I get to learn more about the thing itself. Thirdly, obviously, having a YouTube channel teaches you a ton of really useful practical skills. I was having a conversation with a 17-year-old the other day who was trying to figure out what to do with their life and wondering, I've got the summer holidays coming up, should I start a YouTube channel? I was saying honestly, there is no better way to learn a bunch of skills which are unlikely to pick up at university, just off the bat, things like talking to a camera or public speaking, filming, learning how cameras work, editing, presentation, design. All of these things are increasingly becoming more and more useful as the world shifts to remote, as the world shifts to this more like multimedia landscape. Being a good YouTuber requires the ability to write, the ability to communicate ideas clearly. There's so many personal benefits you get by learning those skills and improving those skills over time, which are very unlikely to pick up unless you sit down and do a university course in videography. Even then, I know people who've done three-year degrees in videography and the stuff that you learn through being a YouTuber and picking it up on the job as it were, is so much more useful for a lot of areas in life than learning all the ins and outs of like three-point lighting setups and things or the teacher at university. Fourthly, having a YouTube channel is really good because it helps you build alternative CV or alternative resume or alternative portfolio. Now, we've hired about 18 people for my team right now, and a handful of them have had YouTube channels which haven't been particularly big, a few 100 subscribers, a few dozen of subscribers, whatever, but the fact that they've had YouTube channels means that as an employer looking to hire these people, I can immediately see what they're about. I can see what the vibe is. I can see that this person has actually gone through the effort of picking up videography and editing and lighting and cameras and knows a bunch about these other skills which are very useful to almost any business. To be honest, even when I was working as a doctor, there were a bunch of benefits I had to my medical career because of the fact that I had this background in design and that I knew how to make videos and stuff look pretty because when I would go to medical conferences, people would always need some video. When the pandemic struck and all these conferences moved remote, all of the people in my hospital were like, who do we know who does video? Ali Abdullah does video. Let's ask him to figure out how we can film our little presentation so we can submit it remotely to this video conference and potentially get CV points for that. Overall, even if your YouTube channel doesn't do particularly well by the metrics, which is fine, you still get the benefit of having those skills and also having a CV booted up by the fact that you've got this thing. Point number five, a YouTube channel acts as a serendipity vehicle. Now the idea here is basically, if you imagine yourself living in a little village and the only people you interact with are the people in your village and you don't talk to anyone else, then it's very hard for you to experience lucky breaks because your world is confined to this one little village. Maybe when someone visits the village, then you're like, maybe talk to them and then it's like, you've got a little bit of potential lucky breaks. Maybe your future spouse just happens to visit the village. That is one way of approaching life. The other way of approaching life is, let's imagine you are in this village, but every weekend you go out to neighboring towns and cities and neighboring villages, and you talk to everyone you meet, and you have interesting conversations. Now let's say you go to a different village and you meet someone who becomes your business partner, or you meet someone who becomes an investor, or you meet someone who gives you a job, or you meet someone who end up marrying. Yes, those are all lucky breaks, but the fact that you're the one putting yourself out there meant that you can increase your surface area for serendipity, i.e. more of those lucky breaks are more likely to happen to you. Again, it's not guaranteed, but you're just increasing the surface area. It's just far more likely that you're going to have one of these interesting things happen to you by virtue of the fact that you've been putting yourself out there. Now, starting a YouTube channel or having an online presence in any capacity where you're sharing things that are useful to other people, act as a serendipity vehicle. What that means is that, like for me, I can make a video and it can reach however many people, 10 people, 100 people, 1000 people, and of those people, now they're interacting with my stuff and my ideas and my vibe. Maybe one of those 100 people that's watching my niche videos reviewing a [inaudible] desk chair, maybe one of those people is an employer looking to hire someone for the next job, and they think this guy on YouTube is making interesting content about this thing I like his vibe. Let me invite him over for an interview and I might end up landing a job with this guy. But the really cool thing about the YouTube channel is that you do the work once in putting a video out there, and then it acts like your little minion going out there and working for you even while you're asleep because other people are watching these videos and interacting with them and then you can get a lot of lucky breaks coming your way. In fact, all of the YouTubers I know, they've had so many opportunities in their life come through the fact that they have a YouTube channel, which they've put effort into consistently overtime, wrote it to a size, where now they're benefiting from the serendipity that comes as a natural side effect of putting yourself out there. Point number six about having a YouTube channel is that it helps you make friends. About a third to a half my friends these days, the ones that I see on a daily basis or weekly basis, are friends I've made through the Internet, through Twitter, through YouTube, through being a creator, through being an entrepreneur, and it's just great because as you get into this network of YouTubers, you start then being friends with other YouTubers and other entrepreneurs and other people on Twitter. As you take all this stuff more seriously, you then just unlock this ability to make cool friends from around the world who are interested in your thing. Thanks to my YouTube channel and Twitter and Instagram and stuff, I now have people that I would consider friends in most countries in the world, most cities in the world, and so if I want to visit somewhere, all I have to do is just message a few people. I'll be like, hey, what are you doing? Can I stay over at your place in Austin or can I stay over at your place in San Francisco? Or wherever. It's not really just the friends that you make who are also other creators, there's also this para-social relationship that forms with the audience. Again, if I was visiting a random, I'm going to Paris next weekend, all I have to do is post on my Instagram story. I'd be like, Hey, I'm in Paris. Anyone want to hang out? I did that in Monaco a few months ago. I was in Monaco, some guy messages being like, "Oh my God, I'm a university student. I literally live half an hour away from where you are. I would love to show you around the city." We connected with him and he showed us around the city, and that was pretty cool. Our final benefit of starting a YouTube channel, there's loads more, but this is the final one we're going to talk about is the potential to make some money. Obviously, when you're starting out on YouTube, you're not really going to make any money. You need 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time to monetize through AdSense. But there are all different ways of monetizing a YouTube channel, which we're not going to go into. But the really cool thing about YouTube is that you actually can make some significant money. I first started making money about nine months into starting my YouTube channel. I think I'd made about 90 videos to that point, 90, and then I started making some money. Then I remember the day when I made like $5 in a day and I was like, oh my God, like this means I can basically get a free lunch every day, if my YouTube channel is making $5 a day. Then it was when it was making $15 a day. I was like, Oh my god, $15 a day. I can basically get a lunch and a dinner takeaway for $15 a day and it's all paid for via my YouTube channel. Then as is the case with all these things then the numbers compound overtime through consistency and through marginal improvements over a long period of time to the point where now, just through AdSense alone, the YouTube channel is making about 50,000 pounds, which is about $70,000 every month, just purely of the fact that I make these free videos, stick them online and people watch them and YouTube ads pay 50K a month. Now, this is the point that we're going to return to throughout this course. It's not good to start a YouTube channel thinking, Oh my God, I need to be hitting 2.5 million subscribers and making 50K a month. That's pretty unlikely to happen. The thing we want to focus on is actually enjoying the process so that we can sustain it through that initial one to two to three-year period while we don't have much traction. Like with me, for example, it took six months and 52 videos to get my first 1,000 subscribers, and my channel wasn't even monetized until I've already made in 90 videos. I know so many people who start YouTube, who's over there like, "Oh, I've made 10 videos and I'm not getting any growth." I'm like bro, you've made 10 videos, of course, you're not getting any growth. This stuff takes time and what it takes is compounding effect over a very long period of time where you were making marginal improvements and making videos that are useful to other people. But hey, it's good because we're at the start of the journey, and this class is all about YouTube for beginners, I'm going to teach you everything you need to know to get started on that journey. Then further down the line, there are all other resources and stuff that you'll pick up along the way on this path to growth, consistency, and having fun along the way. Yeah, that's why you should start a YouTube channel. To be honest, I would hope you're already sold on it already if you're watching this course. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next lesson. 4. What to Make Videos About : Welcome back. Let's talk about the age-old question of what the hell do we want to make videos about? This is one of the biggest things that stops people from starting YouTube. They think, well, I don't know what I would make videos about, therefore, I'm not going to make videos about anything at all. I can completely empathize with this point of view. If you don't have a good idea of what you're actually going to make videos about, it's very difficult to actually a, convince yourself to start a YouTube channel because it's a good idea, making videos about random stuff. Because then you might be thinking, why would anyone care? I don't want to be one of those influence of logotypes people that shows myself brushing my teeth. No one's going to care if I brush my teeth, and you're right, no one will give a toss if you brush your teeth, but this does not have to be the thing that stops us from starting a YouTube channel. The way I like to think about it is that there are broadly two approaches to starting a YouTube channel around this question of what the hell do I make videos about. We call them the architect and the archaeologist. Now, what is the difference between these two? Well, I'm glad you asked. The architect. An architect is a person who has all the plans before they get started. They don't lay a single brick, they don't buy any cement until they know exactly what the house is going to look like and have all of the details of the building completely sorted in their minds and on paper, and only then do they then figure out, okay, now let's lay the brick. That's one way to approach YouTube. It is also the wrong way to approach YouTube for about 99 percent of people. Most people should not be an architect in their approach to their YouTube channels, instead, most people, 99 percent of people I would suggest, should be an archaeologist. Now, what does an archaeologist do? An archaeologist doesn't necessarily know what they're going to find, but they think, that area looks interesting, I'm just going to start digging. They dig and they dig and they dig, and most times, they won't find anything at all. But occasionally they'll stumble up, oh, hello, what's that? Then they'll dig more. Once they see a little bit of results, they'll start digging a bit more, they'll do some more excavation, they'll dig deeper in that one area, as they start to see some level of traction. The archaeologist approach is what I would suggest most beginners to YouTube should be doing. If you don't know what to make videos about, that's okay, you should just make videos about anything at all. It doesn't need to have a niche. it doesn't need to be like a specific, oh my God, I need a business plan, I need to do my market research, I need to know what I'm doing. It doesn't need to be any of that at all, you can just literally start making videos. The things you'll learn as you start making videos about anything at all, you'll learn a, how to actually make videos, how to talk to a camera, how to film, how cameras work, how to edit, how to brand yourself, how to do lighting and audio and all that jazz, how to upload to YouTube, how to be comfortable talking to a camera, how to be comfortable sharing your ideas out there with the world. Those are the personal scaling up benefits you'll get even if you only make a few videos and nothing else ever happens, you'll still be glad that you did that, and there's not one person I know who's ever started a YouTube channel who have then regretted it, even if they haven't continued further down the line. But then what you'll also find is that as you're exploring different areas, because obviously, you've got multiple interests and you don't know which one of those to make videos about, you'll start making videos about a lot of them, and as you do those, you'll get some experience. You'll get an idea of, what are the things you enjoy making videos about? What are the things you enjoy talking about? If you make a few videos around a single topic for a while, you might even start getting an audience around that topic. You might be making a few vlogs, or making a few study videos, or making a few tech videos, or making a few product reviews of parental products to help raise your babies, and you might be like, oh crap, when I review my prime, suddenly that video got like 25 views and that's more than the five views I had on my random vlogs. Therefore, interesting, maybe the audience is resonating with this video about a prime. I also have this other Bjorn baby holder that I use for my kid. Let me do a video reviewing that because I actually went through a whole process figuring out is it worth spending $200 on one of these Bjorn baby holders? Oh, crap, that video got 35 views. People are resonating with when I do reviews of parent items and stuff. You might think, this is interesting, I quite enjoy that, the audience seems to be resonating with it, this is an interesting area to explore, and I'm going to start digging more in that area by making more and more videos about that. I'm not saying once you hit that area, suddenly are going to be like, oh, my God, I'm a multimillionaire because I've got a million subscribers. That is completely unrealistic. Instead, what I'm saying is that you try out multiple different things, you throw a lot of proverbial spaghetti on the walls and you see what sticks. You see what sticks in terms of, I'm personally enjoying making videos about this thing, and or you see what sticks in terms of, oh, there seems to be some audience willing to watch videos about this thing, and my videos seem to be resonating with that audience. You might even start to see comments being like, oh, my God, I completely randomly came across your YouTube channel, I'd never heard of you before, but this video was really good, I really want to see more videos about this thing. Now, you're like, oh this is interesting, this is a direction I can go in. Whereas, if you started with an architect approach, you probably won't have start a YouTube channel at all because you'd be thinking, oh, my God, I have all the different interests, I don't know what to talk about, why would anyone listen to me? I'm not an expert in anything. All of the stuff that YouTube beginners always struggle with. To be honest, I've been doing YouTube for five years and I still struggle with, what the hell am I going to make videos about? Do I really have a niche? I don't really know. Do I want to narrow down, do I want to broaden out a bit? These problems never ever go away. Every other big YouTuber I've spoken to also has these problems of thinking, what the hell am I actually going to make videos about in the future? It's not a problem that ever goes away. But I think for most people thinking about it like an architect is not the way forward, thinking about it like an archaeologist is the way forward. That was the first mental model we want to think about the architect and the archaeologist. Now, I want to share a few other questions that you can ask yourself to help ultimately narrow down, what are those areas that you might potentially want to explore? On a Part-Time YouTuber Academy, we go over much more of these in-depth, but I'll just give you a brief overview right now. Broadly, there's like a three-step process for this. The first one is to ask yourself, who am I, and what to do I want? That sounds like a big question, but the sub-questions there are, what do I actually want from my YouTube channel? What are the things that I would personally enjoy talking about? What are my unfair advantages? What are the areas of my life where I have an advantage, where pretend if I made videos about this thing, I'd be leaning into that advantage and advantage that other people may not have? In my case, when I first started YouTube, what do I want from the channel? Well, the answer to that was, I don't really know. I want to treat it like a hobby, but I wanted to treat it like a serious hobby and I'm not expecting to make any money, but I know in the future if this goes well, I might make money further down the line. I was also thinking that I already sell products that help people get into medical school, I sell courses, therefore, if I can attract a target of medical school applicants, some of them might actually think, this guy knows what he's talking about and therefore they would sign up to my courses. That was the one small thing I wanted for my YouTube channel to increase sales for my courses. Secondly, I asked myself, what would I enjoy talking about? I realized I actually really enjoy teaching, I really enjoy helping people get into med school because I've been doing that for years and people come to me for that advice. I also really enjoyed reading up about what makes effective study techniques. I gave a talk about that, four years before starting my YouTube channel, it went down really well. I really enjoy talking about it. That was a subject that really resonated with me in medical school as well. I thought, hey, I could potentially make videos about helping people study for their exams. I also really enjoy tech. I was thinking, if I can figure out a way to incorporate reviewing tech into this YouTube channel that could be interesting. I wasn't thinking about it too hard, but I was thinking those are some areas that I might want to explore with my channel, but I'm going to start off small, just serving this audience of people applying to medical school. Then I was thinking, what are my unfair advantages? My unfair advantage was a, I was a medical student, and b, I was at Cambridge University, so I had with the credentials to be able to give people advice about how to become medical students at Cambridge University. I was not making guitar tutorials. If I was making guitar tutorials , no one would have watched my channel. The fact that I'm a medical student at Cambridge University is completely irrelevant if you're looking for someone who's good at the guitar, and good at teaching guitar, to do guitar tutorials. If I was doing a cooking channel, I have no unfair advantages that. No one cares about me, I have no skills when it comes to cooking. The fact that I'm a medical student at Cambridge is completely irrelevant. But if I'm making content helping people become medical students at Cambridge University, there is no one in the world better placed than I am to help people get into that thing which I was already doing. One way of really increasing the likelihood that your YouTube channel will succeed. Because ultimately it's all a probabilistic game, there are no guarantees here. But one way to stack the deck in your favor is to lean into your unfair advantages. Everyone has unfair advantages. There is a book called The Unfair Advantage, which is written by now a friend of mine called Hasan Kubba and Ash Ali. They talk about this idea of the MILES framework, M-I-L-E-S, that's money, intelligence and insight, location and luck, education and status, or something, I can't quite remember. But basically, their point in the book is that everyone has unfair advantages, you just need to figure out what your unfair advantages are, and maybe, if you can lean into those, your YouTube channel is far more likely to succeed. That was step one, figuring out the personal aspect of it; like, who am I? What do I want? What do I want from a channel? What are the advantages? What would I enjoy talking about? Then we have step two where we want to be thinking about who is my potential audience and what do they want? Now, if you don't have an audience already, it's going to be like, well, I don't have an audience, how do I know? But the answer there is to go internally and think about, what is the audience that will resonate with my stuff? When it comes to educational content, this is fairly straightforward. Generally it is you, but like a year ago or two years ago, three years ago, or five years ago, depending on where you are in your life and in your career. When I started my YouTube channel in 2017 at the age of 23, I was thinking, okay, I want to be aiming my videos at people who are 17 or 18 who were on the same path as me. Basically, myself, but six years ago. These days I'm 27 and my YouTube channel is more aimed at people like four years-ish younger than me, so people who are 22, 23. The way I think of it is how do I make videos for that person? What are the problems that that person has? What are the problems that I had five years ago that I can then make videos about? We also want to be thinking, what is the content I watch on the Internet? What's this stuff that I consume? Is there a way that I can create things around the stuff that I consume which would potentially help that hypothetical audience member? One way to think of it is to think of this idea of , even if I don't have an audience, can I conjure up this construct of a hypothetical member of my audience who one year from now will be my absolute super fun? This is the person that my audience is so targeted at, they resonate with it so much that they're going to tell all their friends about it, they're going to scream it from the rooftops, and they're going to start a YouTube channel talking about how much they love my YouTube channel. Who is that person? Then thinking about what they want potentially, from a YouTube channel? That's another way of thinking about, okay, what is the value that I can provide to the world? Then Step 3 of the process is to bring those two things together. It's this idea of who am I, what am I good at what are my unfair advantages? Then number two, who is this potential audience member, who's maybe me but a few years younger or whatever your audience construct might be? It might be a way of bridging those two gaps. Step 3 is what value am I giving to that person? In my case, when I first started YouTube, it was what value am I giving to this medical applicant? Well, I'm helping them get into med school. I'm teaching them how to do well in the entrance exams, I'm teaching them how to do well in interviews, how to write their personal statement, how to study for their exams, and then over time that definition of what value am I giving, has evolved beyond just a, I'm helping people get into med school. The key thing here is that you don't have to be the salvation for absolutely every problem that person has. You have multiple interests. I'm sure you're watching this, you've got a growth mindset, you're interested in starting a channel, you don't really know what to talk about. Even if you've got this hypothetical audience member, they have like 20 different things that they're struggling with, you don't need to have answers to all 20 of them, you just need to have answers to one of them. Whatever that thing is like, the more niche you can go, some people say the more likely you are to blow up on YouTube, and I probably agree with this to an extent. Those are some of the ways that we can think about this question of what the hell do I want to make? But the crucial thing to remember is that don't let, not knowing what your niche is going to be, stop you from making content in the first place. Think more like an archaeologist rather than like an architect, and get started with making videos, throwing spaghetti at the wall, and then eventually you will find something that sticks and you can double down on that and start digging deeper and deeper and deeper. Those are some thoughts on how to figure out what to talk about. Thank you very much for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. Overcome the Fear of Getting Started: Welcome back. We've talked about what to make videos about, and think like an archaeologist, don't think like an architect, architect is a bad idea for most people unless you're already a pro at doing YouTube, which we'll talk about more slightly. I just want to talk a little bit about how to get over that fear of getting started, and this is a thing that holds a lot of people back. Now, when I first started teaching my part-time YouTuber Academy, I assumed that the fear of putting themselves out there on YouTube, was a fear that only kids would have. I assumed, if you're a 13-year-old, and you're worried that your friends in school are going to bully you then, okay, you have a fear of getting started on YouTube. Turns out that actually everyone has a fear of getting started on YouTube. We have real adults on our course all the way from age 18-68 who are worried when they start a YouTube channel that potentially, what are my friends, and family going to think. Because even now, even while YouTube is such an established thing, there is still this fear of like, oh my God, isn't it a bit cringe, what are people going to say if they see me starting a YouTube channel, like this is just a fear that so many people have from all walks of life. Really, there's no real way to get over this fear other than to do it, and recognize when you do it, that no one actually cares. Like we all spend so much time worrying about what the people are going to think about us, that once we actually start a YouTube channel, all of our friends, and family, and cousins, and sisters, and moms, and dads, they all have their own lives, they're not worrying about what we're doing on a daily basis. They might be like, oh, it's weird that Tommy started a YouTube channel, or weird that Alice has started a YouTube channel. But to be honest, probably won't even think that, they probably think, oh, that's weird, but it's weird in a cool way. I was really worried initially, like, what are people going to think when I start my YouTube channel, and then I started it, realized no one gave a toss, and I was like, great, this gives me so much freedom. Then occasionally, people will be like, oh, that's a bit weird, but then they will look at the channel, and they'd be like, oh, this is actually cool. It's cool that you're vlogging your life, it's cool that you're giving advice on how to get into med school. I think the 99 percent of the fear comes from before you publish your first video, and then you publish your first video, and you're like, oh, that actually wasn't so bad, and I might as well just have gotten started with this ages ago. The other thing to remember is that, it's very easy to change direction once you're already moving, it's very hard to change direction when your static. Like so many people will be in their heads about starting YouTube like, oh my God, I need to have everything planned out. I need to be an architect, but no, be an archaeologist, it's much easier to change direction once you're already moving in a particular direction. To be honest, when you're starting, you're not committing yourself to doing this for the rest of your life, you're literally just trying, and experimenting. You know what, I'm going to try this for the next few weeks, and see how it goes, and then what I would suggest is that, once it goes okay over the next few weeks, ie, your enjoy the process or you can start to feel yourself making progress or improving or enjoying the process. At that point, you commit to doing it for at least a year, preferably two, preferably three, and then, at that point you don't have to think about it much harder because you already made this commitment for a long period of time. But certainly when you are a beginner, you don't need to worry about it, you can just get started. The third thing to remember is that, if it all really goes badly, you can just delete your channel, there's this whole fear like, oh my God, something is on the internet forever. Like, when you have 0 subscribers, no one's watching your videos anyway, no one cares, and if you want to start again later on when you are better at doing YouTube, you can just start a new channel, like it's all good, you can just delete your channel, and start completely from scratch. You can also just delete your videos, and just keep your channel going, there are so many options, and so many people spend so much time worrying about this, oh, I can't get started decision, it's just like bro, just get started. It's like if you wanted to learn how to paint, and you were teaching someone to learn how to paint, and they were like, oh, I just can't bring myself to get started, I don't want to put pencil to paper. Bro, it's just a painting, no one cares, it's all good, you don't need to worry about it, you can just get started, you can throw it in the bin if it's really, really crap. But you have to make a lot of crap paintings before you get to a point where you actually know how to paint before you can make good paintings. Again, this is just my plea, that look, if you've been procrastinating from getting started on YouTube up until this point, however old you are. Even if you're 55, and watching this, I know 55-year-old who procrastinate from getting started on YouTube, they have incredible careers, the one I'm thinking of, incredible career in management consulting partner, made millions, financially independent, but still, struggling with the idea of putting themselves out there in YouTube. Don't worry, it's a problem that we all have, and it's a problem that we all get over overtime, but you can't get over it unless you get started, please just get started. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. Starting Your New Channel: Welcome back. In this lesson, I want to introduce the fake, not really fake new YouTube channel that I'm going to be creating as a little follow along as we go through this entire process of starting YouTube as a complete beginner. I've decided that through my niche exercise, the things I care about, the things I might be good at etc., that I want to make a YouTube channel called Ali's Kitchen. I want to make it a cooking and food themed YouTube channel where I can combine the idea of home cooking with the idea of doing things productively in a small amount of time. I liked Jamie Oliver's approach. He's a UK chef to like five-minute meals and 10 minute meals, and I want to do something in that cooking genre. I am going to show what is the market research process that I would be doing. You don't have to do this. If you're just starting out, just make a YouTube account, you can skip this lesson and just move on to the next one where we'll follow along and create a new YouTube channel. Because I've spent lots of time on YouTube and most of you probably spend lot of time on YouTube, you'll know what are the channels in the genre that you're thinking about. But even if you don't, you can always just search. I'm going to say productive home cooking, and let's see what comes up. Pro home cooks, The Home Cooking Survival Guide for Your Busy Week. Let's check out his channel. This is nice. You've been loving the 15-minute meals having breakfast, lunch, and dinner- This is good. I look at the channel, and I'm immediately thinking, this guy is like a professional setup. He knows what he's doing, I've actually seen some of his videos before. I'm looking at videos and glancing through the thumbnails and I'm getting a feel of the vibe. It's all very colorful. He's got these nice like handwritten things. He's using yellow as a bit of an accent color, and I'm flicking through his channel. How long has he been doing this YouTube thing for? Five years, six years, six years, six years. My goodness, seven years. He's been doing YouTube for a long time, and he's been doing this foodstuff on YouTube for a long time. This is a very interesting channel to me. His first video, pumpkin Cinnabon- school at 23. Herbs smoked stuffed salmon and spicy bear, braised ribs, grilling steak, beginners homemade pizza, eight years ago. This is all going to have probably really junky production value as well because it was eight years ago. Yeah, pretty jagged production value. But actually it's not that bad. His editing is pretty reasonable. But if you compare his earlier videos to his current videos, there's a significant obviously huge change in what's going on. Pro Home Cooks is an interesting channel that I am going to be keeping in mind. [NOISE] Another one that I watch is Babish., Babish Culinary Universe. Again, you look at the channel and immediately you think, this is a professional setup. This guy knows what he's doing. I'm just doing a little bit of market research to be like, what are the channels that are in the space that I maybe want to be a little bit like? Not copying them obviously, because there's no way I'm going to be copying Babish or Pro Home Cooks. But just getting a feel of what the vibe of those channels is. Another one that I like is Pick-up Limes, 3.7 million subscribers. Interesting channel arts, probably not the direction that I want to go with mine, but if we look at the thumbnails, doesn't that look absolutely incredible? Okay, cool. Now this is like, if I was beginning YouTuber, and I was looking at these thumbnails, I'd be like, "Oh, my God, this is like a level of pro that I'm not yet at." But that's okay, because it's like you look at the van Gogh or like the pro artists of the world, and you're like, "There's no way I can do that." But it's fine, you do a lite version of it and you work your way up. In fact, when I'm doing research on YouTube channels, I'll often sort them by oldest to be like, what does a 3.7 million subscriber channel look like, and what did they look like when they first got started? So Sadia from Pick-up Limes started five years ago, and these thumbnails are actually pretty reasonably aesthetic, but we can see some travel tips, they're not quite as nice as the thumbnails that she currently has. This is interesting, because this is a more doable style of thumbnail that I could choose to go in this direction if I wanted. Let's see what Babish was doing if we sort by oldest. Now look at this. Eleven years ago, he made a bunch of random videos, but then he seems like he really started doing it properly five-years ago, and actually it seems like his thumbnails five years ago are very similar to what they are now and he was crushing it from day 1. Maybe Babish is a bad example, but it just gives me some ideas of potential thumbnail styles as well. Then obviously I've actually watched a bunch of the channels before so if you are going down the taking YouTube seriously market research approach, I'd recommend just watching a ton of YouTube to see what is out there, and where can you potentially fit within this market. But again, as always, don't use this as a source of procrastination. Don't use this as a way of overthinking what you're going to do. It is just worth understanding what else is in the space that you potentially want to go into. Like I said, I'm going to be starting a cooking YouTube channel, and that's the thing that we're going to be following along. As we set up the channel, do the channel art, do all the stuff, film the first video, edit the first video, publish the first video. It's all going to be based on me starting a Cooking Channel. Other than just the vibe of the channel and the thumbnails and the style, it is worth watching the videos as well to see what kind of vibe the videos are. This is all fairly simple stuff. You probably doing this already if you spend a lot of time on YouTube and if you're not spending a lot of time on YouTube, you should spend a lot of time on YouTube. Let's look at a random video from Babish. Binging with Babish, how to make apple pie. I'm going to speed up. [inaudible]. This is actually very simple. It's like a voiceover, over or just like a single camera angle it seems, and he's just talking through it. I'm like, "Okay, this is do able." [inaudible] Yeah. It's actually just a single camera angle, and a voice-over, and some music in the background. I'm thinking, this is the kind of vibe that is reasonable. I can see myself doing videos that are this sort of vibe. It's okay to copy. I'm a beginning YouTuber, no one's watching me at this stage. The way I'm thinking of it is, what are the elements from other people's channels that I can steal like an artist or I can copy from, and how can we combine those to make something interesting? Because Steve Jobs famously said, "Creativity is just combining ideas," and there's this other quote which is that, "When people's say something is original, it just means they don't know the sources involved." If you just take an idea of format from Babish, and then of speaking style from Peter McKinnon, and then a branding and thumbnail style and Pick Up Limes and then maybe add a dose of like Nathaniel Drew background music. It's those elements that you can take from different YouTube channels that combine to give a flavor of this new thing that you are creating. Again, it's advice that I give to beginners who are thinking of taking it seriously from day 1. Do this market research and figure out what is your mood board? What are the different elements you actually want to be taking from different channels out there, and how can you combine them to make something interesting? Let's look at Pro Home Cooks, the greatest home pizza ever. Right. I'm just going to flip through this video. He's got a few different camera angles. [inaudible]. There's a lot going on. It's vlogy style. It looks like he's filming this with a phone. The whole process. The dough was a little bit too small. I probably could have doubled that. He's got a front angle, he's got sign language, he's got a handout angle, he's really clearly got a very stocked kitchen. This is way beyond my level of cooking. Just flicking through, and obviously if I was doing this in real life, I'd be spending probably a whole week just watching YouTube channels that are in and around my niche, so my potential niche for the things that I potentially want to do, so then I can get an idea and figure out what are these elements I want to steal that I can combine into my own little thing? You can do that with a bunch of channels. The reason I'm making Ali's kitchen as the example channel for this class, is because I've spent the last six months just watching tons of cooking videos because I genuinely do want to get into cooking. I already have an existing interest in the thing, I've seen a bunch of YouTube videos about it, and so I think you know what? Let's try this out as a potential thing. I'm thinking that my angle can be that productivity angle of like, how do I do nice meals as quickly and efficiently as possible as a home cook with basically zero experience? Those are the ways in which I do market research. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you in the next video where we're actually going to make this channel. 7. Create Your YouTube Account: Hello. Welcome back. In this lesson we are talking about how to create our YouTube channel. I'm just going to show you the process and you can follow along if you feel like it and I'll explain the rationale behind some of the decisions that we're going to be making. But really, the key message here is let's keep it simple. It's not that hard. We don't need to over-complicate it. This is like the easy part. I'm going to agree to all this stuff. I'm doing this in an Incognito Window so I don't have any of my Google account and all that jazz. I'm going to hit Sign in. Actually I'm going to make a new Google account for this particular one. Now at this point it's going to ask me, do I want to make an account for myself, for my child or to manage my business? And I'm actually going to click on to manage my business. This is not a huge deal, but it's just useful to have a business Google account rather than personal Google account. Because then later down the line it's easierish to give people access to your accounts and your channels and stuff. But again, it's not the end of the world are plenty of ways around this, so it really does not matter. You can just use your existing Google account, but I would say let's create a new one. Let's say Ali Abdaal. Your email address. Let's create a new Gmail instead. I'm going to say aliskitchen@gmail.com. Ali kitchen is taken. Aliabdaalkitchen@gmail.com. There we go. I'm going to make a random password, and I'm going to use my phone number, recovery email address, and my date of birth. Let's go express personalization to just do this quickly. I don't really care about add personalization and I'm going to agree to all the terms and conditions. At this point I now have a Google account which has only for my YouTube channel. This is generally considered good practice. Some people say you don't want your YouTube channel connected to your personal Gmail. Again, it doesn't really matter. My YouTube channel is connected to my personal Gmail, so just an extra example, but it is probably more secure to have it not connected to your Gmail. Again, not a huge deal. You don't need to worry about it. Anyway, I'm going to go all the way to the top and click Create a channel. Now this is exciting. How you'll appear, name. Name is a thing lots of people get hung up on. They are like what should my YouTube channel name be? Should it be my real name or should it be a brand name? Now, generally, for 99% of people, I would say just use your real name. You don't need to call it Yoga with Adrian, you don't need to call it [inaudible]. You can just call yourself Adrian, whatever or Ali Abdaal or Tom Smith or whatever your name is, and that's probably fine. Two, you can always change the name further down the line if you really want to. In this context, I'm deliberately not going to use my real name. I'm going to call it Ali's Kitchen because I already have a personal channel with my real name, and I know that I want this to be a food specific YouTube account. I know that further down the line, let's say for whatever reason this becomes my main channel because I just enjoy posting on it too much. I can always change the name at a later date. I'm going to ignore the profile picture for now. We do not need a profile picture at this stage, and I'm just going to hit Create channel. Now the magic is happening, and here we have a YouTube channel. We have Ali's Kitchen, which has no profile picture and no subscribers. Now at this point we do want to add a little bit of fluff to our YouTube channel because we can see there's basically nothing on here right now. What I'm going to do is I'm going to hit Customize channel and that will take me to YouTube studio where I can hit Continue. It's going to ask me for a channel trailer. You don't need a channel trailer. I don't even have a channel trailer on my main channel that has 2.7 million subscribers or however many it does. No one really needs channel trailer. It's not a huge deal. Branding wise we are going to sort out the profile picture and banner image and watermark in a little bit. But I think it is worth on basic info, just like writing a few words about what your channel is about. Welcome to Ali's kitchen. This is a channel where I share my newfound love of cooking recipes and a bunch of other things. I hope you have a nice time here. It doesn't need to be fancy, just like a very basic description. Most people don't look at the About page of a channel, but it just nice to have something there. I can add a link if I have a personal website. I'm going to actually add a link to my main channel , but you don't need to. I'm going to main channel, my website. It's probably all I need and contact info. I can put in my email address if I want to. I'm going to say ali@aliabdaal.com, because then that goes into my thing and that's the email address that gets displayed on the website. Once I've done that, I'm going to hit Publish. Now if I click View channel, we can see this is what my channel looks like. Still there is nothing on here we're going to sort that out in the next lesson. But if we hit About, we now have this description. Welcome to Ali's kitchen. This is a channel where I share my newfound love of cooking recipes and a bunch of other things. I hope you have a nice time here. It's very basic, no one really cares about the description. We've got our links, we've got our view email address for business inquiries, and we can see that I've joined on the 8th of February 2022, which is when we are filming this video. Now if we go back onto YouTube Studio, you'll see there is a bunch of stuff here, and YouTube Studio can be consumed quite intimidating, but don't worry, we're going to go over all of the interesting bits as we go through this course. I'm going to show you all of the customization step by step as we go along as I show you how I would actually build this YouTube channel and then we'll film a video for Ali's kitchen then your YouTube channel. Thank you for watching. By the end of this lesson, you should have your own YouTube channel setup like this, and then the next lesson we're going to customize it and make it look absolutely sic for free and quite easily. Thank you for watching. I'll see you in the next lesson. 8. Choose Your Channel's Visuals: [MUSIC] All right, welcome back. At this point, we have Ali's kitchen. We have our YouTube channel looking bear and looking not very nice. We're going to start to make this look absolutely sick. The website I want to introduce you to is canva.com, which is a very easy way to make your website or your YouTube channel look absolutely sick. What I'm going to do is, over here, I'm going to type in YouTube channel and it's going to give me YouTube channel art. I'm going to hit YouTube channel art. I'm just going to use one of the templates I like the look of. I'm not going to worry about this. We've got music, beauty. Can I search food, have they got food as an option. Look at that. My goodness, this food looks really good. This says Lucky's Kitchen, I'm going to replace it with Ali's Kitchen. Bring you easy and fun comfort food recipes every week. I just need to think of a random tagline, you don't even need a tagline for this, but I'm just going to make something up. Bringing together the worlds of productivity and healthy cooking. Emoji, smile. There we go. This is how easy it is to make something look good on Canva. Here are some other options. That looks cool as well. It could be this, Ali's Kitchen, it can be that. Let's say I was a random YouTuber, I can just scroll through all results. This looks nice. Not fond of the font. This looks nice. There's so many options on Canva. I'm just going to go back to that, food. This is Ali's kitchen. I want the background to be a little bit darker, so I'm going to add a filter to it. Let's see epic, no. Festive, no. Summer, no. I want a darkish one. Drama, that's nice. I want to reduce the intensity, 33 percent intensity filter on drama. Don't want to get rid of it. Looks better. I think that's fine. Good. Now I don't need to do anything else. I'm just going to hit the download button , and there's going to be a png. Now I need to sign up. That's okay. I'm just going to make an account. Because I made a free account on Canva, I can now download this image in higher resolution format. That is the one that I'm going to upload. Also I just recommend having a Canva account anyway, I'd even recommend signing up for Canva Pro because it makes it easier to make thumbnails. But I'm going to hit this little camera button, which lets me change my channel art, and I'm going to change this. It's going to be at Ali's Kitchen 3. There we go. Hit "Done," hit "Publish". Now when I refresh, hopefully Ali's kitchen should look a little bit better. Perfect. We have a high-resolution photo on Ali's kitchen. This is already making this channel start to look pretty reasonable. What we need now is a profile picture. The best profile picture is generally one of your face. I am literally going to take one right now. It says edit profile picture, and it needs an upload. What I'm going to do is, I'm just going to get my phone and I'm going to take a little photo. I'm going to use portrait mode, so I get a bit of blurred background, natural light. There we go. I've got my photo. I'm going to AirDrop it to my MacBook so that I can upload it to YouTube. Nice and simple. We don't need to overthink this stuff. Good, that's done. That shouldn't be happening. Anyway, doesn't really matter. Great. I'm going to hit "Publish". This is what my YouTube channel now looks like. View channel. Look at that. We already have something that looks reasonable, and in fact I actually want to slightly reposition this. Hit ''Change'', upload again. I'm going to go a little bit less headroom. I like this. That level of headroom is good. Perfect. Publish. Now I have a YouTube channel that automatically looks better than most people's starting YouTube channels. There's just no excuse for not having a channel art and profile picture. But even within our part-time YouTuber Academy, there are so many people that just don't have channel art. It just make the channel look like absolute trash. Like it's so easy to just go in Canva, make a free account, completely free. You don't need to pay anything for it. Download something that looks pretty reasonable. Now you have your channel art. Yes, further down the line, you can start overthinking your channel art a bit more. You can start thinking more intentionally about the vibe and the branding and all that stuff. But when you're getting started with YouTube, when you're a complete beginner, none of that stuff matters. Just pick something you like the look of and get started straight away. The mistake people can make is overthinking and over obsessing about what the channel art looks like and all that. I need to have my typography, I need to have my branding, I need all of it done before I upload my first video. But that's all a bit BSE. It's like starting a business and then waiting to have the perfect logo, and the perfect business card, and the perfect domain before you go out and start actually trying to build a product or find customers, is a generally a bad way of doing things. But here we are, we have Ali's kitchen and hopefully by this point you have also in the follow along, have made your YouTube channel. You've got your channel art and you've got a profile picture preferably of your face. But I guess it doesn't have to be of your face. The thing to keep in mind is that people follow other people on YouTube. We don't generally follow brands or logos and stuff. There are lots of exceptions to that rule. But if you can put your face as a profile picture, and if not, you can use an icon or whatever if you really want to. If you're desperate to use an icon website that I like to use is flaticon.com. If I search icons for kitchen, something like this, that's actually quite a nice icon. I could just download this as a PNG. Free download and, cool, I've got it now. Now if I wanted to, I could change my profile picture to this kitchen tool thing. I don't personally like non-people profile pictures, so I'm going to change it back. But there's always the option, we have the option of using flat icon if you want to get a random icon for your channel art. Generally, when it comes to YouTube channel, you don't really need to worry about royalty-free images and that stuff, but a website you could look at if. you want nice background is Unsplash. Unsplash gives you freely usable images. If I want kitchen I can type in kitchen and get pictures of kitchens. If I want food, I can type in food and get pictures of food. I can choose to use a combination of Canva and Unsplash to make my own balance. The key thing is start with a template and customize a template a bit to suit your likings, and then we are ready to go. At this point, we have Ali's kitchen bringing together the worlds of productivity and healthy cooking to form the basis of our YouTube channel. I hope you followed along. I hope you've gotten this far. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video. 9. Beat Perfectionism: [MUSIC] All right, welcome back. It is now time for our very first challenge, and in this video we are going to beat perfectionism, and we're going to upload our first video to a new YouTube channel without any preparation. Yes, I know that sounds scary. If you're a beginner to YouTube, you're probably overthinking your first video. The main thing we need to do is we need to besmirch the blank page. This is a thing. I don't know who it was. Was it Van Gogh or some famous artist who said that whenever he draws something, he always puts a pencil mark in the middle of the page, so that he stops thinking that the blank page is sacred and that for the first stuff he does actually matters. What we're going to do is we're going to use our phones, we're going to record a video and we're just going to upload it to our YouTube channels, and it's not going to matter. No one's going to care. Our channel has zero subscribers at this point. I don't think anyone is ever even going to see it. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to go on the camera app on my iPhone. Nothing fancy. I'm not using FiLMiC Pro. I'm not using all these other fancy apps, I'm just hitting the "Camera" button. I'm going to go into Video mode. I'm going to turn the phone sideways because it's YouTube and YouTube is still broadly a sideways phenomenon. I'm just going to hold my phone like this, and I'm just going to talk to my phone. It doesn't matter if it's 4K, it doesn't matter if it's an ATP, the point is we just get it done. I'm going to talk to my phone and just introduce myself and say, "Hey, this is my YouTube channel and here are the videos I want to make." Let's go for it. I literally have not prepared anything at all and this is exactly what I want you guys to do. Hello, how's it going? This is an introductory video for my very first YouTube channel. What I'm going to do is I'm theoretically going to be uploading videos about cooking, combining my newfound love of cooking, because I decided to get into cooking and my love of productivity and just to make this channel about recipes and stuff in my day-to-day life. We'll see how it goes. Honestly, I don't think anyone's going to be watching these videos, no one's going to care, but, hey, a few years from now, it'll be interesting to look back on just to see how I have changed as a person and what the vibe is. I know that if I didn't do this video, I would be overthinking the **** out of this, and I probably never film my first video. I'm keen on my first video being this handheld thing. I know the studio looks all fancy, but completely ignore that, that doesn't really matter. I'm literally just filming this with an iPhone. If you have any ideas for content, then I'd love for you to leave a comment down below. If this vibe sounds up your street, cooking with a twist of productivity then by all means hit the "Subscribe" button, although I don't think anyone's realistically going to see this video except my grandma. But yeah, please do leave a comment. Thank you, and I hope you enjoy the channel. Okay. That was my very first video. Literally what I'm going to do is now I'm going to go on the YouTube app. I'm going to log into my new account. I'm just going to upload it straight from my phone. We are not editing this at all. YouTube app. Now I'm logged in on my phone, on the YouTube app. If I look at your channel, it says, we've got the profile picture, we've got the channel art, and now I'm going to hit "Create." It's going to let me upload a video, and I'm just going to upload completely wholesale, this video that I have just filmed. I'm going to hit "Next." I'm going to title this, I'm going to call it Welcome to Ali's Kitchen, My First Video. That's a reasonable title. Welcome to Ali's Kitchen, My First Video. Great. Now, add a description. I'm just going to say, welcome to my new YouTube channel. Please hit the "Subscribe" button if you'd like to see more. I'm going to add a little smiley face. It doesn't need to be anything fancy. Cool. Then I'm going to hit "Next." No, it's not made for kids. Unless you have a specific video made for kids, you want to click the "No" button on that. I don't need to bother with age restriction, and I'm just going to hit "Upload Video." Now, fingers crossed. The video should just get uploaded. Now after a little bit of a lot of waiting, as I've refreshed this a bit, here we go, uploads. Welcome to Ali's Kitchen, My First Video. No views, 18 seconds ago. We've literally just beat imperfectionism. We have besmirched to the blank page, the blank slate of our YouTube channel by uploading our very first video, by filming horizontally with our phones, zero preparation. This was easy, hopefully. Hopefully, by the end of this lesson, you will have done this as well. Please just do this. You can always get rid of this video later. You can always delete it, make it private, make it unlisted, or you can do what I did, and just leave it up on your channel. I have one of these videos on my main channel. You can just leave it up. Then if your YouTube channel gets big, three years later, people will look back on your first video and think, "Oh, my God, it's so inspiring that you started by filming videos just with your phone. I want to do the same," and you might inspire people to start their YouTube journeys. We're not going to worry about thumbnails. We have uploaded that first video, and we have besmirched to the blank page of our YouTube channel. Hopefully, that was helpful. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. 10. Brainstorm Video Ideas: Okay, so at this point, let's have a look at how we're doing. We've got Ali's kitchen, it's got the very first video with one view from me published eight minutes ago because I uploaded it eight minutes ago. Welcome to Ali's kitchen- My first video. At this point, let's talk about what our next steps are going to be. I think we generally want to start with brainstorming some ideas for potential videos that we might do next. Now, I have not yet thought about this; I'm literally doing this on the fly, I'll show you what my thought processes as I'm brainstorming these new videos. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to open Apple Notes, basic note-taking app, it doesn't need to be fancy. It doesn't really matter. I don't bother with Notion, Roam, all these other fancy apps. You don't need to worry about them just yet. I'm just going to open Apple notes and start thinking about, "Okay what are the different ways I might brainstorm some video ideas? So Ali's kitchen video ideas. I know that my vibe equals cooking plus productivity. I like the idea of five-minute meals, weeknight meals. I like that general thing. I like the general philosophy of chuck ingredients at the pot and hope for the best. I don't really vibe with the whole fine dining tweaking every ingredient, and I think my angle in the cooking space is going to be what is the quickest and dirtiest way that we can make healthy tasty meals, basically. That's, I think what I want. Probably again, I'm thinking of myself, but a few years ago, or even myself, but last year. I'm imagining a 20s, five-year-old college graduate, first job, orders take away all the time. Doesn't know how to cook anything but an egg, even that's bad. Never cooked anything before, etc, but interested in getting into cooking because it seems cool and healthier and cheaper, and a good way of like hosting slash bringing people together. I'm just brainstorming a few thoughts. I'm like, "Okay, I think maybe this is the direction I want to go, but I'm going to be an archaeologist about this. I don't want to put all this stuff out in advance. I want to archaeologist. I want to find little bits and figure out where my potential niche can be." I'm going to start by just brainstorming ideas off the top of my head. Then I'm going to go into other YouTube channels and just do some searches on YouTube and see, "Oh, what are some video ideas, that I can steal like an artist? What are some video ideas that I can copy?" Video ideas. I could potentially reviews of cooking gear, but stuff aimed at beginners, potentially. I actually do have a Le Creuset Harry Potter collection, Dutch ovens, which I bought the other day. I could do a review of those. I can do review Le Creuset, mugs times four, I've got some of those. I don't really have any other, review School of Wok, because I bought one of those woks the other day after reading some reviews online. I can, I can always review these products. What else can I do? As a beginner, so beginner learns series, something like that. I could do my favorite cooking channels where I can talk about like Babish and Pro Home cooks and Ethan Tchaikovsky, and Pick Up Limes and stuff. I can just make a video talking about my favorite things there. I can make a why I'm learning to cook, how I'm learning to cook-type video. Really scraping the bottom of the barrel here. Then I can think, "Okay, essential pantry shopping list and essential kitchen gear." What I can do with those videos is, I guess I can look at other YouTube channels and other blogs and stuff to see what they recommend and be like, "Hey, I watched 10 other videos, and here are the things that they have recommended." What I'm doing there is taking a curator approach where I'm just taking advice from other people or maybe taking advice from a book and be like, "Cool, this is what this book says about the essential kitchen gear that I need." I'm going to buy it and I'm going to make a video talking about the reasons I've bought all this stuff. As you can see, this is a very higgity-piggity approach. Again, I'm not overthinking this. I'm being an archaeologist rather than architect. The key thing when we're starting out our YouTube channel is to just make lots of videos. It doesn't matter what they're about. This is the formula that we teach in our YouTuber Academy, is level zero or level one is where you're making one video at a time and it's a struggle to make every single video. That's a place where everyone starts. Then you got to level two, which is where you are then making one video every week, and you're not concerned about the quality. All you want to do is figure out how do I make one video every week, then you have level three. Level three is where you want to make one good video every week. So until we get to level three where we're already making a video every single week, we don't want to be caring about the quantity, the quality of that video. We want to focus on quantity to begin with these ideas. These are all probably pretty bad ideas, but the point of these videos is not to grow my YouTube channel. The point of these early videos is to grow my own abilities at making videos. Now, unless you are a professional videographer, unless you've had so much background in video editing and audio editing and lighting and cameras and all that stuff where you already know how to make the videos, then if you're that person, then the architect approach is probably better for you. Me having done YouTube for the last five years, if I were starting a new channel from scratch, it would be the architect approach because I already know how to make good videos. If I was a beginner and I didn't already know how to make good videos, those first 20, 30, 40, 50, sometimes even 100 videos, my first 50 videos are not for my audience. My first 50 videos are for me to help myself improve my own abilities to make videos. Then once I know how to make a video every week, at that point, I can start thinking about delivering value to my audience. I think this is really the way we want to think about it. We don't want to have any expectation of growth. No one cares about our videos. No one's going to watch our videos because I videos, quite frankly, they just suck. They're really bad. You would not expect to read the writing of someone who's never written before. You would not expect to buy the painting of someone who's never painted before. So how can we possibly expect our viewers to give us their most precious resource, their time, and their attention, for videos that are objectively absolutely awful? We cannot. Therefore, our first 50 videos are for us. Our next 50 videos are for our audience once we know how to make good videos. So all of these things I'm writing down, reviews of cooking gear, I'm not expecting anyone to watch them. Begin a learn series, my favorite cooking channels, who cares? No one gives a **** about what my favorite cooking channels are, but the point is me making that video helps me develop my own cooking skills, and as a bonus side effect, maybe someone will watch those videos. Maybe they'll comment and maybe they'll subscribe, but the point again, it's for me, it's not for that. Okay, so those were some ideas about how to brainstorm stuff. Again, first 50 videos for you, your next 50 videos for them. Let's talk a little bit about filming styles as well, because that comes into when we're brainstorming video ideas. The most common style of video on YouTube is where a person is talking to a camera and doing something. For example, this is a talking head-type video. I'm talking to the camera, maybe doing some stuff on the side, maybe you got a screen recording, maybe I'm sharing some stuff. Maybe I'm being like, "Hey, I want to do a review of this glass," but ultimately it's a video of me talking to the camera. Those are the videos that we're probably going to be focusing on as beginner YouTubers. There are other formats of videos. You can do a faceless, voice-over type thing, where you show what's in front of you rather than your face and you do a voice-over at the top of it. We're not really going to talk about those because those are a bit more complicated. You can do faceless animation channels, things like Wendover Productions or Kurzgesagt, or CGP Grey, where you're telling a story through a voice-over, through music, through animations. Again, those are also really hard. We're not going to focus on those. What we're talking about in this beauty for beginners is the easiest videos to do, which is you speaking to a camera and doing stuff. If we think of what people like Binging with Babish do, you don't really see their face on camera, which is fine. If you're like one of those people who so terrified of showing a face on the Internet, you don't necessarily need to show your face. For example, one of my YouTuber friends is called Mr. Who's The Boss, and he is huge on YouTube. He has nearly on 10 million subscribers, probably will be by the time you're watching this. If we look at his old videos, I wonder if we can see them, how to optimize your ZTE Blade, Olympus camera review, how to install a custom ROM. Let's look at this one. Hey, Youtube. I'm just doing a quick video on my [inaudible] ZTE Blade. You don't see his face. For three years also on YouTube, Aaron never showed his face. Coca-cola montage, I don't even think that's his face. He's just doing videos where he's reviewing the tech. Where he's like talking over the top of it and doing a voice-over. Again, that's a reasonable way of getting started if you're terrified of showing your face. In fact if you're like 14 at the time and you didn't want to keep people in school to know and stuff. If you're beyond the age of school where you're concerned about bullying, you probably should not be concerned about sharing your face, but hey, whatever. Those are the two easiest older videos; either the speaker camera video or the voice-over while something else is happening type of video. The ones we're going to focus on are these speak to camera-type videos. All right, so these are just a few brainstormed video ideas that I've got. I think what I'm going to do is my first video is going to be a review of the Le Creuset Harry Potter collection Dutch ovens. Probably no one's going to watch the video. In fact, the thing with that video is that someone might watch the video. So if I go on YouTube and I'm going to search for Le Creuset Harry Potter, if I search for that, Le Creuset, 18,000 views, 1,700 views. Someone's made an unboxing video, 2,000 views. 3,000 views, kettle review, Dutch oven. There's a few people who've made videos about it. The top three are from the Creuset themselves, but no one has really made a review of the Harry Potter Dutch oven. So if I make a review called Le Creuset Harry Potter Dutch oven review, and have a good thumbnail, there is a chance that some people might see this just because they might be searching for it. I have no idea what the search traffic or this video is. I could use a plugin like VidIQ or TubeBuddy to figure that out, and those will be linked down there below in the resources section if you'd like. Again, I'm going to keep things simple. The point of these first 50 videos is for me rather than for them. I'm just going to make video review of the Le Creuset Harry Potter collection. I'm not a pro cook. I don't know anything about it, but hey, I've used the product once or twice, and so I can give my very first impressions as a complete beginner. That is going to be the test video that we do here. Hopefully, this gives you an idea into my brainstorming process, process as I'm very early on in this process. The other thing that I would probably want to do is cooking for beginners. I will do a bunch of searching on YouTube; cooking basics, five basic cooking skills, 15 mistakes most beginner cooks make, simple recipes. I'd probably start incorporating some recipe-themed content if I was taking this seriously. I'd probably be looking at a bunch of cooking channels that are big today and see what were their early videos, and are there any title ideas that I can steal or borrow from those? This is what we've got so far. I could feasibly make my next 10 videos off the back of just this list. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. 11. Script Your Video: All right. Welcome back to the course. In this lesson, we're talking about scripting your video. Firstly, we are going to talk about should you script your video and to what extent you should script your video? Then we're going to talk about how to script your video. Then we're going to talk about how to know when your script is ready. So let's start with number one. To what extent should we be scripting our videos? Now, there is a spectrum for this. There is the fully scripted spectrum on one hand where you literally just reading off a teleprompter or reading a voice-over script, fully scripted word for word, that kind of thing. Right on the other end, you have a video that's completely unprepared. Like no, literally just, I'm going make a video. I'm going to hit the camera and I'll figure it all out as we go along. Now, most YouTubers are going to fit somewhere in-between those two spectrums in terms of like, scripting stuff. The place that I normally recommend for beginners is somewhere in the middle, IE it's worth scripting your video in terms of bullet points and rough talking points about what you're going to say. It's worth scripting out the rough structure of the video in terms of bullet points but it's not worth scripting things out word for word. Yes, scripting things out word for word will probably make your video a bit better in that it will make it more engaging and a bit more like, improperly increase audience retention. But when you're a beginner, it's actually really hard reading out a script word for word. It really makes it sound like it's reading. It's really hard to use a teleprompter and it makes filming a video become like a five-hour-long job. If you're trying to read from the laptop and then memorize that line and then deliver that line and then read another line and then memorize and delivered the line. It just ends up being really annoying. Feel free to try this for yourself, but I have doubled and we've had 1000 plus students through our YouTuber Academy who have done various degrees of scripting. The place where most people are comfortable is scripting out rough talking points, but not scripting out much more beyond that. In fairness, this does depend on what your channel is about. If you're a faceless animated channel, where that relies heavily on storytelling and animations and stuff that, obviously you do have descriptive voice over word for word. But for most of us, those of us who speak to a camera and do stuff on camera. I think bullet points is really the way forward. Let's now talk about how to script the video. There's really nothing fancy here again, I'm just going to open up Apple notes and I'm going to do my first video which is the Le Creuset Harry Potter Dutch Oven Review. Now, when it comes to scripting a video, there's a few things we want to keep in mind. The first one is, what are my title ideas? Then we have thumbnail ideas. Then I'm going to say what's the hook slash intro of my video? I'm going to talk about the main body or the main value, and then I'm going to talk about what am I going to say at the end. Well, that's all I need to do in scripting video. We want to start from the top. We want to start with title ideas. Again, as a beginner, your first 50 videos are for you, the next 50 are for them. You don't need to overthink the title ideas, but I can literally just use this, Le Creuset Harry Potter Dutch Oven Review or Le Creuset x Harry Potter Dutch Oven Review, something like that. That can be a title idea. Trying out the Le Creuset Harry Potter Dutch Oven Review. Honestly, I think for this one they're very vanilla basic title of what is the product and sticking review at the end of it. Review for beginners, or just even review. That's totally fine. Thumbnail idea. Now, I'm thinking, okay, well, what's the thumbnail of this video going to be? A probably close-up of the Dutch Ovens. I probably don't want to have my face in it. My rationale there is that, at the start, if I'm trying to give views in this video no one cares about my face. Well, when people are searching for this video, what they care about is the product. That's why most tech review channels don't have their face on the thumbnails because generally if you're targeting search traffic rather than [inaudible] traffic, but that's a bit more complicated. If your video is targeting search, it wants to get out people who are searching for the thing itself rather than people who will just see it randomly on their homepage and be like, that looks so intriguing. I want to click on it. I probably want to shoot with my iPhone, a close-up of the Dutch Ovens and that'll be my thumbnail. Potentially, one of me holding them up and smiling. Maybe if I hold them up like this and smile then that adds a human touch to the video and maybe people will click on that more. So we'll take a few different thumbnail examples for this one. It's easy to overthink title and thumbnail. Most pro YouTubers do that title and thumbnail way before they film the video. Most new YouTubers, beginning YouTubers film the video first and they think about the title and thumbnail as they're uploading the video. It doesn't really matter when you're starting out, but we want to move towards thinking about title and thumbnail intentionally. Even if we are in those early days where we're making the videos just for ourselves because title and thumbnail is such an important part of moving forward with video. Now, let's think about the hook or the intro. Again, don't need to overdo this. For a video about a Dutch Oven Review, I'm probably going to be like, I'm just going say it. Often what you can do is just repeat the title of the video in your intro. So this is how Mr. Beast, for example, the famous YouTuber, says that he knows his video title is good. If his opening sentence can literally just repeat the title, for example, I built the world's most dangerous escape route as a title. He knows that's a good title because at the start of the video he can literally say, right, so I build the world's most dangerous escape route and the little blah, blah. It's interesting. Generally, what we want to keep in mind is that the first thirty seconds of the video is the most important. We're in that first 30 seconds, we just want to really make sure that the audience knows that they are getting the value that they were promised. When someone clicks on a title and the thumbnail, that creates an expectation in their mind. If my title is Le Creuset Harry Potter Dutch Oven Review and the thumbnail is a photo of the Dutch Oven, they're expecting to get a review of the Harry Potter Le Creuset Dutch Oven, right? In my intro I need to be like, this is going to be a review of the Harry Potter Le Creuset Dutch Oven. They're like, I got what I came for. If in my intro I started like, hey guys, how's it going? Welcome back to the channel. You know I've got a new YouTube channel. Make sure you smash that like button and subscribe button and make sure you sign up for my newsletter or check out my product, blah, blah. They're getting disinterested because they clicked, uninterested, rather, because they clicked on that video expecting something and I'm not delivering on that expectation. That's just a general principle. We have a whole two-hour long session about this, a live session in our YouTuber Academy. But as a very basic thing, make sure your first 30 seconds you are delivering on the expectation that they were promised. So, Hey guys, welcome. I'm going to say, Hey friends, welcome to the channel. This is my first video etc reviewing the Harry Potter Le Creuset Dutch Oven. Great. That's all I need to say for that. Now, when it comes to the main body, what I'm thinking about is what is the broad structure of the video? What are the general areas I want to talk about? I'm probably going to start with a caveat that, I'm a beginner and don't know anything about cooking but these were cool. Then we'll talk about the design plus close-ups of the items. Then we'll talk about tech specifications, which I can get on the website. We can talk about what it's like to cook with them and five closing thoughts. Something like that. Cool. For each of these, I'm just going to be thinking what are the bullet points that I want. A caveat that I'm a beginner and don't know anything about cooking but these were cool. Why I bought them, used them for spaghetti bolognese and they did the job nicely. But don't expect a professional chef review of these design and close-ups. Go over design of both and show closeups. Yeah, that's pretty self-explanatory. I don't need to worry about that. Check Le Creuset website, discuss sizing. Yeah because I remember thinking when I was buying these 28 millimeters to I just write 28 centimeters, 26 centimeters, 24 centimeters. What's a good size? I did a bunch of researching so I can share some thoughts in sizing what it's like to cook with them. So SpagBol discussion because I cooked spaghetti bolognese, and also a fajita discussion because I cooked fajita in them, in the smaller one. Bigger one, smaller one and aesthetic vibes of cooking with them where I want to explain how it encouraged me to cook because of the aesthetics and then closing thoughts; Nice but expensive, check them out if you like. Easy. Right at the end, the final bit of scripting a video is the end screen. It's the message I'm going to get to the audience at the end of the video. Generally, you don't want to end the video with, Hey guys, thank you so much for watching. Please make sure to hit the like button. Please make sure to subscribe. Because at that point people are just going to switch off and leave the video. Generally, you want your end screen to point them to another video. The problem is this is my first video, so I have nothing to point them towards. I know that in my YouTube studio, at the end of the video, I can choose the option that says latest upload. I'm going to say, in the end of my video, Thank you so much for watching. If you want to watch more, click here to see my latest video. Thank you so much. Hit the subscribe button, blah, blah. In my end screen, I can select my latest video is that one, and it will always update to my latest video. While I have one video on the channel, whatever, no one knows. They won't have anything to click on, but that's okay. We're building the foundation for the rest of our channel. This is the extent of the scripting that I've done for this video. Now, I've made something like 450 plus main videos on my main channel, another 50 for the second channel. I've done another 500 to 1000 for online courses. This is the level of scripting that I do for most videos. But I'd say 90 percent of my videos they have this level of scripting. Maybe five percent of them are completely unprepared if it's just like I'm answering questions. But even if I'm answering questions, I'll still semi prepare them by knowing what the questions are going to be in advance, or if I'm going really ham on research, like researching scientific papers and doing reviews and that kind of stuff. Then I'd put a lot more scripting into it. But 90 percent of my content is scripted with this level of bullet points. The nice thing about this is that it really encourages you to lean into your personal experience. As I'm moving forward to my YouTube channel, I'm thinking about how can I make this channel unique? The way I make it unique is by making it uniquely authentic. You can escape competition through authenticity as novel Robert Kant famously says, "There are a lot of people in the world are going to be making cooking channels, but there's no one in the world who's going to make a cooking channel by me because I am somewhat unique." There's another phrase, "There were no unique messages, only unique messengers." This encourages leaning into personal experience and showing the vibes and all that stuff. I think this is the level of scripting, maybe a little bit more, that most beginners should be aiming for. If you need to do a video that requires so much heavy scripting, I would suggest it's probably the wrong video to make as a beginner because all of the other bits are hard enough. Yet if you add scripting and reading from a teleprompter or reading from a script, it just really takes the joy and fun out of the whole process of making videos. At least that's what most students on our part-time YouTuber Academy find. So hopefully that gives you an insight into what my scripting process looks like. Hopefully, by the end of this video, you will have scripted your own video as well. I'll see you in the next one where we're going to talk all about how to actually make one of these videos. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 12. Film With Your Phone: [MUSIC] Welcome back. Now we're getting into the fun stuff. This is where the rubber meets the road, and this is where we start to have fun in terms of actually filming the video. Now, because this is a class for beginners, we're not going to worry about fancy camera gear. In this lesson we're going to talk about how you can film pretty reasonable videos using just your phone. What I have here is one of these phone tripody-type things. You can get these off of Amazon for like $5, $10. You can get them from any shop. It really doesn't matter. If you have one that has this little gizmo on top, this is known as a cold shoe mount. It's easier to mountain microphone on it. But again, it's not a huge deal, it doesn't really matter. To show you how to do this one thing, we're going to move away from this setup. Because to be honest, this is unfair. We have the lights, we have the cameras, we have multiple cameras, we have a studio. This is just not a beginner friendly setup and therefore, we're going to switch to handheld mode, and I'm going to show you how I'd set up the iPhone to film a hopefully reasonable-looking video in a random place in this building. Hopefully, you can do the same. What we're going to do is we're going to go around a bunch of different randomized places that don't have any fancy light setup, and I'll show you what an iPhone setup would look like in those contexts. There's a seat. This is far from ideal conditions. Lighting is not great, but what else. I have my iPhone attached to this dock thingy. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to use the BOG Standard Camera app on the iPhone. I'm not going to do anything fancy with FiLMiC Pro or any of these other fancy apps. If you want, we'll put some links to resources down in the resource-type area where you can find more videos about exactly how to film with an iPhone and how to level up your filming. But really, default camera app is all we need to do. This is what the kind of non-selfie mode looks like. I'm just going to switch it to selfie mode and we're going to see what this footage looks like. We can see here that this is not ideal because we can't see me at all. What I'm going to do is figure out a way of moving this further away from me so that the framing looks reasonable. In fact, I'm going to hit "Record" here as well. Sure, I have record of that. What I'm aiming for over here is like the top of my head just about brushing the top of the frame. If I use the selfie mode, I've got to have my iPhone far away. But actually this is not bad. Like, as far as iPhone footage goes, this is reasonable. If I hit "Record" over here as well. I wonder if that will work. This could be a YouTube video. At the moment, I'm looking at myself in the camera screen. We've got Golem in the background. But that looks kind of weird because that's where I'm looking is not where the camera is. In fact, this is where the camera is over here somewhere at the top of my iPhone. Instead of looking at myself filming, what I should be doing is looking at the camera, and now as I'm looking at the camera, hopefully, this looks like I'm making eye contact with you. Whereas if I'm looking at myself in the screen, it looks like I'm looking at something else. We want to be looking at the camera. This is one way of filming ourselves with an iPhone. It just means we have to put the iPhone a little bit further back. That's a kind of framing we're aiming to get at. Now if I was filming a video like this, in this video we're going to be reviewing the part-time productivity planner from the Essentially stationary Line built by Ali Abdaal This looks like a reasonable setup for video. I have done zero in terms of lighting, in terms of background. The iPhone is just doing all the work in making this look somewhat reasonable. Now, the other way that we can go about this is not by using the selfie mode on the camera, but instead by turning it around and using the other angles. Here's what that looks like. Now what I'm doing is I've turned the iPhone around and I'm going to look at it and see what this looks like. The problem is, I now can't see myself. This is, basically a two-man job. Either that or requires some kind of mirror, or requires me plugging in my iPhone into my laptop. I have a video on my channel where I talk about how to do this, but I just want to show you what the basic principle is. Generally, the camera on the back of an iPhone is higher-quality than the camera on the front, and this applies for all phones. You get slightly better quality if you use the back cameras rather than the front cameras, but you do run the risk of not being able to see yourself. I'm going to ask Golem's help. Golem can you set up this phone in a way that makes it look reasonable with the main angle. Now, another thing that we want to keep in mind while setting up our shot is that we want the angles to be straight. We don't want it to be like, this is looking at me from above, or looking at me from below, we want it to be dead on straight. We just wanted to try and move the position of the phone so that it accomplishes that. You know what, I have an idea. Golem, I'm going to ask you to sit over there and we're going to use you as the subject for this. I'm going to show you how I would set up a phone in this context. This is looking pretty reasonable already. I feel like Golem is a little bit far away, and he's got too much headroom over here. What I want to do is just move the phone closers so that we get a little bit less headroom. Because I want his head to be just about brushing the top of the frame. Somewhere here seems pretty reasonable. Now another thing to keep in mind is that when you're setting up your phone, you want the angles to look straight. This looks reasonable because you can see we've got these straight lines in the background and they look straight on the iPhone. What we don't want to do is have it like this or have it like that. That is like the phone is looking up on Golem and the angles are a bit wonky. We also don't want to do this. This looks really bad, it just looks awful. Often, the trick to something looking good on camera is just the lines being straight. Here is where the lines are right about straight, and this looks pretty reasonable. Golem, if you can say some stuff. Hello. My name is Golem. I've been enlisted to help Ali with his phone video thing [LAUGHTER] This quality seems pretty reasonable. Here I'm using the 1X lens. If I switch to the 0.5, now Golem is suddenly miles away. The way that would work is if I put this camera much closer to him, and now, that's just a slightly different framing. Now, Golem, if you can speak to the camera. Hi. This camera feels really close to me. It does feel really close because this is a wide-angle lens, but it just shows you based on whatever your phone is, you can figure out the best way to set your framing. I think to be honest, if you're a beginner, just use the selfie mode because then you can see yourself, and it's a lot easier to know what's happening when you're seeing yourself than when you don't see yourself. But it just goes to show the power of phones these days in producing a reasonable picture, even if we haven't thought at all about the light to camera or anything else. I'm going to do this in a few different locations. Let's go outside and we'll see what this looks like from the phone there. I'm going to switch to selfie mode. Now I'm literally just going outside into our office area. I'm going to plunk this phone on this table. See what it looks like in selfie mode. Reasonable. I think we're still a little bit tall for this. This is probably bad practice, but I will slightly angle up my phone on the tripod just so my head fits in there. Let's just make it a little bit less wonky. What I'm focusing on is I want the background lines to be as straight as possible. If we look at the lines in the background, they're slightly wonky, but there's not much I can do because I'm confined to the length of this table. Here's another random video setup where I haven't really thought too hard about it. I've literally just gone outside, hit the Record button on my phone using the default camera app. Nothing fancy at all. This looks pretty reasonable. This is another way that you can get started using just your iPhone. Let's just drive this point home by doing this iPhone setup in a bunch of different places. I'm going to get up now, move around the building a bit. Walking down. Turn this into vlog mode if you'd like. It looks something like that. Thank you, Golem. [BACKGROUND] [NOISE] This will do. We have loads of background noise here, and this is not a particularly fancy background, it's not particularly a static. What I'm focusing on it's like, I just want to get my iPhone, my footage living reasonable, and get it looking at the point where my head is just brushing the top of the frame. Now if I'm doing a review, I can be like, in this video, we're going to talk about the American Express black card, and I'm going to review that black card. I have to remind myself of this because I don't use to film like this, to not look at the screen, but instead to look at the lens. Now I'm looking at the lens and hopefully this looks more like I'm speaking directly to you. Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. In this video, we're going to be reviewing the American Express black card, and I'm going to tell you all about the benefits that I've had from this card over a long period of time. Conditions here are not amazing, but she's still shows power of the iPhone in making stuff look somewhat reasonable. We've switched the iPhone over to cinematic mode now, which means it's going to artificially blurred background. This is a feature on most modern-ish phones which can look quite nice. Like in an ideal world, when it comes to lighting, again, we don't need to overthink this as a beginner, but the lighting setup I want is where there is a big soft light source like a window at a 45-degree angle from myself. If I was standing like this and filming a video like this, this would look pretty good in terms of the general lighting, the general vibe. You can probably think, this looks pretty reasonable, especially with cinematic mode turned on. It's annoying holding the camera. What I'll I'd be trying to do is set myself up something like this. Where potentially now if I was filming a video like this, we can see head is just about brushing the top of the frame. Well, lighting is pretty reasonable and pretty aesthetic on me. I'm using cinematic mode so the backgrounds a little bit blurred. What I could be doing is I could be talking to the camera like this, talking really about anything at all. This would be a good setup for my, I don't know, if I'm doing a video about my favorite cooking channels. I could just sit down on the sofa and be like, all right guys, this video is all about my favorite cooking channels. Let's sit down and have a bit of a chat. This was quite cozy, is quite nice. We got a bit of blur in the background. We've got that light. Again, I haven't done anything. We've just roamed around this building, just trying to find decent spots to the iPhone to go. Like I said, you don't need to overthink this. The iPhone or whatever phone will compensate for almost any terrible lighting condition. But in an absolutely ideal world, we would be shooting somewhere 45 degrees from a window. Hopefully, this looks pretty reasonable. I could probably even shoot a main channel video just by using this natural light. We'll talk a little bit more about light in the video about lighting. But again, moral of the story, you don't need to overthink these things. Just get a phone, get a tripod for your phone that cost like $10, and find a way to have straight lines in the background like those. They're all straight, which means my angle is straight. Make sure you're looking at the lens rather than at the screen. That's it. Make sure roughly your head is brushing the top of the frame because that looks reasonable and it's sort of horizontal video is supposed to look like. That brings us to the end of our iPhone lesson. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about how you can set up a basic camera setup. Then we'll talk about lighting and we'll talk about audio. You'll have everything you need to film your first video properly. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 13. Upgrading Your Camera Setup: Welcome back. We've talked about what it's like filming on an iPhone. In this lesson, I want to show you what the differences are between different levels of upgrading your camera setup. What we've done is we've got these four different cameras. We've got the iPhone 13 Pro, we've got Canon M50, we've got Sony A7C and the Sony A7S3 with various lenses on them, trying to read vaguely re-create the same scene that we have with our main camera angle, which cost $6,000 or something stupid like that. I want to show you what the differences between, assuming we have optimal conditions, studio conditions, what is actually the difference between shooting with these cameras at different price points. Let's start with the iPhone. Honestly, this iPhone has cinematic mode turned on. To be honest, iPhone cinematic mode footage is actually really good. you probably wouldn't be able to tell that this was shot with an iPhone, and even if you can, this is a level of production value that no one is going to complain about this level of production value even if it's coming from an iPhone. If you're a YouTube beginner, again, another place in which beginners seem to get hanged up is, "Oh my God, I can't get started filming YouTube videos unless I have the perfect camera gear." You don't need the perfect camera gear, phones these days are absolutely incredible. You don't even need to have the brand new state of the art iPhone 13 Pro with the pro mode. Almost any phone like iPhone 8 plus or almost any Android phone from 2012 or beyond, will be able to film at a reasonable camera quality. Especially while you're making your first crop of videos, where you're still learning the craft of editing videos and talking to a camera and filming and lighting and all that jazz, you don't need to worry about upgrading your camera. But having said that, if you do want to upgrade your camera, this is what the Canon M50 looks like. Now, the angle is a little bit weird and I'm not really a fan of the Canon M50, but it's a $500 camera setup and it's a fairly beginner friendly YouTube camera. It's got to flip out screen, which means you can see yourself while you're recording. This is what it looks like when I'm talking to the Canon M50. Again, I didn't like it, to be honest, I actually think the iPhone footage looks better with an iPhone than the $500 Canon M50 setup personally, but that's a pretty reasonable camera to upgrade to for beginners. Once you learn how the settings work and all that stuff, you'll be able to make the camera work for you. This is another point I want to make in this session that, it's not about what camera you have, but it's about how you use the camera. If I was someone who was using a Canon M50 a $ 500 camera on a daily basis, I'd figure out a way to get the most out of it. I'd be watching loads of tutorials trying to figure out the appropriate settings, figuring out the best lots for it and the best light color grading profiles, just making sure I know how to use the camera that I have. Basically, the main thing I want to take home from this lesson is that it's not really about the gear. Everyone says gear doesn't matter, and it's true to an extent you can get amazing quality footage just using an iPhone. Or you can get pretty reasonable quality footage using a camera. That's not the thing that generally tends to make or break YouTubers. But having said that, if you can get your production value looking as good as possible, that is another thing that helps you stack the deck in your favor when it comes to making content that has a bit more of a wild factor to it. This is the Canon M50 a $500 setup. Let's now switch to the Sony A7C. The Sony A7C is a $1,500 full frame camera. We don't need to go into the differences between crop sensors and full frame and stuff that's not beginner friendly, but again, more resources in the video description and you can always dive more into this stuff at a later date once you've got a few more videos under your belt. We've got the camera Tamron 28-75 lens attached to it at a focal length of 28 millimeters. This looks reasonable, to be honest. What looks better, this or the iPhone? I'm not sure. Probably if we're doing a direct comparison of iPhone versus A7C, the A7C will look a bit more natural because the iPhone is doing computational photography to do It's like cinematic background blur all that kind of stuff. If we turned off cinematic mode on the iPhone and the background would look quite flat because it's not very good at the blurred background effect. But this is what I set up. The costs run about $2,500 looks like, again, it's not really about the gear. It looks reasonable. You don't need to upgrade beyond this. This is where you get significant diminishing returns when it comes to spending more money on camera gear. This is the $2,500 A7C with the Tamron 28-75 lens. Now let's move on to the Sony A7S3 with the 24 millimeter G Master lens with a Peter McKinney ND filter applied to it. If you don't know, what all this game means, it doesn't matter, this is a big $6,000 camera setup, which is an overkill, but it's the main setup that I use for my videos and have been using for the last six months. But let's bear in mind that for the first year of my YouTube channel, for the first two years actually I was shooting with a camera that costs around about £900 so like $1,200, that's still expensive. But this was four years ago before phones were amazing. Now phones are amazing. to be honest, I could get a YouTube channel to a 100k subs, probably just off the back of filming with just an iPhone. But this is the gold standard with a nice lens and a nice camera and stuff. But again, this is a course for beginners. The thing I'm going to keep on repeating because it needs to be said multiple times is that, it's really not about the gear, what provided you have like a baseline level of production value at that point, the gear stops mattering so much. Unless you're competing in an industry like tech or photography or videography where the gear that you use actually matters, because the production value is the unfair advantage you have the thing that sets you apart from other YouTubers. Tech YouTubers like Marquez Brownlee MKBHD with over 15 million subscribers. He'll spend like $500,000 on a camera robot, a robotic arm that he can program with a fancy $50,000 camera attached to it just for five seconds of footage for one of his videos. Because he will know that in the world of tech, that is what's needed to really stand out and to really stay on top of your game. That's one of his unfair advantages. He can throw money at the problem and he can have that technological advantage over the competitors in the tech space. But if you're a beginner, you're not trying to do that. You aren't spending $500,000 in a robotic arm, all you're trying to do is just make content that's reasonable, that you enjoy making that provides value to your audience. Whether you're filming with an iPhone or a Canon M50, or a Sony A73, or a Sony A7S3 or well even if you don't know what any of these cameras things mean, you can always learn this kind of stuff overtime I knew basically nothing about cameras when I first started, I was filming with a Sony A6,000. Actually, I started just filming with my iPhone, but overtime as I watched more YouTube tutorials and learned more about the craft while I was continuing to make videos, that is how my camera knowledge evolved. The mistake that you don't want to make is to think, Oh my God, I need perfect equipment from day 1 to get started. Just start with your phone. Phones are pretty reasonable these days. This footage looks fantastic, if I say so myself I hope. Even just get started with this and then you can level up your cameras overtime as you go. That's really the main point of this lesson. Don't overthink the gear, just get started, make the videos and overtime you can always upgrade and you can always figure out the optimal cameras set up for you over time. That brings us to the end of this lesson. Thank you very much for watching and I'll see you in the next one. 14. Set Up Your Audio: [MUSIC] Welcome back. We talked all about upgrading our cameras setup, and we've decided that for the rest of this class, we're basically going to film things with the iPhone. Right now I'm filming with the iPhone. But in this video, we're talking about the importance of audio and how to get decent audio for your videos. Now, the thing with audio is that audio is actually probably one of the most important things because people will sit through bad video quality if the audio is good. But your video quality can be the most amazing thing in the world. You can be treating with the fanciest camera in the world. But if your audio quality sucks, then no one's really going to want to sit through that. That begs the question, how do we get good audio? In this lesson, we're going to try and break that down into simple steps and the ways you can level up your audio. Let's start with level 0. Level 0 is where we are not using any external microphones at all and all we're doing is using the audio that's on our device. Right now I'm filming on the iPhone 13 Pro, and the iPhone is about two hands lengths away from me. By the standards of microphones anyway, that's pretty far away. This is what it sounds like when I'm just speaking in without using any external audio. This is just the pure native audio of the iPhone. This is what the audio on the iPhone 13 Pro sounds like without any external microphone attached tool. The Quick Brown Fox jumped over the lazy dog, Mr. and Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number 4, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. This probably doesn't sound amazing. It probably still sounds reasonable, probably sounds possible, but it's not amazing. We've got a bit of a harm in the background. The room is quite big, it's a little bit echoey. The iPhone is really far away from me and we're not plugging in any external microphone. That's level 0. Now there's two different things that we can do to basically level up or our audio to the max and those two things are, number 1, use an external microphone, and or number 2, bring the microphone closer to us. Those two factors are basically the only real determinants of audio quality. Number 3 is the acoustics of the room. But to be honest, if you're shooting in a really big open church hall, you're going to get a lot of echo, if you're shooting in your bedroom, your living room, wherever. Usually there's not much you can do about the acoustics and things like setting up acoustic panels and some blankets and all that jazz, that maybe gets you an extra five percent of audio quality. But really the key thing is external microphone number 1 and number 2, bring the microphone closer to you. Now we're going to show you what both those different things look like. First of all, we're going to plug in an external microphone, and we're going to plug in the Rode VideoMicro into the iPhone. The iPhone has a lightning port, and the lightning port requires this lightning port adapter and then we need this extra thing to be able to plug the Rode VideoMicro into it. We're going to plug this in right now. Right now we have plugged the Rode VideoMicro into the iPhone. Now hopefully, you can hear that this sounds a little bit better than what I did before and we're going to play some samples with and without all this stuff anyway. But you can see that the iPhone is still quite far away from me. It's still two hand breaths away. But now we just have an external microphone. This hopefully shows that the addition of an external microphone does improve sound quality significantly compared to no external microphone at all. That's why we say for most people, the Rode VideoMicro is like a $40 microphone. You can get microphone super cheaply and they really do level up the quality of your videos because it just makes such a big difference to have external audio, and so that's why this is broadly the setup that I'd recommend for beginners, like get some cheap *** tripod that takes a phone, you can get those for $10 of Amazon. Use your phone and then plug a microphone so that that microphone sits on top of it. That's one very easy way to level up your YouTube setup immediately without spending much money while you're just filming using your phone. Now we've switched our audio. What we've done is we have boomed in the same microphones. We've got the Rode VideoMicro, but we've stuck it on a microphone stand and we've got it closer to my mouth. While before it was quite far away now it's probably to this length away from me rather than two of that length away from me. You can hear what the difference sounds. Now what I suspect is that the addition of an external microphone will be more important than the addition of the boom pole and bringing that microphone closer to us. But generally those are the two things you want to do. You want to add an external microphone and then you want to bring it as close to your mouth as possible. If we do the test. This is the test of what the audio sounds on the Rode VideoMicro while it's boomed in. It's this far away from my mouth and still connected via the lightning port to the iPhone 13 Pro, the Quick Brown Fox jumped over the lazy dog, Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number 4, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. But broadly, you can take a cheap *** microphone, you can plug it into your iPhone and or wherever your camera is and you can just bring it a little bit closer to your mouth. That generally gets you 98 percent of the way there towards decent audio. At that point, you can then upgrade the microphone. This is a $40 microphone. What we actually use to film our videos is like an $800 Sennheiser MKH 416 microphone. To be honest, it's probably a little bit overkill that particular microphone and maybe went to people's side-by-side here. The difference between this and the Sennheiser, which is like 20 times the price. They might be able to tell the difference, maybe not. It's basically moral of the story to improve your audio. Step 1, add an external microphone, they're quite cheap, and or step 2, bring it closer to your mouth. Now there is an option. A third option which actually incorporates both of them. It means you don't have to have this boom pole lying around. That is switching to a lavalier microphone and that's what we're going to do next. At this point we have talked about three different audio setups. We've talked about what the audio sounds like just using an iPhone, number 1. We've talked about number 2, what it's like having a road VideoMicro sitting on top of the iPhone far away from me, and number 3, we've talked about what it's like having a Rode VideoMicro connected to the iPhone through a cable, but boomed in on a microphone stand, a $20 microphone stand you can get from Amazon just more close to my mouth about this faraway compared to that faraway. You've heard what those different audio level sounds. You'll notice now that I'm wearing a lav microphone, lav stands for lavalier and it's one of those lapel microphones that you stick, you clip onto your top or your shirt or whatever. You'll notice that you can already see the wire in here. Because the wire we have for the lav mic we had lying around is not long enough. Moral of the story, if you are buying a lavalier mic for your videos, you should get one that has a longer wire so that it can go down your top and under the table and so it's less visible. But the good thing about these is that it automatically is, a, external microphone, and b, very close to your mouth. Hopefully, you'll get pretty reasonable audio quality, and it'll be much better than just having no audio options at all plugged into your iPhone or your camera. Ultimately, when it comes to figuring out what audio setup you want for your content, really the key is we want a decent balance of audio quality, yes, but also convenience. Lav microphones, I'll be honest, are pretty convenient. It's also pretty convenient to just have a read VideoMicro and just stick it onto the top of your microphone. The thing that we do where we boom the microphone in and you have an external microphone pointing down and all that stuff, it's inconvenient. I think the benefit you get from them when you are a beginner is not huge. Right now my main channel these course is, we're not talking beginner level content and so we're doing everything we can to level up production value, even if it means we get an extra one percent gain for an extra $1,000 of expense. That's worth it for us. But as a beginner, it's not going to be worth it. I think lavalier option is very reasonable, or just stick an external mic onto your iPhone and call it a day. I think that's also very reasonable in terms of leveling up your audio. Like I said, there is other stuff you can do to soundproof the room and reduce echo. Basically it just means having furniture and having soft furnishings and rocks and stuff. But that's way beyond the scope of this. You can find tons of videos on YouTube where people who are actually pro at audio, are explaining all the various things that you can do to make your audio sound better. If you're looking for specific gear recommendations, then again, you'll find loads of stuff if you just search YouTube, this stuff is always updating and therefore, if we recommend gear here, it's just going to go out of date immediately. But channels that are good are DSLR, video shooter, and Gerald undone. If you just search YouTube for best shotgun microphone under $500 or whatever your budget is, you'll find various options for that. But hopefully, this gave you an idea about how to level up the audio in your videos. Moral of the story, use a lav mic or use an external mic. Don't use the built-in audio onto the iPhone or onto the camera because usually it's not very good. Thank you so much for watching. This has been a long one, but I'll see you in the next lesson. Bye-bye. 15. Set Up Your Lighting: [MUSIC] Welcome back to this lesson. In this lesson, we're talking about the importance of lighting. The main thing that I want to emphasize here is that actually if you're filming with a phone, lighting is not overly important. Yes, if we look around, [LAUGHTER] we do a lot in the way of artificial lights. We have this biggest softbox and all that stuff. If you're filming with a fancy camera, then having a biggest light is one of the things that you can do to really level up the quality of your videos. But to be honest, when you're filming with an iPhone, biggest light versus no biggest light doesn't really make a huge difference. It really starts to matter when you start going into proper camera mode. In a dream world, you would have a setup like this where you have, at 45 degrees, a very big soft light source, and that's really the key to a decent looking lighting: just as bigger light source as possible and a softer light source as possible. Which is why these whole softboxes, the whole point of them is to diffuse the lighting so it becomes softer, and softer light looks more pleasing to the eye and makes faces and skin tones appear much nicer. Conveniently, there is another source of good, high quality, soft light, and that is daylight outside next to a window. When you're standing next to a window, for example, that basically acts as a soft light source. If I hit record over here, now you can see that the light on my face on this side is quite nice, it's quite aesthetic, it's quite pleasing and it's because I'm literally sat right next to a window. I could record with the window at 90 degrees right right to me like this. Or like we showed in a previous video, if I was sitting here moving on these plants, now the window is 45 degrees from me and it's lighting me at a 45-degree angle. So 45 degrees is absolutely ideal if you can get some light source at 45 degrees whether it's a window, whether it's an artificial light or whatever, 90 degrees is pretty good. The thing we generally want to avoid is like having light coming right in front of us. Right now with this particular angle, we can see over here, the windows in front of me and the light is hitting my face. That generally is not particularly pleasing because it makes the face look a bit more flat, because you've got the light shining you straight in the face. For example, if we go over here, I would not want to film a video with the lights hitting my face directly on because there's something about that just looks a little bit and not nice, a little bit less nice than filming a video like this, where this light is now like 45 degrees in front of me. That's really the key thing with lighting. It's like the 45-degree rule. Try and get your light source either in a dream world 45 degrees from you. But if you have to, 90 degrees is totally fine as well. I'm going to swap places of angles now. Now, over here, this is actually reasonable. If I set up the camera in this position: so something like that and just up a bit. You can see the background is absolutely awful and it's not great because again the camera at eye level is looking up, but we're working with what we've got. But you can see we've got a window over here. I've got this nice soft light coming in at 90 degrees from me. In fact, if I was actually filming this for a YouTube channel, I would probably, to be honest, set up my camera over here so that now the window source is actually at 45 degrees. It's not at 90 degrees, it is at 45 degrees. This is what that set up would look like. Again, I'm filming with an iPhone, so it doesn't really matter because the iPhone will just compensate for the light anyway, but we've hit the sweet spot of 45 degrees in this mode. The thing that I encourage you guys to do is as you're figuring out where to film your videos, again, if you have the option, try your best to get a light source 45 degrees away from your face in either direction. Try to make that light source as big as possible and as soft as possible, and like we said, window is often the way to go if you don't have a bigger softbox and artificial light. We're actually outdoors in this villa inside the building now. There's two interesting examples of light situations. It's actually the two bathrooms. One has got great lighting, this one, and one has terrible lighting, this one. We're going to show you what it's like in both lighting conditions. Let's go into the little bathroom. I'm going to sit on the toilet seat. We're going to close the door and only use the iPhone. The only light we have is that light at the top, [NOISE] which you can see is just like terrible spotlight. This is an example of horrible lighting situation, horrible audio situation it's ridiculously echoey, but we're going to show what this looks like anyway. I'm just going to plot my phone over here. [LAUGHTER] Plot as it were. I'm going to hit record. Now, this is what this sounds like and what this looks like. This is by far the worst lighting and sound situation imaginable, super echoey, it's probably not great at all, but this actually doesn't look horrendous. I'm just talking to an iPhone and phones are so good these days. They're just compensating for bad lighting conditions. If you stuck a proper camera here, if you've got a cinematographer or videographer along, they'd be just absolutely aghast. How can you possibly be filming in this set up. But, yeah, terrible lighting, it still gets the job done. So really the message I want to drive home in this lesson is that, you don't need to overthink the lighting thing. Similar to background, as we're going to talk about, lighting is something that you can just improve over time if you want to. It's not something that's massively important to worry about in the early days. You can just get your phone, stick it on a tripod, go to a fricking bathroom, and you can still hit record. To be honest, I'd be quite comfortable filming a video in this set up despite the lighting and audio conditions being absolutely horrendous. That was this awful lighting condition. We're then going to move to the other bathroom that has much nicer lighting, and we'll see what that difference looks like. Now, we're in this other disabled bathroom, which actually has a really good light source. There's soft light from the window. Let's see what this would look like if I were recording a video here. Again, this light source is in front of me like that. This looks quite pleasing. In fact, I'd probably stick the camera over here. [LAUGHTER] I'd sit on the floor and adjust things so that the lines are soft. I can't really get the lines straight, whatever. Try to make the best of a bad situation. But, hey, it's not too bad. This is a big soft light source 45 degrees from me. I'm just sitting on the floor. I'm talking to the camera. Again. the phone is actually really good. This is just a selfie camera as well. I'm not using the fancy back camera. I'm not using fancy cinematic mode or anything like that. I'm just pointing the phone at myself with the selfie camera. Again, I'd be very comfortable filming a YouTube video, if I was a beginner, just using this set up. Again, moral of the story: yes, lighting is good, yes, 45-degree rule. Try and get a soft light if you can. But if you can't, be filming at night, filming in bedroom, filming in a bathroom, it really doesn't matter. I know a few doctors actually who've blown up several hundreds of thousands of subscribers on YouTube and they film videos on their phones in the middle of a shift when it's super dark and there's no decent lighting around. They still manage to do well because unless you are in the field of live photography, videography, tech to an extent, quality does not matter as much as the content. So focus on the content, focus on getting better at the content, and the quality will naturally improve over time as you'd be a little bit more intentional about what your setup to look like. That was a little primer on lighting: 45 degrees, soft light source. If at all possible, yes, and artificial light will make your videos look slightly nicer, especially, if you're filming with proper cameras. But basically don't overthink it, focus on the content, focus on getting better at the craft of making videos and lighting is something that you can improve slowly over a long period of time. Thank you for watching, and hopefully, I'll see you in the next lesson. 16. Perfect Your Background: Welcome back to the course. It is a new day. We filmed all of yesterday and then we lost light and then we got tired so we've now started again on day number two. Today in this lesson we are talking about how to make your background look great. Now, a few points to begin with. Firstly, don't overthink this. If you're a beginner, you actually don't need to worry about what your background looks like. Remember your first 50 videos are for you to hone your skills. Your next 50 videos are for your audience to actually provide value and over time your background can and will change so it's far more important than you actually get filming those first few videos. The background is like maybe a five percent difference in terms of quality of your videos but really the true value comes from the video itself. The background is just a little cherry on the top, a little nice to have. But having said that, the background is important. It's one of the main levers we have for figuring out what is the vibe of the videos and what's the vibe that we're trying to create for our channel. To reiterate, having a perfect background should not be the thing that stops you from filming videos, but you can over time adjust your background and make it a little bit more interesting, which begs the question of what is it that makes a background interesting? To be honest, the answer is it really depends. It depends on what vibe you're trying to create. I personally think for most channels, the vibe that I like is the Holy Trinity of lamp, bookshelf, and plant. I think if you have a lamp if you have a bookshelf and if you have a plant in your background or multiple copies of those things, it will just automatically make your background look nicer. But that's creating a very specific vibe, which is the vibe that I personally like for my channel and that I personally like for other YouTube channels. I know that because I spent a lot of time watching YouTube videos and analyzing their backgrounds and figuring out what is it about that background that I like? Is there something that I can incorporate into my own channel? If we look at this background, for example, we have this Holy Trinity. We have a lamp over there, which is providing some nice accent lighting and we have a color changing light bulb in there so we can change the colors of the light if we really want to. We have a plant over there. We have a plant over there. We have a plant over there. We have a plant on the bookshelf. We've got lots of plants in the background, and we've got a bookshelf that has a bunch of books. Even if I move, you'll see that there's this other mini bookshelf that's covered up by me right now but that is the one that then gets shown depending on if we move angles around this room. That's what we've got at the moment. This is like five years into doing the YouTube thing so this is probably unsustainable and unfeasible for most people unless you have large amounts of control over your living room or your bedroom or wherever you want to film your videos. But however small your space, putting some books, putting a lamp, and putting a plant is probably going to be possible if that's the vibe you want to go for. Let's now have a look at some of my older studio setups and we can see how things have evolved over time and how I was thinking about the background. This was from November 2020. This was my desk setup in my Cambridge flat. We can see this was about half of a living room, which I had completely repurposed into a studio. We have a big desk. We've got plants in the background. We've got this Kentia palm. We've got this little Christmas tree. We've got a plant over there in the corner. We have a bookshelf in the corner. We have a lamp in the corner with the bookshelf. We even have a guitar, a con, a little bit of a piano because I'm adding in the music vibes and it was a very deliberate choice to add in musical instruments in the background so that's the vibe that I want to create. You also notice there is a ukulele in the background over there, which is currently not visible, but it would be in different angles. You can see that I'm going for quite a light mode vibe. This is filmed at night because this was when I was working full-time as a doctor so I didn't really have time to film during the day. But you've got this blue accent that's created by the lamp in the corner. We've got the orange accent created by the lamp in the other corner, teal and orange, like blue and orange is like a pretty pleasing complimentary color set or opposing color sets, just in terms of color grades and stuff. A lot of people like pairing teal with orange and I thought, hey, that fits my vibe let's do that. In the foreground as well, we also have this colorful keyboard, which is again a deliberate addition because I thought, keyboard that's white, blue, and pink is actually the vibe I'm going for and there's a very deliberate choice of books in the background. We've got a few board games at the bottom of this bookshelf, and then we have a few books. I think it's the Throne of Glass series or something like that where I saw those in a shop and I was like, those books look really nice because they're white and blue and white and blue is the vibe I'm trying to create. Therefore, let me buy these books specifically to stick on the bookshelf in my background. Now we're going to go in the channel and we're going to look at the older videos. I'm going to show you when I first started doing YouTube, what did the backgrounds looked like? We've got a few singing videos. Here we go. This is really bad. This is awful. This was my first proper video that I did, which now has 137,000 views. I was filming this in a random hotel room in Cambodia where it was on my medical elective while I was doing a plastic surgery placement did not have any knowledge about what makes a good background. It was literally just the hotel room curtains behind me and a very harsh light from a desk lamp shining onto my face because I knew nothing at the time. This is not a very good background but hey, it did the job and it goes to show that the background is not massively important. Then this was all still in that hotel room where I was like, I don't like filming against the curtains. Therefore, let me film with a white wall in the background. Again, not thinking too hard about it. Then I got back to university and this was my background in my room. We can see over here, I've actually made a mistake with framing and that I probably have too much headroom because this looks weird. I'm also weirdly off-center. It's not quite the rule of thirds where I'm off to a third of the screen but it's just a little bit off, like as if it's somewhat unintentionally as if I intended to be in the middle. But you can see again, I've got a bookshelf in the background because I had a bookshelf in my room. We've got a little teddy bear at the top, massively overexposed on the lighting so this is not fantastic and then 50 videos later. Here's one, this was another background that I had where I was like, if I have the camera far enough away from me and use a 35 millimeter lens then I'll be able to have my computer monitor in the background and the computer monitor looks nice because it shows that, it's a computer monitor and that's the vibe I wanted to create. But it was a university room where I didn't have a lot of stuff going on so I couldn't do a lot with the background. Then a few 100 videos later, I finally decided to make this one. This was a iPad Pro medical school review video, which now has 5.7 million views and this was like my 90th video or something like that. A whole nine months into starting my YouTube channel and making two videos a week. This was when I realized that, this actually looks quite nice because I've got the light coming in from the window. I did not have an artificial light for this video and if I clean my room and have most of the background behind me, the camera does a good job in blurring that background so this looks nice. Again, none of this was completely intentional. This was just what my room happen to be like but you can see how I'm thinking about approaching the background. Let's look at some other examples. An example that I really like is Pick Up Limes. This is one of my favorite YouTube channels to get inspiration for with regards to vibes. l think we showed her example with thumbnails as well. You can immediately see the vibe that she's creating, this wholesome, healthy, green vibe and so if we look at her background, you'll notice that well there's just loads and loads of green and stuff in the background and it's very earthy tones but with loads of green and it's very light mode rather than dark mode. It just makes you feel awesome and nice and she's just got loads of plants everywhere. All of these are intentional decisions that Satya is using to make her background seem more naturally and awesome-y because that's the vibe she's going for. Let's look at Peter McKinnon. Peter McKinnon is also one of my favorite You Tubers and as I said whatever session it was, I try to make my vibe to be the Peter McKinnon of medical school. If we look at his background, there's a lot of camera gear in the background because that's the vibe he's going for. He's got a bunch of lights. You can see lights up there., lights over there, lights over here. He's in his studio. It's cool because he's got a lot of lines leading up to him and you get a lot of straight lines but this is also very dark mode vibe. The way he's dressed, the way he's lit, the background, it's very dark mode. It's very different to mine, and it's very different to Pick Up Limes. Peter McKinnon is not going to have loads and loads of greenery in the background with a white wall and bright lights and bright blue colors because it's not the vibe he's trying to create. The vibe he's creating is a more grungy, masculine, tattoos, pirate icons like very grungy vibe and it works really nicely because that's the vibe that he's intending to create. The thing that I'd encourage you to do is that as you're thinking about figuring out what your background should look like, be intentional about the vibe that you think you want to create. If you don't know, that's totally fine. Again, you can steal like an artist. You can read this book, steal like an artist and follow its advice and actually steal like an artist where you're just getting inspiration from other people, you are stealing ideas from them. Then over time, you can be like, I really like that element from Pick Up Lime, that element from Anti-valor, that element from MrBeast, that element from, l don't know Nathaniel Drew, or whoever your inspirations are and you can start incorporating those slowly over time into your videos. Let's use another example that's different. This is Casey Neistat, which you might be familiar with and again, his whole vibe is that he's got this very like DIY setup. He's got his office in the background. Again, Casey Neistat would not be caught dead with bright blue stuff, with lamps, with green plants everywhere. It's not the vibe he is going for. The vibe he is going for is homemade DIY. That's his editing style, his filming style, it's his background. It all works nicely to create the brand that is Casey Neistat. Now, at the start of your journey again, it's not overly important because you probably don't know what your brand is. You don't know what your brand values are, you don't know what vibe you're trying to create but just keep that in mind slowly over time as you make more and more videos, being intentional about the vibe you want and therefore adjusting your background accordingly. I get it, if you're filming in a tiny bedroom at the university or in your house, or you've got kids running around all over the place, or you've got family, that means you can't completely control your living room to whatever you want, that's totally okay. We all have to work within the constraints that we've got, but there is always stuff that we can do to make our background look nicer. To be honest, like one of the main things is just to make it clean. One of the most unprofessional things you can see from a background is that it is untidy. If we look behind this camera right now, it's an absolute mess. We would not be filming with the absolute mess in the background but that's okay because in front of the camera, where you guys are seeing it looks super clean and super nice hopefully, and I even spent some time tidying up the bookshelf this morning to make sure the books were aligned because books that are like wonky, books that are not in the right size, it just all looks a little bit messy. Even if you're not going to add anything to your background, just make sure your background is clean and tidy because that is far more aesthetically pleasing than a messy and cluttered background unless of course you are going for messy and classic. Casey's background is pretty messy but it's like organized chaos and it doesn't look as if you've landed in the picture. It looks like, wow, everything is organized nicely into place. Those are some tips on how to set up your background and then when we actually get around to filming the video, I'm going to pick the most random unnecessary part of this room to film in and I'll show you how physically I would change up the background to make sure it's clean and to add in these elements of personality that I care about. Thank you very much for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 17. Exclusive Bonus Materials: Hello again, how's it going? I probably look a little bit older than when you're watching this class because I'm filming this after the fact. Because just to let you know, we have just added an enormous amount of totally free bonus material over to my website, which facilitates all of the different skill share classes that we have here on the platform. So if you head over to Ali Abdel.com, forward slash Skillshare, resources that lingual appear here and also down in the projects and resources section or wherever you happen to be seeing this Skillshare often changes the structure of the website, so it'll be linked somewhere on this page and also right here, so you can go to that URL and that will give you access to a bunch more bonus information relating to all of the different Skillshare classes. For some of those that might be Notion templates for some of them might be PDFs and worksheets and bonus material. It's all on the website, it's all completely free and you can check it out with that link. Anyway. I hope you enjoyed the class. I'd love it if you can leave a review if you haven't already and hopefully see you in the next one. Bye bye. 18. Talk to the Camera: Welcome back. In this lesson, I'm going to give you some quick tips on how to improve your camera confidence and how to speak to the camera a little bit better. Now, this is something we all struggle with. No one finds it natural to speak to a camera as a completely inanimate object. It always feels really weird. People always feel, ''Oh my God I hate the sound of my voice when I hear myself on camera.'' People often think you know what? I'm reasonably comfortable speaking in a group setting or speaking in a class or presenting in real life or even speaking on Zoom calls. It's just something about hitting the Record button on a YouTube video that makes me freeze up and makes my life very, very sad.I have a few different ways of dealing with this. We're actually working on a course about this which will be linked somewhere over here at some point but basically, Number 1, it just comes with practice but you already knew that. Number 2 is we want to figure out baby-step ways to improve our camera confidence. One of those is actually to send more video messages to our friends. What we can do is we can just open the camera. I don't know, just make a video message selfie mode on the camera being like, hey, Gareth has going, I just wanted to say, thanks for all the work on the creator MBA course that we're working on I just want to check in to see how things were and yeah, have a good day. Whatever, anything like that you can send to your friends, you can send to your co-workers, you can send to your colleagues. It's things like that. The more practice we have talking to an inanimate screen or lens and delivering information, or it's saying, we want to say in the same way as if we would if that person was standing in front of us, the more comfortable we're going to see him on camera. Tip Number 3 is that we want to be thinking of the camera as if they were a person. Now there's two ways that I go about this. I have two minds to two different approaches to talking to a camera. The first one is the coffee conversation. It's when I usually have a glass in my hand and I'm talking like this, hey friends, welcome back to the channel. In this video, I want to share my thoughts about why I decided to quit medicine. To be honest, it was a bit of a difficult decision. I have been really struggling with this for the last seven years, but ultimately I decided that this is what I wanted to do and it's this slightly lower energy, a bit more loci as if I'm confiding in a friend, I'm treating the camera as if the camera was my therapist. Almost. The camera's not going to respond to me but it's like my therapist, I'm pouring my heart out and I'm doing it as if we're just sitting across a coffee table. Right now the camera is about our hands, hands, breath, hands length away from me and I can talk in that way. The other way to talk on camera and this is what's more popular amongst YouTubers is to slightly dial up the energy. If my usual energy like right now, in speaking is maybe a five out of 10 when I'm presenting a YouTube video, I'd probably go up to about a seven out of 10. This is what that looks like. That doesn't necessarily mean that you have to speak faster, but it does usually mean that you're coming across just a little bit higher energy, a little bit more confident using a little bit more in the way of hand gestures and stuff like that. Now if you were sitting across a coffee shop for me and I was talking like this, it would be a bit weird. It would probably sound a little bit preachy but generally, when we see stuff coming across on camera, by default, we imagine it as being a slightly lower energy level. To compensate for that we go for a slightly higher energy level while we're talking to the camera but to be honest when it comes to speaking to a camera everyone has their own style and any style can work. What I would recommend is that if you don't yet know what your camera personality is you watch a lot of YouTubers and see who you want to copy. One example that I will say is that Peter McKinnon, the YouTuber, was who I wanted to copy with my camera style. I thought I want to be the Peter McKinnon of medical school because he was very dynamic, he was engaging, he was fun and my failure to imitate Peter McKinnon ended up morphing into my own personal style. You're never really going to quite copy someone because you can never really copy someone's style word for word but you can take inspiration from that style and even attempting to copy someone's style will eventually result in your own style coming through. One quick thing that I do when speaking to a camera's if I make a mistake I usually clap my hands or snap my fingers because a, that makes it easier to see the waveform spike when I'm editing video if I'm editing the video myself. But it also functions as a bit of a psychological research. It also functions as a bit of a psychological reset. It helps me think I can just snap. I can take a breath and I can continue. What you don't want to do is snap and then what you don't want to do is snap and what you don't want to do is snap it. What you want to do is leave a pause before and after you snap because then, it's much easier in the edit to string those things together. Whereas if I snap and immediately go into it then when you're editing your own videos you realize it's actually quite hard to edit out that pause, which is why it's okay to pause when you're filming a video that's going to be edited. Pauses can always be removed in the edit after the fact. Now I've got a bunch more tips on how to speak more comfortably to a camera but what I'm going to do is I've already made a YouTube video about this called Secrets of Public Speaking or something like that. I'm just going to include that video in this class wholesale. That's another 10 tips on how to get better at public speaking, which also applies to getting better at speaking to a camera. I hope you enjoy that. When I was younger, I used to be really, really bad at public speaking. I was super shy, I never wanted to put myself out there and I was really terrible at talking to pretty girls, but over time I've improved at two of those things. In this video, I'm going to be giving you my nine top tips for how to be a better public speaker. Let's get into it. Tip Number 1 is get the **** out of your own head. When we're talking in front of people, public speaking is the biggest fear in the world outside of spiders or death or something but when we're public speaking we can often feel like there's all this judgment that's being cast on us and that people are here to judge the things that we're saying. It's very easy for us to get into our own heads and to worry about the things that we're saying and to worry about how we're coming across and worry about our body language and whether we're sweating through our top All of this stuff gets in the way of giving a good talk, giving you a good speech. For me whenever I'm giving a speech or even talking to a camera, I always try to remember that it's not about me. The audience does not care about me. They do not give a toss. The audience only cares about themselves you, the viewer as much as you like me and care about me potentially, you actually don't really care about me. You only care about yourself. You care about the, hopefully, the value that I can provide to you. Therefore, for me to be in my own head worrying about how I'm coming across is counterproductive because it gets in the way of the message that I'm trying to give. Keeping that in mind that no one cares about us, get out of our own head, and let's make it all about the audience. I found that really helpful. Tip Number 2 is to speak through a smile. Now I'm going to show you what this looks like before and after I apply this technique. While doing that I'm going to tell you about our sponsor for this video which is Audible. If you haven't heard by now, Audible is the absolute best place to get audiobooks from anywhere. Audible is probably the single app that's most changed my life. I often say to people that if I could only have one subscription in the world it would be a subscription to Audible That's me talking normally without speaking through a smile. Now I'm going to say basically the same thing, but I'm going to have a smile on my face while I'm saying it. Hopefully, you will see the effect that it has. Audible is genuinely one of the most life-changing apps that I've got. I listen to Audible for many, many, many hours each day and these days now that I'm actually leaving the house a little bit more, I'm going in the car going on road trips going on picnics. It's like enjoying my hot girl summer as it were. I've always got audible as a companion these days I'm listening to a book called unconditional parenting, which is all about parenting. It's really, really interesting even though I'm not yet a parent. With that, hopefully you have seen that when I'm speaking through a smile, hopefully, I come across as much more engaging and enthusiastic rather than when I'm talking like this because I could be saying exactly the same thing, but as soon as I start speaking through a smile, hopefully it just sounds a little bit better. This is an absolutely fantastic hat for getting better at public speaking. Tip Number 3 is to avoid the British Airways mode of speaking. This is what I mean by the British Airways mode of speaking. If you're looking for a great way to experience audiobooks this summer then head over to audible.com/aliabdaal. If you're an Amazon Prime member, you'll actually get 53 percent off your Audible subscription for the next four months. This is an incredible deal and it's an absolute no-brainer. That is my British Airways voice. This is the voice that a lot of us put on. Sometimes I call it the primary school teacher voice as well. It's a voice that a lot of us fake put on when we're giving a speech because we're thinking of it as giving a speech and it's like, when I am giving a speech, I have to talk in this exaggerated sound like an air hostess or like an announcement on an airplane flight would sound. But if you're still watching this, hopefully you've realized that that is not the way we want to be spoken to; we don't like it when people talk to us in this fashion. To get over this, like sing-songy, British Airways, primary school teacher way of speaking, what I try and do, when I'm speaking, I'm going downwards. If I tell you about Audible while speaking and going down, it might sound something like this. Genuinely Audible is one of those absolutes most changed my life. I've been listening to fantasy audio books for absolutely years now. Since 2017, I've listened to Audible for around three hours a day. Particular favorite of mine are the Mistborn Series by Brandon Sanderson, Stardust by Neil Gaiman, also a great public speaker, incredible for listening to, if you want to improve your public speaking. But if that sounds up your street, then head over to audible.com/aliabdaal, and if you're a prime member, you'll get 53 percent off your first four months. That was me talking and not British Airways mode. I was talking in a more matter of fact fashion and aiming to go down rather than talking in a sing-song fashion and aiming to go up at the end of a sentence. That's just something to keep in mind. Avoid speaking like a primary school teacher. Avoid speaking like a British Airways flight attendant. Be yourself and try and speak how you speak when you are around your friends, which is not in this sing-songy fashion. Tip Number 4, is let your personality shine through. Again, one of the issues that we have when we're public speaking is we think of it as I'm giving a speech and we don't want to be thinking of it as I'm giving a speech. Because then for some reason we feel all stuffy and we feel formal. Even if it's something like a business presentation or a presentation at work. I've given so many presentations, at medical conferences and at teaching sessions in the hospital, and I always try and let my personality shine through and try and be a little bit more casual and a little bit less formal. If I'm at a medical conference, even if I'm talking about something very serious, the audience wants a personality, the audience wants banter, they want humor; they want to have a good time, to an extended they care about the content of the speech. But broadly, they all just want to have a good time and they all just going to stay there sweltering in the heat. I was at a conference in Singapore a few years ago, sweltering in the heat and they just want to have a good time. When you let your personality shine through when you're on your own unapologetically weird self, the audience really appreciates that and so whenever I think of public speaking or speaking in general, I think that I should not stifle the quirky aspects of my personality. Maybe I'll throw in a toilet joke here and there. Maybe I'll reference Harry Potter. Maybe I'll talk about Disney songs or how I was singing in the shower the other day. That kind of stuff sounds a bit trite and trivial right now. But generally it helps my personality hopefully shine through videos and through speaking, ramping that up slightly rather than dampening it down, which is what we're prone to do in a public speaking. Think that's the way forward. Tip Number 5, for public speaking, is try and add banter and humor and stories to the stuff that you're doing. Again, we're is getting outside of this mindset that I'm giving a speech, therefore, I have to be formal and I have to be boring. Instead think that really the only thing the audience cares about is having fun. How do we make the audience have fun? We can add jokes, we can add banter, we can add storytelling. This is not a video about storytelling. Maybe we'll do one in a little while, but fantastic book by one of my friends, Matthew *****. It's called a Storyworthy. It's absolutely incredible, my favorite book of 2020. That is basically all about how to tell a better story. In fact, that's also available on Audibles so go to audible.com/aliabdaal to get your audio book of Storyworthy by Matthew ***** if you want to learn to be a better storyteller in every way. Tip Number 6, is don't read from a script. Whenever we're reading from a script, it's going to sound absolutely terrible. Like there is no way to make reading from a script sound not like reading from a script because we all go into this reading thing. We've all seen people, speeches, and stuff where they look down, they've got their notes and the way they deliver it, it's obvious that they're reading from a script, they automatically go into British Airways mode. This is basically all the way forward. Certainly for me I find that whenever I'm having to read from a script to make a YouTube video, it's just not fun and it sounds absolutely terrible and it takes me absolutely ages to get it right because I just hate reading from a script. What I would recommend is, if you're giving a speech, just use some talking points. It's useful to have an outline. It's useful to know how you're going to start and how you're going to finish. It's useful to know what broad talking points you want to hit. But beyond that, I think there is a degree like it's very possible to over prepare a speech. As soon as you get into that realm of over-preparing, you're going to sound like you're reading from a script and that's not going to be particularly engaging. Don't worry about the script. Focus on the bullet points. Tip Number 7, is to just speak louder. Generally when we're giving a speech, we want to be adding a little bit of energy because people want to have fun ultimately, they don't really care about the content. They just want to have fun and a super easy way of adding energy to whatever we're saying is to just speak a little bit louder. The way that I think of this is that my normal speaking style is about a five out of 10. This is about five out of 10. This is how I'd be talking normally if I was hanging out with friends. But I'm going to ramp it up to a seven out of 10, if I'm giving a video. This is me talking at a seven out of 10. Certainly, if I was doing a speech in public, I'd be talking at this pace or this kind of loudness rather. This loudness would be weird if I was sitting across from someone at a coffee table or if I was at a dinner party, this loudness would probably be a little bit excessive. But it's a YouTube video. I'm giving a speech. Or if I'm giving a speech in public, I would ramp up my loudness to a seven out of 10 rather than a five out of 10, which would be my baseline. Tip Number 8, is to speak slower and pause more. This is something that I really struggle with. I did a course called Ultra Speaking, which is really good link the video description if you want to check it out. Then of course, the main thing that the instructors were telling me on this is that look, you just needs to be more okay with taking time. Be more okay with speaking slower, and be more okay to take pauses. Because a pause to the audience does not sound nearly as long as a pause to us. If I'm actually giving a speech rather than trying to race through a YouTube video at breakneck speed the pauses are what allows the audience to appreciate the thing that we've just said. The guys are ultra speaking. The way they talk about it, it's like when we're speaking, if you imagine a snow globe, when we're speaking, it's like we're shaking up the snow globe. Then when we pause, we're giving time for the snow to settle. I still suck at this; it's a work in progress, but certainly I found that my speeches and my talking in public becomes more powerful when I'm more confident that I can speak slower and I can take more pauses. Otherwise, the thing that I struggle with is that, in my head where I'm like, Oh, my God, what if what I have to say isn't really valuable? I'm trying to respect people's time. Therefore, I'm going to race through this as quickly as I can so that they can go on and do something more interesting. But I'm having to rewire my brain into thinking, no, people are here, they want to listen to me. I am providing value, and it's actually better for the audience, if I slow down a little bit, if I let this snow globe things settle and if I take a little bit more pauses. Finally Tip Number 9, something that I find helpful is to actually play public speaking games. Again, my friends at Ultra Speaking, they have this ultra speaking simulator that gives you lots of interesting games. I'll show you what one of these looks like. This is Triple Step, which is one of my favorite games. The idea here is that we've got to give a speech about a random topic. Then we've got to incorporate the words from that are appearing on screen as they're coming on screen. This is hard, but it's also quite fun to do. I enjoy doing this sometimes in my spare time. I'm going to do it on the maximum settings. Let's do 30 seconds integrating eight words into it and it's going to suggest me a title. Let's see what this looks like. The color of life. To be honest, I think the color of life is blue. Blue is my favorite color. I find that, for example, if I'm running a marathon, I see the blue sky and it really helps me focus if I roll the windows down in my blue Tesla, again, it allows me to feel the breath in my face, even when I'm going to the toilet or having just been for a round of horse racing, I just feel that color blue everywhere around me. It's like an engine. When you have the perfect color, you can feel as if you're like a Ferrari engine driving down the road. Even if you're voting for popsicles or whatever, it's just the color in the sky. It feels like the color of luck. That's scary. But these games, you can get an Ultra Speaking. They're free, pull the link in the video scripts if you want to check it out. This is fun, good way of improving public speaking. Those are my nine tips at getting better at public speaking. If you liked this video, you might like to check out this video over here, which is the lessons that I've learned from the last four years of being a public speaker on YouTube. Those are general life lessons that being a public figure, dealer celebrity has taught me. Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you in the next video. Bye-bye. Those were a bunch of different tips on how to get more confidence speaking to a camera. When you first start filming videos, it's probably going to feel really bad. It's probably going to feel like you're waiting through trickle because it's just such a nightmare trying to film the video. But that's okay. We all make mistakes. I still make mistakes all the time while filming content. I've been doing it for five years. It's okay. You just sort it out in then edit. It's like writing. The first draft of writing is pretty crap. But then in the edit is where it starts to get good. Similarly, when you're speaking to a camera, it really doesn't matter how many mistakes you make because you can always just get rid of all of them in the edit. Hopefully that's helpful. That was some tips on how to get better at cameras speaking, and I will see you in the next lesson. Bye-bye. 19. Set Up Your First Video: Now we're getting into the fun stuff and we're actually going to be filming our first video. In this lesson, we are going to be setting up for our first video, and we're not going to use this setup because this setup is a bit unfair and not very beginner-friendly. Instead, I'm going to walk around and I'm going to find somewhere totally random, probably this one where it's just basically a desk. It's nice because we have a bit of a window behind us. But otherwise, there's not much going on here. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to show you cinematic mode. You know what? Let's actually just use normal mode. Cinematic mode? You know what, I'm going to use normal mode, whatever, it doesn't really matter. I'm going to use normal mode, and we're just going to set up the phone and we're going to talk about how we're actually getting the setup. Before we do it, what is the setup? Well, the setup is an iPhone 13 Pro with a random Amazon tripod phone mount thing and this Manfrotto mini tripod thing, which I got off Amazon as well. You can get any phone tripod. They're super cheap. What we're going to do for audio is we are going to use our Rode VideoMicro. Please, if I can grab it. Thank you. This is the Rode VideoMicro, which is again $40 from Amazon. We're going to plug it into the top and we're going to, oops, thank you very much, plugged it in via the lightning port into our iPhone. There we go. Where is the pluggy thing? That red cable. Thank you very much. We are going to be just basically plugging into the microphone. There'll, of course, be links to all of this stuff in the resources' area. This microphone is $40, the cable is about $5, this tripod at maybe $30, $70 setup, we have what is going to be a pretty reasonable filming setup and so this is the gear that we are now going to be using. This is fun. I'm excited about this. I'm going to set up the tripod first, and we're going to see how we can make this background look not awful. Currently, this looks pretty bad because there's too much going on. I wonder if we actually discussed straight. How am I setting this up? I do want a table in front of me because when I show the items, this is your table. Maybe we'll move this a little bit further back, oh God, another way. How's that? That could work reasonably well. Annoying thing about this mic is that I can't really see myself. Here, I want to get my phone up to some high level. What I'm going to do is take some Amazon boxes that we've got lying around and just like there we go. That's a pretty junky *** setup. But I'm sure it will get the job done because we are beginners after all and as long as we are making the videos, it doesn't really matter what we are. I'm happy with the kind of high level of this right now, although I would actually like the table to be more visible because I want to show the item and then put it down and so right now this view is not showing the table. I need to probably move the camera a bit further back, which is annoying because it's going to be the audio worst. But what else? We really are just working with what we've got. Does this work? [inaudible] I think it will work. Good. I think we're getting somewhere. I think this is good. This works nicely. I'm happy with the general framing. My head is just brushing the top of the frame. We can see my table so that when I talk about the gear that I'm going to be reviewing for the video, I can lean forward, I can talk to the camera like this. I need to make sure I'm looking at the lens rather than at myself because that looks weird, and I can have stuff on the table. Now we need to figure out we've got the gear, we've got the framing. We now just need to make the background look a little bit nicer and the key thing to making the background look a little bit nicer is just like cleaning it up a little bit. We can see that random coat needs to go. There's some boxes there, there's some boxes here. I'm just going to do my best to clean this up so that it doesn't look so atrocious. Here's what that looks like. Great. Now this background is so much cleaner than what it looked like before. We're going to do a little before, and after. I don't know what that's going to look like in post, but this is starting to look pretty reasonable. Now the things that I want to do is I could just film the video like this. This looks reasonable. No one's going to complain if they see a Le Creuset Harry Potter review, what's its face? Let's get my products. I could film the video like this if I wanted to, but I actually do want to do a little bit of modifying of the background just to, [inaudible] that box is a bit annoying, well, it's hidden by my chair anyway, modifying in the background is to make things look a little bit better. We said the trial factor was books, plants, and a lamp. We don't have any lamps that are easily movable, so not going to bother with that, but I am going to stick a plant or two in the background. We can see what that looks like. I don't really like the fact that there's obviously some office-looking fire door. I want to see if I can put a plant in that corner over there. Just stick a plant in there just to add good vibes. Let's try that and see how it looks. Navigating my way through this office. What kind of plants should be used? I think this plant would be good because it's quite tall. Well, it's self-contained. Good. I think house plants like this, it just like so good. Just making any background looks so much better. Does that work? It's not work in the background. It does but another general principle which I learned from Peter McKinnon through watching a bunch of videos, is that you ideally don't want to have stuff coming like sprouting from your body or sprouting from your head. Right now if I film the video like this, like my body is half covering the plant and half not. I do want to move it a little bit more in this direction unless I can potentially move this drawer unit over here and shove the plant over here. Would that work? Would that look good? That's looking reasonable. This background is now automatically more interesting because we have a plant. I think that's nice. There's not really a lot that I can do about that fire door, keep locked. Is there anything I can do about that? No, there is not, but I can get rid of this all-dotted green screen. This is looking okay. What else can we do with this background? To be honest, I think not a lot. I think we are kind of stuck now because we've got the plant. I could put a bookshelf there, but I'm not allowed to cover the fire door. Do we have anything else that we can use to add vibes? I think plants. Fake plants are good vibes, especially in the foreground, so I could stick a fake plant like over here somewhere and this would be a nice little like, I don't know. Oh, over here. That works nicely. Now I want to talk about the video. I've got little fake plant over here is a bit of foreground object. We've got plant over there, in the background and now I can just say my video like this. This is actually, I think, a pretty reasonable setup. I do tend to have a tendency to move around a bit. We might see that yoga mat, but I don't really care at this point. I am now happy with my setup to film my first YouTube video. That's how we took a random spot of the office, made it look a little bit nicer by basically just cleaning up the background. We've got the setup, we've got everything ready to go and now I need to fill my video based on the script that I wrote a few lessons ago. Thank you for watching and see you in the next lesson. 20. Shoot Your First Video: [MUSIC] Welcome back. It's now time to film our video. You can see what I've done is I've taken my laptop and I'm sticking it in front of me so that it can't be seen in the frame of the iPhone. I'm going to bring up my script. I've got my script in front of me. I'm going to zoom in a bit so I don't have to worry about it. Type line title is LeCruset Harry Potter Dutch oven review. Thumbnail, will think about it in a little while, but I've got some ideas. Now, I've got my hook intro. Hey, friends. Welcome back to the channel. I've got the main body where I'm talking about caveats, design, tech specs, what it's like to cook with them, and closing thoughts, and I've got an end screen where I point to my latest video. What I'm going to do is I'm going to hit record on the iPhone. I've got it on cinematic mode so that it will artificially blow the background a little bit, but if your phone doesn't have cinematic mode, that's totally fine. It doesn't really matter. I'm just going to run through and show you how I would film this video in real time. No cuts or anything like that. By the end of this video, once you've seen what I've done, I want you to also go out and film your first video. If you can. That would be ideal. Let's do this. I'm going to hit record. This is attempt number 1 at this video. Now, actually microphone-wise, I'm actually recording our audio from this road, road video micro. This lavalier microphone is actually just to record with this proper camera, so you can ignore the fact that this lavalier exists. This is what it would look like if you had a lavalier that was like underneath your shirt, snaking around here and plugging into the iPhone if you really wanted it to, but [NOISE] let us go. Hey, friends. Welcome back to the channel, or should I say welcome to the channel? Because this is my first video, this is Ali's kitchen. In this video, we are reviewing this LeCruset Harry Potter signature edition Dutch ovens. These are expensive. They're a bit absurd, but I thought, you know what? I'm getting into cooking and I freaking love Harry Potter and so I thought why not? Let's find a way to buy these and then to cook with them. Here I am making a review because to be honest, I looked on YouTube and I couldn't find many reviews about it. What's coming up next? Now, quick caveat before I start the review. I'm a total beginner to the world of cooking and I actually don't know anything about how to review cooking gear. If you're looking for a pro chef to review these, I'm sorry, you're out of luck, but this is a beginners review of the topic, or should I say of the products. As I said, I bought these because I was in the market for a Dutch oven. [inaudible] the four-hour chef, and I bought the Harry Potter editions and paid extra for them because [LAUGHTER] it's Harry Potter and I freaking love Harry Potter. I have used this one so far to make a corned spaghetti bolognese, which turned out really nicely. I've used this smaller one to make a vegan fajitas, which also turned out really nicely. I'm a huge fan of cooking in them. Let's get started with the design. Now, the design is pretty nice. These are pretty standard Dutch oven from LeCruset. LeCruset famous for apparently having some of the best Dutch ovens in the market. What size is this? Twenty six centimeters? I'll go over sizing in the next one actually. They are available in red and blue. In red, you only have available this larger size, which I believe is the 26 centimeter one, although let's just double-check to make sure. Yes, 26 centimeters indeed. This size, it's pretty heavy, it's pretty hefty, it's how hefty you'd expect a Dutch oven to be. The little one is 20 centimeters. It's a nicer size for cooking for a small number of people. I think this is more small family vibes, whereas this huge one is more like if you're cooking for a party, I suspect, although I don't know. I'm not really a pro, but the real cool part of these things is the lids. For the red one, you get this lid which has LeCruset, and if I hold it up like this, you'll see it's got the glasses over here. It's got the hair over here, and the lightning scar, which is nice. The lightning scar acts as a bit of a lid. [NOISE] That's really cool. Then the little one is Quidditch. I don't know if you can see on the camera, but we've got LeCruset at the top. We've got these three hoops when they're playing Quidditch and we have the golden snitch as a bit of a handle. That's actually a pretty cool part of it. To be honest, this is why I bought the collection. I also got a cast iron pan which is 26 centimeters, which then fits this lid. I've got that in series, which is the red color as well. Now it's as if I have multiple items in the Harry Potter collection, even though I've only got one lid, so that's pretty ideal [NOISE]. Designs as well, we've got the handles which was convenient, and obviously, if you're sticking these in the oven, the handles do get really hot because this is enameled cast iron, I do believe, but the way it works is that, well, if you stick an oven hat on it, or oven handles or anything like that, it becomes much easier to carry so that you don't burn yourself, obviously. Fine. Let's talk about the technical specifications. I've written tech specs in my script, but I went a bit off script and I've already discussed these, so I'm just going to cut that from the script. I'm just not going to bother with that. [NOISE] That was a little bit about the design. Let's now talk about what it's like to cook with these items. Like I said, I made a big corn bolognese in this. I cooked for around about 22 people, managed to make a whole pot full of corn bolognese. I think I got like four cans of canned tomatoes, or pasta sauce or something. Put it all in, put a little corn mince because it's vegan, or vegetarian or something like that. I chopped up some celery, chopped up some carrots, and I shoved them all in there. Then I actually had this all prepared like an hour or so before the guests arrived and this was just simmering on the little stove top. By the way, I was using an induction cooker, and these are induction cooker friendly. They work with all sorts of cookers. It was just simmering away and it added a really nice smell when people came in and they saw it simmering away as people came into the house for the party and they were like, what is that? It created a really good vibe. It was super easy to clean up afterwards as well. I think the fact that this is enameled cast iron means that it's quite easy to clean. I just use a little bit of soap and just rinsed it out a bit. Didn't put it in the dishwasher because apparently you're not supposed to do that with cast iron, although to be honest, I'm not sure about what that's like with enameled cast iron, but it was amazing. It was very easy to clean and brand new. Now I'm really looking forward to cooking with this again. That's what it was like cooking with this one I thought the size was perfect for a whole ton of bolognese that was servings for about 20 people. Although at the end, there wasn't really much leftover. If you're trying to serve for 40 people, this is probably not a good size, but 20 people, bolognese where you're making pasta on the side in a different dish. This worked really nicely. Now, let's move on to the 20 centimeter one. I cooked some chicken for heater mix in this. I got some garlic, and salt, and onions, and chopped them up, shoved them in there. Used some Mexican fajita mix and chopped up some vegan chicken, chucked it all in there, and some bell peppers, chucked it all in there. What else do I have? I think I had a few tomatoes as well, chucked it all in there. This worked nicely. I was feeding four people; me, David, Lauren, Lucia. Yeah, four people. To be honest, I probably could have made more. We finished it all quick, but everyone had two or three fajitas each, and the food then finished, and I was like, I'm actually feeling a little bit more hungry. I wished I could've cooked a bit more, but when I was cooking those, it was about half full, so I could have easily gotten more value out of this had I just added in more bell peppers or more fajitas or more chicken bits or more whatever. [NOISE] Overall amazing experience of cooking with that one as well. Again, super easy to clean because enameled cast iron and everyone was blown away because this lid looks pretty sick when you bust it out and stick it on your table. This is probably the one that I'm going to be using more on the daily to cook because this one is more party-sized when I'm cooking for a large amount of people, but to make balls, to make stews, to make soups, this is the one that I'm going to go for, [LAUGHTER] [NOISE] and it's the one I find myself reaching for when I think about doing any cooking with it. Now, let's go into closing thoughts. [NOISE] Now, in terms of closing thoughts, to be honest, these are really nice. This was 360 pounds and this was like 280 pounds or something like that. I checked in the LeCruset shop to see how much the non-Harry Potter versions were. The non-Harry Potter version of this was 300 pounds and this was like 220. I was paying about an extra 20 percent more for the benefit of the Harry Potter branding and I felt personally for me, that was a price worth paying. Since I've gotten these, I also got the spatula set and I also got the mug sets. By the way, if you're interested in a review of those, leave a comment down below, and I'll review the Harry Potter mugs and the Harry Potter spatulas. I'm trying to get the Casserole Voldemort dish as well, but that was out of stock. I found that because it's just the Harry Potter's vibes and I freaking love Harry Potter, it has encouraged me to do more cooking now that I have these, but it does come at that expense of the extra 20 percent, although LeCruset lifetime guarantee, these apparently last for generations. I'm hoping my kids and our kids' kids will also be fans of Harry Potter so they can use these items as well. [NOISE] If you want to check them out, I'll put links in the video description to the LeCruset website where you can check these out and you can buy them if you like. [NOISE] That's the end of my review. I hope you enjoyed this. If you did click over here, which is my latest upload. I'm hoping to do more reviews and stuff on the channel. If you have any requests for ideas of content that you'd like to see, please do leave a comment down below. Hit the subscribe button if you aren't already and if you want to see more cooking theme stuff. Thanks for watching and I'll see you hopefully, in the next video. Bye-bye. I'm actually sweaty [LAUGHTER]. It's actually quite hard doing a review of something that you're not that familiar with. I'm going to stop recording on the iPhone. That's it. You hopefully saw, as I was doing that, that I was making a bunch of mistakes, but I was just going with the flow, correcting myself, going a little bit off script, but roughly following the talking points that I was talking about, and I did cut out the technical bit of video because I realized I can't be bothered to talk about it. That's video number 1 down, 49 more videos for me to go as I improve my own ability to make videos. Then I'll start worrying about actually making the videos valuable to the audience. Next video, we're going to be editing this up. Thanks for watching and see you in the next lesson. Bye-bye. 21. Shoot Your B-Roll: [MUSIC] Welcome back. At this point we have filmed our lesson. We still got the sweat stains, the pit stains on our T-Shirt underneath a hoodie. Now we're going to film a little bit of B-roll. B-roll basically meaning close-up shots or rather B-roll, defined as anything that goes on top of the footage. You have A -roll which is where you see the person talking to a camera and you have B-roll where you cut away to other things that are happening. For this, I'm just going to shoot some B-roll right here where I can just get some close-up shots again with my phone of the different elements of the Le Creuset Harry Potter pots. I really should get this whole class sponsored by the Le Creuset. I'm literally just going to go on my phone and film random from running with the B-roll. I'm not it's not going to go, you showed us in some motor video mode, it goes video mode. I'm just going to go video mode, hit Record and just do a little bit of a close-up E-type stuff. Just a little bit of movement here. [NOISE] I quite like overhead shots as well [NOISE] so I can show this. I can stand up, my overhead short a bit more legit. [NOISE] Now it's a nice close-up and we're just adding a little bit of dynamism to the shot. If I want, I can really go fancy on the shove there's a fake plant over there in the corner, to be like, "Oh hello." Now we have a shot. [NOISE] Let's do a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Oh hello, 26 France. I'm going to do the same thing with the other one. Made Made in France, very nice. Le Creuset and I can show you these. Show a good close up with the golden stitch thing. Show close-up with the golden stitch thing. Nobody concerned about what's in the background. Now I can sit back down and I can do a little bit of a handheld B-roll like this. Boom. What a pro. This is going to look so bad. But to be honest, for beginners at this point, we're not doing anything fancy. I'm using my chair as a slider, [inaudible] clever. Hear is one way you can look to minimize camera shake. It's like tuck your elbows in and then hold the phone out like this because what you don't want to do is have your phone far away from you because it's going to shake. Tuck your elbows in and try and get more than one contact point with the device. I'm pushing it in a little bit. I call it the ninja walk, when you're holding a camera like this and you're walking like a bit of an Ninja. [LAUGHTER] None of it is particularly perfect, like a slider or a gimbal would be, but it just adds a little bit of flair to our video. Let's go close up with this. Go that way. [NOISE] Hello, do the same with this one. I'm just trying to be a little bit creative, just trying to get some Bureau shots. To be honest, I think that's fine. Then we'll do some shots of this side-by-side. That's it. 2.5 minutes of B-roll filming. [NOISE] I was just rolling the camera because I know in the edit I can just chop the bits out that I need to stick in my video. [NOISE] That's us done with filming B-roll. Again, we don't really need to overthink this. Yes, if you're doing tech reviews, product reviews, and stuff, then having fancier B-roll does make for a more engaging video. Having some amount of B-roll makes a video generally better. But it depends on what your genre is, what your niche is, what your vibe is, what you're going for. There are plenty of people that have millions of subscribers and don't use any B-roll at all because it forces their personality, and actually the content is speaking for itself. It's not overly complicated. But some B-roll is usually better than no B-roll. That's it for this lesson. Let's now dive into the edit and see see you shortly. 22. Shoot Your Thumbnail: Welcome back. Let's now talk about thumbnails. Thumbnails are a ridiculously important part of what makes for a good video, good being defined as people click on it and people are watching it. In order for people to click on the video, they have to see the thumbnail, they have to see the title and they have to be sufficiently intrigued, and they have to want to click on it and then they click on it. A few things to keep in mind. The first one is that thumbnails are really important, but getting good at thumbnails is very much an art rather than a science. Like there is some science associated, but it's more an art than is a science. Secondly, getting good at thumbnails is a thing that will happen over time. Your thumbnails are not going to be amazing from day one because getting good at doing thumbnails requires a large amount of different skills like an eye for design, an eye for photo editing, an eye for how to actually take decent photos, how to think about what photo best summarizes the video, but in a way that doesn't quite summarize the video, but actually creates intrigue, and makes people who are searching or browsing for the video want to click on the video. There's all sorts of skills that go into it. The main point I want to make in this class is, please don't overthink the thumbnail thing. Again, this is one of the worst things you can do where you're thinking; "My God, thumbnails are so important, but because they're so important, I'm going to ramp up the pressure and the stress so much that I'm never going to film the video, I'm never going to shoot a thumbnail." It doesn't matter if your thumbnails are really bad initially, I promise they will get better over time. With that said, we're now going to go back in time and I'm going to show you exactly the process that we went through to shoot the thumbnails for this class, for the Le Creuset-Harry Potter pot product video thing. I'll be honest, this is a little bit all over the place, I would have liked it to be more structured. Then we were thinking should we reshoot this and make it more structured? But then we thought no, this is actually what our process looks like for creating thumbnails. It is a little bit all over the place, and so you'll get this idea of what it actually looks like to be like; "Okay we've done this video, now we need to figure our thumbnail, how are we going to do this?" I'm going to walk you through exactly what the thought processes for the shop placement, for the photos, whether we're choosing photos with me, photos without me, photos with the pots, and then how I'm editing those photos. Let's go back in time and I will see you in a little bit. So we have filmed the video, now we need to shoot a good thumbnail. So tip number 1 for this is actually take a photo for the thumbnail because the thumbnail is important. Even when you're starting out, it's good to get into the practice, into the habit of doing a proper thumbnail. What are the different ways that we can do thumbnail? Well, tip number 2 here is, do a little bit of market research. I've done a little bit of market research and I've seen that these thumbnails we have for these Le Creuset videos are not very good, but ultimately this is a product review. So the options I've got for a thumbnail are; I could take a photo with my phone of just the product, maybe it could be an overhead shot, maybe it could be a more close-up shot, something like that, or I could do a shot of like, I don't know, me holding a thumbnail, something like that. Probably what I'm going to do is I'm going to shoot a variety of different options and then once I bring them into the computer or edit on my phone or whatever, then I'll decide which of these thumbnails do I really want to go with. Let's just try a few of these. I'm going to start with the overhead. I'm going to see if is there anything I can do to make this look a little bit more interesting than just a boring white drop because this looks not very interesting right now, but maybe if I bring in a plant, stick it over there. Threes are nice, so maybe could do a photo like this. One thing to keep in mind is that the YouTube aspect ratio is 16 by 9. I think iPhone shoots four by three by default, and so I'm going to need to crop this out, at the top and the bottom in some editing software. Maybe if I shoot like this, that could be an option. In fact, I might as well just edit this right here. I want to crop it to an aspect ratio of 16 by 9, will it give me the option? Nine by 16, perfect. That actually looks pretty reasonable. This is crops to 9 by 16 aspect ratio and I don't really like that keyboard in the background. Is there a way I can get rid of that? We want to say 9 by 16, perfect. I'm going to do a little bit of editing on this. This is what that thumbnail would look like. It's reasonable, but actually it's a bit annoying that that keyboard is in the background, so you know what? I'm going to take advantage of that and actually move the keyboard out of the way and put something else in there that looks, I'll stick another plant, why not? Another fake plant, sorry about the fake plants. Now, if I imagine my field of view is something like this, could that work? Boom, let's see what that looks like. I'm just going to edit this on the iPhone again, and just crop aspect ratio, 9 by 16. Still looks a bit crap because we now we have these wires in the photo, but let's get rid of the wires completely. Look at this, could that work? To be honest, that could work as a reasonable looking thumbnail. We've got a screen recording of this anyway, so this works. At this point, we've got two potential thumbnail options. So I've done the overhead one. But as we can see from these, there's a bit of lights, we've got this top lighting. It doesn't really reflect too nicely, so I'm going to try this out. Let's see if we can do something else with these thumbnails. I like the idea of doing a close-up, but currently this background is just really awful. I don't want my thumbnail to look bad because the background is awful, so what can I do? You know what? Let's take this outside as it were and let's see if I can do a decent thumbnails outdoors because we have a slightly nice background outdoors. Grab the other one. You might think, I'm spending a lot of time doing a thumbnail and it's only a thumbnail, but no, we never want to hear that phrase, only a thumbnail, because the thumbnail is arguably the most important part of the video because it's the thing that people see when they first. This could look nice. Yeah, this could look quite cool. I'm going to keep in mind the rule of threes, so I'm going to get a fake plant. Just generally, when you have three things in photo, it looks better than when you have two or because we like odd numbers. Let's take a photo here. Nice, so that does my overhead shot. Again, if I edit this for aspect ratio, edit, let's rotate and now let's 16 by 9. Here we go, something like that. That could be actually a pretty good thumbnail. If I saw that on YouTube, I might be thinking, reasonable looking thumbnail, why not? Well, that'll do for those thumbnails. Now, let's try and do some close-up ones. This doesn't take too long but it does involve putting a little bit more effort into a thumbnail than you would ordinarily think. Maybe we do actually add this thumbnail. It's not quite like a straight down shot, but it could work. Let's try that. Let's do a little bit of editing, edit, and 16 by 9, and just crop out. This could work, look amazing. But let's try this one as well. I'm going to rotate and then aspect ratio. In fact let's edit this one too, so we'll just rotate. Actually, I much prefer the natural light outdoors than indoors. Indoors, the light looks very fake, artificially thing, whereas if we flick, immediately, there's something about these thumbnails that just seem more legit and the other ones. I don't really like that one, actually quite like this. I think this is a really solid thumbnail. Let's edit this a bit more. Maybe we'll add a bit of rotation. That could work? That could be a good thumbnail. Let's see what other options do we have. The other option we have is actually just me taking a photo of myself holding up the things. Gollum, can I enlist your help please? I'm going to enlist the help of Gollum as a friend to take some thumbnails of me. Gollum, I just want you to snap some photos of me holding up these. Sure. But we want to keep in mind that the horizons needs to be straight, so we want to be at eye level. Yeah, something like this, where I'm maybe holding up something like this where I've got this one over here. I'm going to stick that over there. How is that looking? Yeah, looking good. [inaudible] something, a few of those, and if we can turn on cinematic mode as well or portrait mode on the iPhone, which blows the background. Let us see what that looks like. Should I do anything else, Gulam? I think you are good. This is the setup that we do for all of them like often we take 50 plus photos for each thumbnail. If you do not have a friend, you can set yourself up on a tripod. Oh, that could look quite nice, that looks pretty good. Yeah, I think that does us nicely for our thumbnails because it's getting cold. Thank you for the help, Gulam. Okay. Let's go inside and we'll just do a bunch of edits to these thumbnails. I'm going to leave these outside, that will be fine. Back into the warmth. What am I doing with these thumbnails? I quite like the ones that do not have the effect on them, so this is nice. I'm going to hit "Edit" on this. Again, I'm going to; aspect ratio is sixteen by nine for you. Oh, that is a bit annoying. When you are sixteen by nine, it means that the thing gets cropped out, let us try it for this one, this could look nice. I think 16:9 should make this reasonable, and this is always a danger when you are doing thumbnail photos that it is very easy to overcrop to not keep the 16:9 aspect ratio in mind. Although this looks pretty good, it actually does look really solid. Let us just do a minor bit of editing on here, contour light, no, definitely not. I don't want to use any of these fancy effects. But I think if I adjustments, Oh, here we go. Vivid, vivid warm, vivid cool, dramatic, dramatic warm, dramatic cool. I actually quite like dramatic cool. This is normal, this is vivid it is a bit much. [inaudible]. I like dramatic cool as a vibe. I'm just going to dial it too maybe I do not know 60 percent or something, and I think that looks reasonable. Now I have this as a thumbnail which is looking pretty good, or I have got this option. Either way, we now have two pretty reasonable looking thumbnails. Let me just see if I can edit this actually to give it some effect. I quite like vivid for this because it doesn't make the colors pop, so there we go, and we have just done some thumbnail editing. Now what I'm going to do is, I'm going to Airdrop this onto my MacBook. Let us open up these images. We have that as a thumbnail, and we have that as a thumbnail. Actually, to be honest, I think both of these look very nice. I like the one that has me in it, but I have got two thumbnail options and I can always if I really want to I can change up the thumbnail, but that is like a more advanced tip and trick. What I might do here, is I might just get feedback from some friends being like, " Hey, which of these things do you prefer as the thumbnail?" I don't know, either of these could work. Basically moral of the story, how do you shoot a good thumbnail? Well, you be intentional about it. You do a bit of market research to see what other thumbnails are there of the sort on YouTube. Number 2, you actually take some photos and it's worth taking lots of photos for the thumbnail until you land on the perfect one. There is no such thing as a perfect thumbnail, it probably could always be better, and often you don't know what is going to work as a thumbnail, but you just try and put yourself into the audiences eyes. On reflection for this particular video where I'm targeting such traffic, Le Creuset Harry Potter review. People probably do not want to see my face in it, they want to see the product itself. I'm probably going to go through the thumbnail that has the close-ups of the product, and I have done a bit of editing to make them pop a little bit more. To the thing we also want to keep in mind when it comes to a thumbnail is that people are scrolling very fast on their phones or on the computers through YouTube, and we want our thumbnail to catch their eye. Actually, let us look at this. If I do this particular video, Le Creuset Harry Potter. What do the thumbnails look like? Yeah, the thumbnail is optically good. Hopefully, mine will stand out. Oh, this is nice. That is a nice close-up of one of them.Other than that, the thumbnails are not amazing, so I'm not competing with very much that is going on here, but hopefully my thumbnail can be good. The other thing to keep in mind is just trying to get a variety of thumbnails. Yes, we did a bunch of different shots of me just holding it up in different positions. But we also did a close-up, we also did a oblique angle. Generally, you want to have a few different ideas of like, here are some possible thumbnails of this video. But again, this is a slightly getting good at thumbnails is a fundamental part of being a good and a successful YouTuber. We want to work on that skill over time, and through our part-time YouTube academy, we often interview big YouTubers and we always ask them, what do you wish you had known when he got started? They always say the importance of titles and thumbnails. Everyone wishes they would spend more time thinking hard about title and thumbnail and being aware rather than treating those as a bit of an afterthought. Hopefully, that is helpful. That is how you should get a thumbnail and take lots of photos, edit them to make them pop a little bit more. You can do that on your phone. You can find a Lightroom tutorial if you really want, and take a thumbnail on. Thanks for watching and we will see you in the next lesson, bye-bye. All right, so we are back in the future now. Hopefully, you saw that walk through of what it was like to shoot those thumbnails, and now we have a thumbnail for this video, which I think looks pretty reasonable. A few other points to mention about thumbnails. Firstly, it is pretty easy to know what the thumbnail would be for a product review if the video is like Le Creuset Harry Potter [inaudible] tradition Dutch over view. It is obvious that the thumbnail is going to have that product in it. Really, you have got fairly limited options for thumbnails there. It is like a shot with a product of myself where the product or show of the product with food. There is a limited sort of show selection. In a way, it is a lot easier to do a thumbnail for a video like that. But what if you are doing videos where it does not obviously land itself to a thumbnail. That is where it gets a lot hard to do the thumbnails. And that is where the art and the science really starts to come in. For example, let us say you are doing a video call and how much money I made in 2021. That is like [inaudible] going to be, it could just be a photo of me just sitting there doing this. It could be a photo of me doing this. Then using Canva or Photoshop, we add in some fake money falling down from the sky. It could be a photo of me doing this and some fire in the background with some money on fire. It could be a photo of me doing just looking at the camera, smiling at the camera with some $ signs in my eyes. There is lots of different stuff that thumbnail could be. And it is hard to know like this is not an easy thing. Like if there was an easy way to do thumbnails, more people would be very, very successful on YouTube because people like MrBeast said, the thumbnail is like 70 percent of the overall value of the video just because it is the main thing people see that dictates whether they are going to click on the thumbnail. But with all of these options, the other thing we want to keep in mind is that really your vibe attracts your tribe. And so if you look at other YouTube videos, there is companies like vidIQ and video creators that do analysis of thumbnails. And they will say that a thumbnail should have a shocked expression on your face. or like, oh my God! They will say that, hey, statistically thumbnails that show the whites of the eyes do better than thumbnails that do not. They say statistically thumbnails that have emotion behind them do better than those that do not. And yes, that is true, but we have to keep in mind that data is being skewed by the fact that YouTube skews quite young. And so, oh my God, like a thumbnail that appeals to, for example, a 10-year-old child will probably get more views than a thumbnail that is a top-down shot of a book, like some of my book club thumbnails because those are appealing to less of a mass market audience than generally, kids on YouTube Who have large amounts of time to watch content on YouTube and therefore spend large amounts of time clicking on stuff and therefore get all those views. The thing we want to keep in mind is that depending on the vibe, of the thumbnails. Yes, it is about optimizing the thumbnail for the individual video, but it's also about like what is the sort of channel you want to make? The sorts of thumbnails of a channel like Graham Stephan, which is like quite kind of almost mye, meaning he is quite like YouTube. He has thumbnail styles. If you compare it to a channel like Andre CIC [inaudible], that is like still kind of appealing to a younger crowd, but a little bit less, maybe a little bit more sophisticated. If I can use that word, then you look at a channel like Matt Developement where those thumbnails are pretty sophisticated, they are pretty minimalistic. They go with his designers study, they go with his vibe. They are not particularly like YouTube maybe, it does not have massive colors, or major, whatever fire in the background, he does not do that kind of thing. You look at a channel like pick-up lines and how hard thumbnails are like very nice aesthetic that clearly does not appeal to 9-year-old kids like some of MrBeast, thumbnails do. But it is a really nice aesthetic that appeals to her audience. Overtime we want to figure out like what is the vibe we want to create for our channel. And that kind of helps us narrow down the scope of what sort of thumbnails we are going to do. For my channel. I do not want to do thumbnails like MrBeast. I do not want to do thumbnails like Graham Stephan, but I do like the vibe of pick-up lines. I like the vibe of Marcela. I liked some of Peter McKinnon thumbnails. I like Becky and Chris thumbnail style. So it is like as, as I'm going through YouTube, I'm looking at channels and thinking, I really liked this thumbnail style. And then I'm trying to figure out what is my style based on? What is the vibe I want to create for my channel. This is again, a more advanced thing and I'm only mentioning it here because there is so much new to all of these topics. Like we could do a whole course on how to shoot thumbnails. And it still would not cover everything because it is not an exact science, it is an art and you get better at the art over time. But that is just another thing to keep in mind. Like if, for example, you are a thirty five-year-old business consultant targeting an audience of thirty four-year-old business consultants. You do not need to do fire in the background or like, oh my god, like reaction phase are using thumbnails. That is not going to appeal to the sophisticated nature of your crowd. If however, you are a gaming channel and you are appealing to 9-year-old then yes, maybe like, Oh my God, would like a screenshot of the game in the background and maybe some like fire emojis or whatever. Maybe that would appeal to the target audience of your channel. So a lot of this stuff that we discussed in a part-time YouTube Academy. And there is also much new ones behind all this stuff. And we have got more videos on our part time great Academy channel, which is coming up about, thumbnails, but basically moral of the story. Do not overthink it too much. It is a skill that will improve over time. And as long as you take a photo and edit it slightly, you are already ahead of the curve and your thumbnail is hopefully nice. I wish I could talk about thumbnails for hours and hours and hours, but that would be a whole course in itself. Maybe we will do a whole course on thumbnails. who knows? Anyway. Thank you for watching and I will see you in the next video. Bye bye. 23. Edit Your Footage: [MUSIC] All righty. Now, we get to the fun stuff and we get to actually editing this footage. Now, I actually have an entire course on how to edit and final cut, but I'm going to be using the free software iMovie, which I have basically never used before. I'm hopefully going to show that by just understanding the basic principles of editing, we can demystify editing and it becomes a thing that is not that hard broadly. Let's open up iMovie. I've already air-dropped my footage from the iPhone onto my computer, depending on what phone you're using, you can plug it in and just transfer the footage across, and hopefully, this will actually work. What's new? Cinematic mode. What else? I don't care. I'm going to click "File", New, iMovie Library, and we're going to say, Alis Kitchen. [NOISE] Great. I'm going to import media and I'm going to import my file and my B-roll. Now, the first thing I'm going to do is the A cut. I'm just going to blitz through what editing this actually looks like. The point of the A cut is we get rid of all the pauses. But I'm not going to explain all the things that I'm doing because I already have an entire course on this that you can follow and that'll be linked in the video description. We're basically going to drag and drop this into here, and now I'm going to zoom in. I just want to cut out all of the pauses. My final cut keyboard shortcuts don't work on this. I need to blade. [NOISE] How do I blade? Split Clip, command B. Good. I Understand. Command B, good. Delete. Nice. Hey, friends, welcome back to the channel or should I say, welcome to the channel because this is my first video? This is Alis Kitchen. In this video, we are reviewing this Le Creuset Harry Potter Signature Edition Dutch Ovens. These are expensive. They're a bit absurd but I thought, I'm getting into cooking and I freaking love Harry Potter and so I thought why not? Let's find a way to buy these and then cook with them. Here I am making a review because to be honest, I looked on YouTube and couldn't find many reviews about it. What I'm doing as I'm doing this is that I'm looking at the audio waveforms and I'm trying to figure out where are the massive pauses, so I can just cut out those massive pauses wholesale. I find a massive pause, I'm going to blade over there, and then I see over here that there's another big pause, so I'm going to delete that. Making reviews about it. Now, quick caveat before I start the review. Good. I'm sorry, you're out of luck but this is a beginner's review of the topic. How do I zoom in? No, I don't want to zoom in. I want to make this small. View. [NOISE] Or should I say of the products? [NOISE] Nothing happening there. Delete. As I said I bought these because I was in the market for a Dutch oven as per Tim Ferris [NOISE] Cool. [NOISE] What I'm doing is I'm just trying to find when I start talking so that I can just completely cut out all the poses. There are also apps that you do this. Recut and a Descript let you automatically get rid of pauses. But I'm just going to try and keep things as simple as possible. [NOISE] Delete. Good. They are available in red and blue. This is the 26 centimeter one. Although let's just double-check to make sure. [NOISE] I'm like I'm not even going to watch the whole thing. I'm just going to skim through this and I can just see on the waveforms exactly what's going on. The point of the first part is just to get rid of all the pauses. [NOISE] One lid so that's pretty ideal. [NOISE] It becomes much easier to carry so that you don't burn yourself. [NOISE] Now, you can see over here, if we zoom right into the waveform, you can see these little spikes. Now, the point of these little spikes, is that's when I've done this [NOISE] or that [NOISE] or whatever and that means I can just visually see where I've made mistakes and so I know I need to cut beyond those mistakes so that all the mistakes get cut out. Delete all that. [NOISE] I was looking for a mistake in that waveform over there but turns out that was just the [NOISE] spike from me putting the metal lid down, but that's fine. [NOISE] You can see, I've made lots of mistakes in quick succession here. I can see from the waveform that bump, bump, bump cold four mistakes in a row. Let's just get bit through those. [NOISE] Mistake over there. [NOISE] Cool. Now, I can just blade that and delete. Okay, nine minutes. Great. In nine minutes, we've done the first cut and we have chopped down a nine-minute video into a six-minute 57-second video. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go through each of the cut points and just make sure they're as tight as possible because I don't want to have any pauses at all in this video because getting rid of pauses is philosophically how we keep up engagement in our videos because when we pause in a video, that pause gets magnified in a way in the audience's mind, so I'm a fan of just chopping out all silence completely, unless it's specifically designed and used effectively. Hey, friend. At the start, there's too much pausing. I need to get rid of the [NOISE] and just go straight into hey, friends. [NOISE] There we go. I'm just going to look at each of the cuts and see whether the cut is tight. [BACKGROUND] That wasn't too tight. I want a tighter cut, so let's blade there and get rid of that.[BACKGROUND] Good. That's a sharp cut [BACKGROUND]. That is not a sharp cut. What I'm doing is as I'm scrubbing through, I've got audio skimming on iMovie. This will be a setting depending on whatever video editing app you're using. I'm just hearing for when I first start speaking and that is where I want to cut. [BACKGROUND]. That's fine. [NOISE] [BACKGROUND]. I don't like that pause. [BACKGROUND] I can get rid [NOISE] of some pauses at the end of the clip Number 1 and at the start of clip Number 2. [NOISE] [BACKGROUND] [NOISE] Nice. That's good [BACKGROUND] They are available in red. Good. [BACKGROUND] That's fine. Is 20 centimeters. [NOISE] [BACKGROUND] That's fine. [BACKGROUND] Fine. [NOISE] Now I'm really looking forward to cooking with this again. That's what it was like to think with this one. [BACKGROUND] Nice. This worked really nicely. [BACKGROUND] Nice. [BACKGROUND] That's reasonable. [BACKGROUND] That's was a lot of pause. [BACKGROUND] Let's get rid of the pause at the end. [BACKGROUND] That's fine. You can buy them if you like. That's the end of my review, I hope you enjoyed it. A bit of a pause at the end here. [BACKGROUND] Buy them if you like. [NOISE] Get rid of that 0.12 second pause. [NOISE] Out and you can buy them if you like. That the end of my review, I hope you enjoyed this. If you did click over it. [NOISE] Good. Basically we now have a six-minute and 55-second video with no pauses in-between the cuts. That is good. We're nearly done, to be honest. Now, what we need to do is add B-roll and add a bit of music and then we're sorted. Let's see. [NOISE] Hey, friends. Welcome back to the channel or should I say, welcome to the channel because this is my first video? This is Ali's Kitchen. In this video, we are reviewing these Le Creuset. To the channel because this is my first video. This is Ali's Kitchen. [NOISE] I'm going to hit "M" to add a marker here because when I say this is Ali's Kitchen, I want to pop-up text that says at Ali's Kitchen, but first I want to add the B-roll. I'm just using the marker thing to keep track of the fact that I have a marker here and then I want to add something to it for the downlink. Now, to add the B-roll, basically what I want to do is I want to set in and out points for each of the clips on my B-roll that I want to go into the video. Again, far more details on this in my actual Skillshare editing class on Final Cut, or you can just find a dedicated tutorial for whatever app you're using to edit. This is not that. This is just doing things quickly to make it easier to set in and out points. What I want to do is I want to zoom quite far in. What this is doing is converting this little thing. I can scrub through and I can see exactly what I was doing when I was filming the B-roll. Let's see, what are the shots that I want. [BACKGROUND] When adding B-roll, I'm not going to use the sound from the B-roll clip. In fact, what I'm going to do is I'm going to show waveforms and can I get rid of sound completely? Can I get rid of sound? Who knows? It doesn't matter. Then you see the weight for waveforms. I'm just going to delete the sound from this recording. [BACKGROUND] [NOISE] I'm setting using I to set an in-point. [BACKGROUND] [NOISE] [NOISE] That's an out-point. I'm going to drag this and stick it over here. I'm going to take the sound slider and drag it all the way down. Good. Here's what this looks like. Hey, friends. Welcome back to the channel or should I say welcome to the channel because this is my first video? This is Ali's Kitchen, in this video we are reviewing these Le Creuset Harry Potter Signature Edition Dutch ovens. These are expensive. [NOISE] That looks all right. Cool. That's a more B-roll. [BACKGROUND] [NOISE] I like this short bit. [BACKGROUND] [NOISE] Good. I've used my in and out points to select a clip of B-roll that I went from here and I'm going to drag it somewhere random, get rid of the audio. Then I'm going to figure out where I want to put. [BACKGROUND] That actually looks reasonable at that part of the video. [BACKGROUND] Let's find another bit of B-roll. [NOISE] That's nice. [NOISE] That's a good bit of B-roll that I want to show. Then I made up the [OVERLAPPING] Excellent. I've set the in and out points. I'm just going to chuck it in here somewhere. In fact, I'm going to put this fairly early on because the thing would B-roll is that at the start of a video it probably matters more because that's when we really need to engage the audience. Hey, friends. Welcome back to the channel or should I say welcome to the channel, because this is my first video? This is Ali's Kitchen. It doesn't quite work there. The first video. This is Ali's Kitchen. In this video, we are reviewing these Le Creuset Harry Potter Signature Edition Dutch Ovens. These are expensive. [NOISE] That looks pretty reasonable. They're a bit absurd but I thought, I'm getting into cooking and I freaking love Harry Potter and so I thought why not? Let's find a way to buy these and then cook with them. Here I am making a review because to be honest, I looked on YouTube and couldn't find many reviews about it. Now, quick caveat before. [NOISE] Cool. That's fine. Let's find some more B-roll. [BACKGROUND] [NOISE] That's a close-up. [NOISE] That'll do. Drug and drop. Stick that in here. [NOISE] Get rid of the sound. Quick caveat before I start the review, I'm a total beginner to the world of cooking. I actually don't know anything about how to review cooking gear. If you're looking for a pro chef. Cut. [NOISE] It's fancy. [LAUGHTER] That's very loud. Let's get rid of all the sound there. How to review cooking gear. If you're looking for a pro chef to review these, I'm sorry, you're out of luck. But this is a beginners review of the topic or should I say, of the products. Now, I accompanied by the term. Actually, I'll use the shot. This is nice. That's actually a nice shot for the opening of the video. I do like that because they show the both of them side-by-side. Hey, friends. Welcome back to the channel, or should I say welcome to the channel because this is my first video? Good. [NOISE] Should I say welcome to the channel because this is my first video? This is Ali's Kitchen. In this video we are reviewing these Le Creuset Harry Potter Signature Edition and Dutch ovens. These are expensive. [NOISE] Good. I have added all the B-roll that I want to. I could go through the video, add more and more of it, but you get the idea. I'm trying to keep things simple here. This is just our first video and so it doesn't really matter too much for you to spend absolutely ages trying to get this video right. I've added my A-roll, I've gotten rid of the pauses, I've made sure the cuts are tight, I've added in a bunch of B-roll at the start in the first minute or so, first 30 seconds of the video, just to make the video seem a little bit more interesting. Now, I am going to add some text. [BACKGROUND] This is Ali's Kitchen. Great. How do I add text? Text in video editing software as known as titles. Here we go. Looks fancy. Why not? Let's stick that in here. Ali's Kitchen. In this video, we are reviewing this. [NOISE] This is Ali's Kitchen. In this video we are reviewing. Great. I want to title text here to say Ali's Kitchen. [NOISE] I'm going to move it down a bit. What's the font that I actually like the look of? Helvetica? Bit basic. Should we go for Chalkduster? It looks a bit tacky, but what else? Who cares? That's going to look tacky, but I actually don't care. Do I care? Oh, no, I do care. I can't bring myself to do something that looks tacky. I can change the duration of it, but I can't change any other details about it. I think that's because this is iMovie and iMovie doesn't have a lot of controls, but in Final Cut, you can do all these different settings. It doesn't matter. [NOISE] This is Ali's Kitchen. In this video, we are reviewing these. Great. I'm going to reduce this duration. Welcome to the channel because this is my first video. This is Ali's Kitchen. In this video, we are reviewing these Le Creuset Harry Potter Signature [OVERLAPPING] [NOISE] Great. That's fine. I've got my one [LAUGHTER] bit of text just to show that you can add text in iMovie, but obviously, if you'll using proper editing software like Final Cut or Premiere Pro, or DaVinci Resolve, you'll be able to have much more finely tuned control of exactly what you're doing. What I'm going to do is I'm going to add some music. I use a site called Epidemic Sound for royalty-free music. Let's actually just use YouTube Studio. I'm going to download a royalty-free track from YouTube Studio. Good. I got reviews, 40 percent impressions click-through rate, incredible. Let's see copyrights, audio library. I'm just going to use YouTube's audio library and I want to create something acoustic. Oh, no, can't spell acoustic. I want something instrumental. Country and folk calm. [MUSIC] Oh, dear, it's loud. [MUSIC] You know what? I'm not going to deal with this. I'm just going to hit "Download audio track." [MUSIC] [NOISE] What I'm going to do is just drag and drop it from my thingy into iMovie [MUSIC]. This is really loud, this needs to volume down all the way. Let's see. Hey friends, welcome back to the channel. It's really loud, volume down all the way. Hey friends, welcome back to the channel or should I say welcome to the channel because this is my first video. That looks reasonable. I think my own audio is probably quite low. Let's look at my audio settings. Hey friends, welcome back to the channel. You know what, I'm just going to select all of my video clips and use the auto audio setting to make them auto. Hey friends, welcome back to the channel, or should I say welcome to the channel because this is my first video? I actually want to create this very slightly. Let's go three percent. No. That's too loud. Let's go two percent. Here we go. Hey friends, welcome back to the channel, or should I say, welcome to the channel because this is my first video? This is Ali's kitchen, and in this video, we are reviewing this Le Creuset Harry Potter Signature Edition, Round Dutch ovens. These are expensive. They're a bit absurd, but I thought, you know what, I'm getting into cooking and I freaking love Harry Potter and so I thought, why not? Let's find a way to buy these and then to cook with them and here I am making a review because to be honest, I looked on YouTube and I couldn't find many reviews about it. Now a quick caveat before I start the review, I'm a total beginner to the world of cooking. I actually don't know anything. I think it actually is a little bit loud. What I'm going to do, I'm going to blade that, and I'm just going to set this to one percent now. In the introduction to the video, the background music is a bit more audible, but then it fades into the background a little bit more as the video progresses. That's pretty nice. [inaudible] it helps more likely and the little one. Cool. The audio level sounds good. Now I'm just going to copy and paste that so that it just happens multiple times across the rest of the video. Copy and paste, copy and paste. Now you can see if we zoom out, I've now copied and pasted this bit of the thing so much. [MUSIC] What I want to do is just get the final bit of this. Why can't I play this? [NOISE] Trim to play it? I don't know. Basically what I'm trying to do is as the music fades out, I want my video to end. This is a bit advanced, but I like doing it [inaudible]. [NOISE] If you weren't ready, and if you want to see more cooking things, stuff. Thanks for watching. I'll see you hopefully in the next video. Bye-bye. What I'm trying to do is line up the waveforms here. If I increase the volume slightly, let's go to two percent. [inaudible] below and just subscribe, but if you weren't ready and if you want to see more cooking things stuff, thanks for watching, and I'll see you hopefully in the next one. Bye-bye. It seemed reasonable. That was [inaudible] to stop. I found that because it shows the Harry Potter vibes and I freaking love Harry Potter, it has encouraged me to do more cooking now that I have these. But it does [inaudible] more expensive, the extra 20 percent. Although Le Creuset is life time guarantee, it will probably last for a generation. I'm hoping my kids and their kid's kids will also be fans of Harry Potter so they can use these items as well. If you want to check them out, I'll put links in the video description to the Le Creuset website where you can check these out and you can find them if you like. That's the end of my review, I hope you enjoyed this. If you did, click over here, which is my latest upload, I'm hoping to do more reviews and stuff on the channel. If you have any requests for ideas of content that you'd like to see, please do leave a comment down below and the subscribe button. But if you aren't ready and if you want to see more cooking things stuff, thanks for watching and I'll see you hopefully in the next video. Bye-bye. [inaudible] I'm just going to align [inaudible] a little bit more. I want to be like bye-bye. [NOISE] That's like the [inaudible] I'm trying to go for. I will see you hopefully in the next video, bye-bye. [MUSIC] Look at that, that's beautiful. I want to play that again. More cooking things, stuff. Thanks for watching and I'll see you hopefully in the next video. Bye-bye [MUSIC]. Love it. That's the video. Then let's just add some text over here saying, thanks for watching. I'm going to go "Titles". Let's add in a chromatic. I like this, standard. Standard looks good. [MUSIC] That could be nice. I'll cut this to fit the music, and then I can say, thanks for watching. Please subscribe. Lots of love. [NOISE] Great. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you hopefully in the next video. Bye-bye. Look at that, beautiful. Now we're done with the video, it's literary done. How much time have we been going for? 28 minutes. Sick, less than half an hour to edit the video. I'm just going hit "Export" and then we're done. File, Share, File, I believe. I'm going to share it to file. Ali's kitchen Video 1 Le Creuset Harry Potter. I'm going to do 1080p, quality; high, compress; faster, hit "Next". Save it as a movie, and then it's going to take a while to export while I'm going to have my lunch, and we can see it over here. It's all exporting. It's actually happening pretty quickly, it's going to take one minute while I have my lunch. Once it'll export and then we're going to upload it to YouTube. That's what we're going to do in the next session. As a reminder, if you've gotten this far, this was me blexing in iMovie, which I've never used before, but I'm infamous familiar with the Final Cut. The very basics of what it takes to edit a video. Do the A cut, get rid of the pauses, make the A cut super tight. Add in relevant B-roll that you care about, add in text, add in images if you want, add a background music track, and hit ''Export". In fairness, if you're editing a video properly, then for me, if I'm editing a proper video for my main channel, they will probably take somewhere between 4-10 hours to edit depending on how complex the video needs to be. Certainly, when I was editing most of my videos, most videos would take at least three or four hours, and generally no more than eight hours to edit. That is the ballpark we're normally talking. This was just me blitzing and doing the bare minimum editing for a video. But hey, we got the video out and now I can improve in the next one. First 50 videos, we want to try and get that quantity out as quickly as we can so that will improve by getting in the reps. Thanks for watching, deeply checkout the Skillshare class or course, or wherever you're watching this on how to edit in Final Cut. There's also tons of YouTube tutorials that will take you start to finish on how to edit. We even got some on one of the YouTube channel that we would like. All the recommended resources around how to actually learn to edit, we will put in the video description, but hopefully, this has given you a little bit of a flavor of what it's like to do fairly quickly in half an hour, which is quick in terms of the world of editing. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. Bye-bye. 24. Upload Your Video to YouTube: [MUSIC] All right, team. At this point, we've done all the hard stuff. We've shot the video, we've filmed the video, we've edited the video, we've done the thumbnail, now we just need to upload the video. Let's do it. Let's go on YouTube and make it happen. I'm going to go on my channel, don't really need to find on my channel, but, hey, what else? I'm going to hit this button up at the top, which says Upload video. I'm just going to drag and drop or rather select the file from my laptop. I saved it into movies, which I believe is somewhere, Ali's Video, Harry Potter. Hey, friends. Welcome back to the channel. That's the one. It's getting uploaded. I just double-click that. I'm going to title it, how do you spell Le Creuset? Le Creuset Harry Potter Signature Dutch Ovens Review. Thing to keep in mind is you want your title to be ideally less than 55 characters. Because if it's more than 55 characters, it's going to get cut off when people watch the video on mobile. This is a welcome to my first proper video. This is a video review of the Harry Potter Le Creuset Signature edition Dutch Ovens in 26 centimeters and 20 centimeters respectively caveat. I'm a total noob when it comes to cooking. So hopefully this isn't too bad. Enjoy xx. Links to products, and I can just find the link to the website. There we go. I'll just flag up this is UK in case anyone is watching this internationally. Please subscribe if you'd like to see more. Sharper timestamps. No, I can't even bother with timestamps. That's enough for the description of the video. Description is not that important. It doesn't really matter too much. But now I'm going to upload my thumbnail. I need to verify my phone number. That's annoying. Well, after I've uploaded the video, I'll be able to choose the thumbnail. Let's see, playlists, non-audience, not set for kids. I'm going to go Video elements, end screen. You know what, let's add an end screen. Let's add one video and one subscribe. I think I'm pointing in that direction. That's the end of my review. I hope you enjoyed this. If you did, click over here, which is my link. The other side. I'm going to put that video over here, which is my latest upload. Let's say most recent upload. That's the end of my review. I hope you enjoyed this. If you did, click over here. I want that to start over here, so I can just edit the settings. Here we go. This is what it's now going to look like. That's the end of my review. I hope you enjoyed this. If you did, click over here, which is my latest [OVERLAPPING] upload. Nice. That's good. I'm hoping to do more reviews and stuff on the channel. If you have any requests for ideas of content that you'd like to see, please do leave a comment down below. Hit the "Subscribe" button if you haven't already, and if you want to see more cooking stuff, thanks for watching, and I'll see you, hopefully, in the next video. Bye-bye. That's better. I want to get rid of that. No, I can't get rid of it, can I? No, I can, actually. I want the whole thank you for watching thing to show. Which is my latest upload, and [inaudible] cooking stuff. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you hopefully in the next video. Bye-bye. Nice. Good. Let's save that. I've done my end screen element, and then I don't need to bother with cards. We're going to do some copyright checks once it's finished processing. Initially, I'm going to save it as unlisted, because I want to edit the thumbnail before I actually hit the "Publish" button. Cool. Processing will begin shortly. Excellent. Now this is rocked up. Now I should be able to upload a thumbnail. Wonderful. I'll go into my Downloads, and I think I will use this as the thumbnail. Yeah, this looks pretty good. File is bigger than two meg. Okay, fine. Let's reduce the file size. So Tools, Adjust Size. Let's make it 1920 by 1080. Save. Hopefully, that's less than two megabytes. Not that one, this one. Perfect. Now, visibility is pending, but let's just head it to public. Now I can hit "Save." Now when the video finishes processing and the copyright checks are done, it should just upload it to my channel. That was nice and easy. Here we go. Le Creuset Harry Potter Signature Dutch Ovens Review. Maybe we don't even need the x. Le Creuset Harry Potter Signature Dutch Ovens. Nice. Great. We've done it, people. We have a video on the channel. Here we go. It's online. Look at it. My thumbnail looks pretty reasonable as well. In fact, you know what, I'm actually going to change the thumbnail for welcome to Ali's Kitchen just because, why not? Upload thumbnail. Let's use that thumbnail that I made for this one. Because this can be like my little welcome video, I'm just going to adjust the size to make it smaller, Save. Just because then it makes a channel look a little bit nicer. Perfect. Save. Now we have two videos on the channel. We have my random phone, one that I uploaded, without thumbnail. I want to see the thumbnail. Why can't I see the thumbnail? Because I've seen some of the video already. Here's what this video now looks like. Hey, friends. Welcome back to the channel. It bad bad quality because it hasn't finished uploading it, but it hasn't finished processing yet. Whenever you upload something to YouTube, it takes a few minutes for YouTube to process it so that it comes out in HD, but this is it. I'm going to say, welcome to the channel, because this is my first video. This is Ali's Kitchen. In this video we are reviewing this Le Creuset Harry Potter Signature edition Dutch ovens. Great. We've done it. Well done, everyone. Hopefully, by the end of this lesson, you have also uploaded your video and given it a title and thumbnail. Now, that's it. No one's going to watch this, unless we start getting search traffic. There's really no need to share it on Twitter. You can share it on Twitter or on Facebook, wherever else if you want. I'm not going to do that. Maybe I'll share it once this class actually goes live. But for now I actually don't want this video to get any views, but it'll be interesting to see what happens to it. Now, that's it, and now it's onto the next video. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 25. Grow Your Channel - 6 Tips: [MUSIC] Welcome back to the course. In this lesson we're talking about six probably tips for how to grow your channel. These are somewhat miscellaneous, but hopefully they'll be helpful if you are a beginner to YouTube. The first one really is that the reason a channel grows is ultimately by making good videos. There is no way to grow a channel by making bad videos, so you have to make good videos. Now, what is a good video? Well, in YouTube speak there are only two things that make a good video. The first one is that people have to click on it, and the second one is that the people who click on it have to watch the video. The more people we can get to click on our videos and of those the more people that we can get to watch more of our videos, the better our video is doing according to YouTube and according to viewers. Now everyone has this idea of the algorithm. How do I make videos better for the algorithm? Really, that's a bit of a false concept. You don't want to be thinking about making your videos better for the algorithm. You just want to be thinking about making your videos better for viewers. How do we make a more intriguing title and thumbnail that accurately depict what's in the video, and that gives the viewer an accurate promise of what's to come? Then once they click on it, how do we actually engage them through the content and how do we make it either entertaining, or educational, or inspirational or whatever combination of those three things you want? This is really the million dollar question, how do we make good videos? How do we make a good title and thumbnail, and then how do we make an actually good video? Honestly if there was a formula for this someone would have solved it, and then it wouldn't be a formula because everyone would evolve to keep ahead of that. The answer is not clickbait. Clickbait means that you've got a title and a thumbnail. This was a big thing back in 2013 i-sh on YouTube. People would have titles, and thumbnails would like the keen models on them and the video would be some dude giving productivity advice. That's creating a false expectation in the mind of the viewers, so maybe you'll get more clicks but those people are immediately going to leave the video. People immediately leaving the video is a signal to the algorithm that this is a bad video. It is a video that people are not watching all the way through. Clickbait is all the way forward, the way forward is by making titles and thumbnails that are genuinely intriguing and interesting and get people's interests, but that also accurately depict what is actually the value of the video. Then when it comes to the people actually watching the bit, that bit incorporates so many different things, like how engaging are you on camera? How good is the writing of the video? How intriguing is the writing of the video? How much value; whether it's entertainment, or education, or inspiration are you actually delivering to the viewer? What's going on, on screen? What's the branding like? Are they vibing with your personality? Is the audio quality good enough for it to seem reasonable? Is there background music that creates a good vibe? There are so many things that go into that, and that is why tip number 2 is focusing [NOISE] on quantity rather than quality. It comes back to that idea that we said earlier which is that your first 50 videos are for you, your next 50 videos are for your audience. It takes a large amount of time to actually get good at making videos, and while your videos suck you really shouldn't expect any growth on your channel. If you have an expectation of growth while your videos are just objectively awful, then you're going to be setting yourself up for disappointment. It would be like, "I'm in the process of learning Mandarin. I'm really bad at Mandarin right now, I can barely string together three words in Mandarin to make a sentence." If I tried to write blog posts in Mandarin, no one would read them because they just wouldn't make any sense. If I was thinking, "Oh, but I'm putting in the work because I'm being consistent. I'm publishing blog posts in Mandarin, but no one's reading them." What the **** I'm doing? I currently suck at Mandarin, my blog posts are objectively awful. Of course no one's going to read them because they're objectively awful, whereas if I spent a long time getting fluent in Mandarin, getting familiar with that, that now when I start to write blog posts in Mandarin I can actually think about the value I'm providing rather than just my inability to actually speak the language. It's like that for YouTube, it's not quite that extreme. That's a very extreme example, but it is like that for YouTube. While your videos are awful you cannot expect any growth, and that's why at the start we want to be focusing on quantity rather than quality because A, quantity has a quality all of it's own, but also B, the quantity of videos is getting in the reps that's what helps us get better at the craft of making videos. If you're already a pro at the craft of making videos, then that's okay. You don't need to suffer through the quantity phase. Software is maybe the wrong word. It's actually quite fun as you improve a skill. But if you already know how to make amazing videos then great, just go straight for quality. But if you don't, you need to go through putting in lots and lots of reps to actually get good at the craft of making videos which is why quantity is more important than quality at least at the beginning. Tip number 3 is that even when you're in that quantity stage, the way that you can get your videos found if you actually want people to watch the videos is to go after search traffic. For example, the video that I'm going to film/half film by the time you've watched this, is a review of the Le Creuset Harry Potter collection Dutch oven. That is a very niche thing that there is not already a significant market for on YouTube, there's not that much competition for it and I'm targeting people who are searching for that thing, people like me three weeks ago before I bought this while I was searching for reviews about the thing. This is not the video that's ever going to go viral, it's never going to get a million views. It's not the video that people would click on on the home screen, and be like, "Oh my god, I can't wait to see this review of this Dutch oven." It's a video that people explicitly searching for the thing might be interested in, and so by targeting search traffic with my initial crop the videos. Even if my quality is not very good, and my camera presence is not very good, and I suck at presenting, and my writing is awful and the quality is bad; even if all those things are true, I can still provide value to people who are searching for a specific thing. The mistake would be at the start while I'm still making crappy videos, if I make a video called 10 Productivity Tips, there's so much competition for 10 Productivity Tips. You're competing with people like me, Thomas Frank, Matt D'Avella. You're competing with people with millions of subscribers who already know how to make good videos. There's no way your crappy video is actually going to succeed in that format, but there is a chance it could succeed if you're carving out this niche for yourself within search. That's one way of doing it to be honest. For the first 50 videos while I'm still bad at making videos, I would not even have an expectation of growth at all, and I will just be trying to make videos to figure out what are the things I enjoy and maybe what are the things that are resonating with some people? Tip number 4, is that as I'm getting better at making videos I'll be spending a lot of time on YouTube itself, but I'll be spending that time intentionally on YouTube doing a bunch of market research into other channels, other creators, other genres to see what is working on YouTube. What are the things that I personally enjoy watching, and what is it about those things that I enjoy watching? Do I like the branding of [inaudible]? Do I like the camera presence of Peter McKinnon? Do I like the editing style of Casey Neistat? Do I like the background and soft jazz piano music that Matt D'Avella uses? Do I like the color grading that [inaudible] uses? Do I like Becky and Chris' interior design? What are the aspects of other people's YouTube channels that I like? On top of that what are their YouTube channels that are within the genre I'm interested in? If I'm making a cooking channel, I'm going to be extremely familiar with the top 50-100 cooking channels, and I'm going to say, "Okay, what are these guys doing well, and what are they doing that I could potentially do differently, and what are the elements from those that I can take?" What are their video titles that are doing well?That channel has 100,000 subscribers but they had this video that had five million views, so their view as subscriber ratio is huge. That was by far the most popular video on that channel, what was it about that video that made it so popular? Is there a way that I can take the lessons from that video and reverse engineer the success of that particular video. Obviously nothing is guaranteed, but this is the way how we can use intentional consumption of YouTube videos as a way of actively and deliberately improving the quality of our own videos overtime. Tip number 5 is to try and land on this idea of creator market fit. Now in the world of start-ups, there's the concept of product market fit. What start-ups do when they are first building their products is that they actually don't build the product immediately. They spend a large amount of time interviewing potential customers, phone call, Zoom calls, actual physical real-life meetups and to have coffee, chatting to people on Twitter, putting surveys out there, and just doing a bunch of research to figure out what does the market actually want? Is there a demand for this thing that I think I might want to make? Only after they spent many months generally trying to figure out what's going on; do they then actually build something, but then as they're building it their constantly iterating on it and they're putting it out there to the market. They're shipping it, and they're seeing what happens and they're getting feedback from users. Eventually or usually after a few years of scrambling around doing this thing, they land on this magical idea of product market fit which usually people say is when they've got over a million dollars in the current revenue and you're depending on who you asked about this. But once you have product market fit it shows that your product is a fit for the market, and at that point growth becomes so much easier and it feels start-up founders who have product market fit describes it as a feeling that it almost feels like cheating. It feels like in the early days we were struggling so hard to get even a single customer; it felt like taking blood from a stone, but then once we got product market fit at that point it seemed like we were just growing organically. People wanted to use this, people were coming to us. We can take that same concept and apply it to the world of creators, and think about this idea of create our market fit. At the start you're throwing lots of spaghetti at the wall. You're being your archaeologist, you're digging for these different sites, and you're hoping something will stick. As you're doing that you're actually getting better at making videos as a YouTuber himself. Eventually you might stumble upon this thing like, "Oh, when I make cooking reviews about this one specific thing that seems to resonate with the audience, let me do a little bit more of that." Then you think, "Oh my god, now people are actually asking me to make videos about other stuff and now I make videos about that stuff," and now, "Oh my god, those videos are doing well and people are watching the channel. That feeling of like, "Oh my god, the channel is growing is when you stumbled on creative market fit." Once you've done that, it's time to double down on that specific thing that's been working. Basically you just do more and more of that and slowly try, and dial the quality dial to get a little bit better over time. Once you've got this creative market fit, that's really when you start to seal the flywheel effect in action. Jim Collins is a business coach and writer guy. He talks about this concept of flywheels. A flywheel is this thing that takes a lot of energy to get going, but once it starts going and gathers momentum then it becomes unstoppable. Similarly, it's going to take a lot of energy, a large input of time, and effort, and hustle, and blood, sweat, and tears, and all that stuff; hopefully while having fun, to do your first X number of videos, but then once you've hit on "Create a audience fit", that's when it's going to seem like your channel is just growing organically and things are just happening for you, but the crucial thing is that you don't want to stop the consistency before you've gotten to that point. This is a mistake so many creators make. They make videos consistently for a few weeks or a few months. They're not seeing momentum and they just give up, but it's like they stopped before they've got a chance for the flywheel together momentum. They stopped before they let compounding actually run its course. Really tip number 5 would be yes, lookout for creating market fit, but recognize it will take some amount of time of work where you're throwing spaghetti at the wall and nothing is sticking for you to make any progress at all. Finally, tip number 6 is a bit of a different one. Actually it's not good to obsess all the analytics at the beginning of your journey. A lot of YouTubers are like, "Oh, I put a video out there, and then I spent 12 hours looking at the analytics to analyze my retention graphs and figure out exactly why viewers were dropping off." That's like when you have not many views on your channel, A, the analytics are pointless because they're not particularly statistically significant, and B, the amount of time you're spending looking at analytics is time that could be spent making a new video. I would suggest that until you have at least a few thousand subscribers or a few thousand views, it's pointless to look at analytics. I would just spend all that time and effort just making more videos instead and doing what I know it will take to make a video better when you're at millions of subscribers and whatever at that retention graphs. When I say this specific thing, my retention graph goes up a little bit, therefore let me do more of that. At those levels of numbers that stuff starts becoming important, but certainly in the early days you know what the difference between your video and your dream YouTuber video looks like. Just make it better and try and get your own skills, your own quality to the point where it's actually good, and then you can start worrying about retention graphs once you've got more of an audience. Those are six tips on how to grow on YouTube, hopefully that was helpful and I'll see you in the next lesson. Bye-bye. 26. Bonus: 10 Tips for Aspiring YouTubers: [MUSIC] Welcome back to the course. In this lesson, we're talking about 10 tips for aspiring YouTubers, slash 10 tips for beginner YouTuber, slash 10 tips I wish I had known when starting YouTube for the first time. In fact, I have already recorded this video on my YouTube channel. If you haven't seen it, I'm just going to include it right here in this lesson, just for ease of browsing. Starting this YouTube channel is hands down to the single best thing I've ever done in my life. In this video, I'm going to be sharing my top 10 tips on how you can get started with setting up your own channel if that's what you're into. [MUSIC] Coming in at number 10, we have don't worry about what other people will say. I was asked this question. I asked a question on Twitter and on Instagram and I asked people, what are your fears about starting on YouTube and what do you want to know? The number one complaint is always, I'm worried about what my friends and family will think. I've been running a course called the part-time YouTuber Academy, where we have people who are aged from 18 up to 55. Basically everyone in that age range also worries about what their friends and family will think. But you know what? The thing that everyone realizes is that once you've uploaded your first video, all of that fear, it goes away because you realize that no one gives a ****, no one actually cares whether you're uploading videos to YouTube. You might think it's like the biggest deal in the world. Oh my God, what is my mom going to say, what are my cousins going to say? What are my friends in university going to say? But no one actually cares. Everyone is just so worried about their own lives that the fact that I'm doing YouTube, no one cares. The fact that you're going to start a YouTube channel talking about whatever you want, no one cares, and we just need to get that into our heads. This is such a common fear and we all have it and it's just the first thing you have to get over. Basically, no one cares. Stop deluding yourself into thinking that people are thinking about you because everyone is just worried about themselves. They're worried about how they are appearing to other people. There's this thing in psychology called the spotlight effect, which is that we all walk through life thinking that there is a spotlight trained on us and just not realizing that everyone else is absorbed in their own life. We are only the heroes of our own story, and we are supporting cast in everyone else's story if they're even thinking about us at all. Start your YouTube channel. Do not worry about what people will think, 99 percent of the fear is in just before you publish your first video. But I promise you as soon as you hit publish on that video, 99 percent of the fear will disappear and you will stop worrying what people think. [MUSIC] Then at point number 9, we have gear doesn't matter at the start. Gear does matter in the long run, but at the start, gear does not matter at all. When I started my YouTube channel, I started filming on my iPhone. I did not have any microphone attached to it. I literally just got the camera, lay in bed, pointed at myself and said, Hey guys, I'm thinking I'm going to start some vlog. I knew absolutely nothing about editing. I just followed free YouTube tutorials about how to edit videos and that's what you have to do when you're getting started. It's like if you're starting learning how to write, it doesn't matter what pen you're using as long as you're writing something. If you're getting started learning how to draw, it does not matter what pencil and what paper you're using. That's all a distraction. What you need to do is pick up any old pencil you've got, or pen that you've got lying around the house, any old piece of paper or scrap paper and just start learning from day one. It's the same thing with YouTube really, if you're watching this, you have a device which is capable of recording video. You have your phone, if you want to get started on YouTube, screw the gear, don't think, Oh, I need to wait to upgrade to a fancy *** camera before I'm allowed to get started on YouTube, start with whatever you have, start with your phone and you can always upgrade later. In fact, over there is a video where I talk about exactly how to stop filming videos with just your iPhone and it looks pretty reasonable. If you do want to upgrade something, then upgrade your audio quality firstly, because people will sit through a bad video quality, but no one will sit through bad audio quality. That's the first thing to upgrade. If you want to learn more about exactly which gear to upgrade, a shopping list for gear at different levels. You should definitely sign up to my part-time YouTuber, free 7-day email course. This is totally free. You just enter your email address and then every day, I will email you with a long *** article which contains lots of tips about getting started on YouTube. One of those in the seven-day course is exactly what gear you need to upgrade and in which order, and I give you different levels for gear at different budget levels. Again, that'll be linked in the video description if you want to check it out. Again, totally free just seven days of emails from me where I give you my top tips on getting started on YouTube as a beginner. Point number 8, we have, don't worry about the numbers. Once you've started on YouTube, this is a mistake everyone makes, is that you're way way focused on the analytics, but at the start, it doesn't really matter. The only thing you have to do is just keep on producing more and more and more videos and not really worry about the fact that no one is watching them and that you're not getting very many subscribers. If you look at the stats, according to TubeBuddy, the average channel with 1,000-10,000 subscribers, has made 152 videos. Until you've made 152 videos, you do not have the right to complain that you're not growing on YouTube. You have to make 152 videos first and then we can think about how to tweak your growth prospects on YouTube. For me, it took me 52 videos and six months to hit 1,000 subscribers. That was making two videos a week, six months in a row, while I was a full-time medical student at Cambridge while preparing for my final year medical student exams, two videos a week, six months, and then I hit 1,000 subscribers. At the very least, if you've made anything less than 52 videos, then don't worry about your subscribe account. You can always email me for advice or sign up to my part-time YouTuber mailing list and reply to emails on that. You can always email me for advice further down the line, but I can't give you any advice [LAUGHTER] until you've made at least 52 videos. That's just how it works. Point number 7 is this idea of stacking the deck in your favor. We've established that you're going to start your channel and you're just going to do it and not care about what people think. But to succeed on YouTube, you want to think in terms of stacking the deck. How do you take the deck and how do you [NOISE] stack it in your favor? Now the extent to which you should stack the deck depends on how you're thinking about YouTube. If you're thinking about YouTube purely as a hobby, where you don't actually care about the numbers and you're thinking, Oh, it would be nice to make money from this further down the line, but it's not my primary aim right now. That's great. You don't need to worry about stacking the deck in your favor. [NOISE] But if a lot of students in our course, the part-time YouTuber Academy, you're thinking of YouTube more as a business opportunity. The more business entrepreneurial, people minded end of the spectrum. You then want to [NOISE] think about how do I stack the deck to try and grow on YouTube, or to try and get to achieve my goals for YouTube as effectively as possible. There's broadly two ways of stacking the deck. You can stack the deck in terms of time or you can stack the deck in terms of money. How do you stack the deck in terms of time? Well, it involves putting in the time to learn how to get better on camera, which happens over time as you make more and more videos, and involves putting in the time to get better at editing videos. Again, it happens as you just produce more and more videos. I've got a friend called James Johnny, who has grown from 0-500,000 plus subscribers on YouTube by making like 10 or 12 videos or something stupid like that because he spends hundreds of hours editing each one to make it crafty into a perfect Netflix documentary style video. He is stacking the deck in his favor by spending large amounts of time, hundreds and hundreds of hours writing, scripting and editing his videos. The other way of stacking the deck in your favor is by using money. Now we're not going to talk about this because this is a more advanced point. But for example, you can invest in gear and number 2, you can invest in hiring your own team, which is now what I've done. Actually a lot of people don't realize that you can outsource video editing for quite cheaply, very early on. Especially if you have a job where your time is worth. Let's say more than $10 an hour, you can easily outsource video editing to someone who you're paying less than $10 an hour or two if you want, as a way of stacking the deck in your favor by using money. Again, that's a bit of an advanced point. We'll talk about that more in my part-time YouTuber free email course, sign up in the video description if you want to check that out. But yeah, that's how I think about it. There are no guaranteed formula to success on YouTube. [NOISE] But really it's all about stacking the deck in your favor, in whatever way you can, depending on what your goals for YouTube are. Are you a hobbyist or are you a entrepreneur, businessperson? I'm somewhere in the middle leaning towards the business side. I do whatever I can to stack the deck in my favor. [MUSIC] Point number 6, use your unfair advantages. Now, I've got a secret three-part formula for success on YouTube and in fact, success in anything in life. That is success equals work multiplied by luck, multiplied by unfair advantages. Now, work you have to put in the work, you have to put in the time and the effort to do this. Otherwise, it's not going to go anywhere. Luck, you're reliant, you do have to get a little bit lucky. But the good thing about luck is that the more videos you put out, the higher the odds that any one of them will get picked up by the algorithm and will start to go viral. In fact, for my channel, it's only been like two or three videos in the last three and a half years that have gone really viral that have really propelled channel growth. Everything else has been fairly average, fairly mediocre, so that was work and luck. But the third component of the success equation is unfair advantages. What are the unfair advantages that you have that you can exploit in your YouTube channel or in whatever you're doing? For me, my unfair advantage was that I was a medical student and I was at Cambridge University. Those are pretty big unfair advantages because the niche that I was targeting was people applying to study medicine at Cambridge University. I was not trying to be a makeup influencer. I was not trying to be a fashion influencer or a lifestyle or workout or fitness influencer. None of that would have used my unfair advantage, maybe the medical student thing if I was actually interested in fitness. But you want to think about what are the qualities I have, what are the things that other people can't necessarily "compete with" even though we don't really want to think about this as a competition, what are the unfair advantages that I have that I can use to help propel my channel? If at this point you're thinking, well, I don't have any unfair advantages, you should check out a video linked up there, which will be in my book club episode of a book called The Unfair Advantage, which is all about the formula to success, where I chat with one of the authors, Hasan, about the five different types of unfair advantages. We talk about how to answer this question of, well, I don't feel like I have any advantages because everyone has their unfair advantages. You just have to lean into them. You have to figure out what they are and then you want to try and weave that into your YouTube channel somehow. Point Number 5, focus on quantity rather than quality. It is far more important when you're starting out on YouTube to make 100 really bad videos than to try and make 10 really good videos. Caveat, unless you're going down the James Johnny root of putting in hundreds of hours of editing into videos, that's a different style. But I imagine for most people watching this, your aim is to become a YouTuber that's like me, whereby you can sit in front of a camera and talk about whatever you want and it's nice and you share your life and you share your experiences and you do some teaching rather than to craft a Netflix documentary. But whatever the case, quantity is more important than quality at the start. There's a nice story that I like, which is the Parable of the Pottery Class. The story goes that there is a pottery class and the teacher divides the group into two different groups. One of the groups has to make a pot every day for 30 days, so by the end of the 30 days, they make 30 pots, whereas the other group has to focus on a single plot for the whole 30 days. They only have one pot at the end of the 30 days. Then at the end of the 30 days, the teacher brings all the pots together and judges the quality of the pots. He gives that prizes about whose the best pots were. Every single pot that won a prize came from the quantity group rather than the quality group, especially when you're getting started out in something, there are so many learnings to be had. Improving your own ability to talk to the camera, improving your ability to edit videos, improving your storytelling. All of these happen through quantity rather than through quality. You have to get in the reps. My theory on this is that you just have to make 100 videos, make at least 100 videos and then worry about trying to improve the quality of them. Because by virtue of making 100 videos, you're naturally going to improve the quality of them without even really thinking about it. But the main thing is you've got to get in the reps. It's all about quantity rather than quality at the start. Number 4 is don't really worry about what your niche is. People get hung up on this, like I don't know what to make videos about. It would be like a writer saying, I don't know what to write about therefore, I'm not going to write or an artist saying, I don't know what my masterpiece is going to be therefore, I'm not going to hold a paintbrush. It's totally okay for your niche to emerge over time. Yes, you can take a very calculating route and plot out in advance and be like, this is my path or you can do what I recommend, which is just stop making videos on YouTube about whatever you enjoy, whatever you want. If I were starting on YouTube, I wouldn't really worry about the niche thing. I'll just think, [NOISE] you know what, let me make videos about the things that I enjoy, make maybe some close-up magic because I'm not a total loser. Maybe like iPhones, maybe like my favorite pen, maybe like tips for getting started on YouTube, maybe life as a medical student, maybe whatever experiences in my life that I enjoy talking about and that I think I could teach on the Internet, that is the stuff I would start making videos about. Overtime, as you start making videos about things that you enjoy, the audience starts to resonate with some of those things and so your niche ends up emerging over time. I never thought I would be a productivity YouTuber, but I seem to have become a productivity YouTuber because that niche just emerged over time. It was not fore-planned in advance. If you've got a lot of interests, if you've got a lot of things you're interested in, or even if you don't know what to talk about on YouTube, just start making stuff and you will figure it out. Don't be one of those writers who says, I don't know what my bestseller book is going to be about therefore, I'm not going to write a single word. It's the same with YouTube. Who cares if you don't know what your niche is, your niche will change over time. I started off making videos for medical school applicants. I now no longer care about medical school applicants in terms of making videos and therefore, it just changes over time. Don't worry about it. Don't overthink it. Just make the videos that you enjoy at start. Point Number 3, be patient and be consistent. Those are really the only two things that you need for success on YouTube. You need consistency and you need patience. Consistency in publishing at least one video a week and patience in that not worrying about the fact that you're not going to get any traction for a large amount of time. Success on YouTube is absolutely not an overnight thing and certainly with my channel, my first 80 videos, I made no money and then I started making a few dollars here and there and with all of these things, like with every good thing in life, it's like a compounding returns curve. You don't realize it when you're right at the start of the curve because you're not seeing any traction. But three years later, if you can stick with publishing two videos a week for three and a half years, like I've been doing, you look back and you think, my God, my first 100 videos, they were just part of getting that flywheel to turn and really it's all about that consistency. But also having the patience and having the faith that this will pay off in the long run, just not in the short-term. It's like one of my goals for the new year is to get six pack abs. But if I were to do some crunches right now and do not see any abs coming out, it would be a bit silly of me to say, why am I not growing on YouTube or why are my abs not coming out? Because you have to do it every day for several months before you see any results and that consistency is what gives you the result rather than a super intense ab workout on Day 1. Point Number 2 is try think about it in terms of systems. Now this is a big thing that we teach in our course, the Part-Time YouTuber Academy. Again, if you wanted the free seven-day email course, hit the link in the video description. But it's really all about building a system because we've established that the way to grow on YouTube is by being consistent for a very long time. You then want to start thinking, if I need to be consistent and put out one or two videos a week for the next five years, how can I build a system around that to make it easier for me to do? At the start of our YouTube careers, what everyone does and what I did is you think one video at a time, you think, what's this week's video? What's next week's video? Then another one. But then very quickly you realize that this is quite hard to sustain and so you want to think about building a system in terms of how can I generate as many ideas for content as possible? Then Number 2, how can I refine these ideas and turn them into titles and thumbnails and hooks? Number 3, how can I create these videos in parallel? Number 4, how can I find pockets of time throughout the day? Where maybe I've got a 10 minute break at work or in my lunch break where I can plan out a video that's going to be pushed out several months in advance. How can I plan out my content calendar so that I actually only have to film once and I can batch film maybe five videos in a row so that I don't have to go through all the effort of setting up the lights and camera and everything? It's all of this stuff around building a system and if you want a book recommendation on that, you should check out The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. This is a book I've been recommending to all the students in our course and everyone who's read it says that, my God, this book is absolutely amazing. It's just a great way of changing your mindset to thinking in terms of systems and I would say that's one of the books that's most changed my life and that has made publishing on YouTube a lot easier because now instead of thinking of it as one video at a time, I think of it as a holistic, cohesive, coherent system. [MUSIC] Finally, point Number 1 is if you're thinking of getting started on YouTube, then just do it. You could literally pause this video right now, you could get your phone out. You could switch on the recording, the camera, turn on selfie mode on your phone and be like, hey guys, this is my first YouTube video. I was watching Ali's tips on getting started on YouTube video and he was saying, to be honest, you should just do it and so this is it. I'm going to start my YouTube channel and this is video Number 1. That video took me 11 seconds to film and if you're starting on YouTube, you could literally do that. Pause this video right now, turn on the selfie camera on your phone and just upload it using the YouTube app on your phone. It is that simple. We all overthink this so much like, my God, my first video has to be good and it has to be perfect and what are people going to think? But what we don't realize is that no one cares, no one's going to watch your first video, who gives a toss? If it takes the average channel 152 videos to go between 1,000 and 10,000 subscribers, why do you think that video Number 1 matters? It's just completely inconsequential. Video number 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 20, 30, 40, none of those videos actually matter in the long run. What matters is that you actually just get started and you realize that hitting that Publish button on YouTube is not as hard as it originally seems. There's that quote that I like that the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago, the second best time is now. If you're thinking, ****, I wish I had started YouTube 10 years, I wish I had started YouTube 10 years ago, but if I don't have a channel and I'd watched to the end of this video, I would just get my phone out and film that video right now. In fact, if you're doing that, link it in the comments down below and I will subscribe to your channel and I'll be your first subscriber for whatever that's worth. But I just need you to upload that very first video and then commit to publishing at least one video a week. Those were 10 tips on getting started on YouTube. You really don't need anything else, you just need to get started. But if you're interested in joining me on a live course, where I teach a few 100 people about how to do this stuff with assignments and things and everything and we teach you about the systems-based approach of growing your channel, then check out the Part-time YouTuber Academy link in the video description, along with my free seven-day email course, again, linked in the video description. Do you need a course to succeed on YouTube? No, absolutely not. It really is just about publishing content consistently and there is absolutely nothing I teach on my course that you can't find out on the Internet. Anyway, check out the Video Creators Podcast, check out the Video Creators YouTube channel, checkout Think Media. They've got a fantastic YouTube channel. There are so many free resources online. If you don't want to sign up to a course, that's fine. You can do the work yourself. But if you're the person who benefits from accountability and having a community of people to go through the process with on top of the content that's all in one place, nicely packaged up for you, then you might like to check out the course. Whatever happens once you start your YouTube channel, you're going to need some tips for time management, which is why you should check out that video where I talk through my eight top tips for managing your time so you can pump out that content consistently. Thank you so much. All the best with your channel and I'll see you in the next video. Bye. That was 10 tips for aspiring YouTubers. Hope you found that somewhat helpful. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. Bye. 27. Make YouTube Fun: Let's talk about how to make YouTube sustainable. I don't know why we're doing this on the piano because we were partly, whenever we're getting to the end of this filming has been two solid days of filming for this class, and we're like let's inject a bit of fun into it. To be honest that's really the main point here. The way we make YouTube sustainable, is by finding ways to make it a little bit more fun. Especially in the early days, the way motivation works is like, you put in some effort and you see some success. Then the small success that you see fuels the fire of motivation. Motivation does not work, by the sense of like you need to feel like doing something and then you'll have the motivation that you'll do it. It's like you do something, it works a little bit and then that success feeds on itself. But in the early days of starting a YouTube channel, you're probably not going to have much success. You're going to think that your work is absolutely shite. There's going to be a large gap between what you know a good video looks like, and the videos that you're capable of producing. You're going to feel like, oh my God, I hate talking to a camera. Oh my God I hate the sound of my voice when I'm editing my videos. Oh my God, when I talk to a camera just feels like such an absolute **** hole like. I don't know what's going to happen, I can't get my thoughts in order, you stumble and start your way through the video, and it feels really painful, then you get to editing it and you think there's just really bad. My gear is not good enough, my phone's a bit shite, the camera's not great, the lighting is a bit awful, the sound sounds bad, can't find a figure out my background music. It's all a little bit of a slog. But really the way to make it sustainable, is by finding ways to keep it fun. By also managing expectations, and not expecting us to get any growth in the first 50 videos. Which is why I say the first 50 videos are for you to hone your skills. The next 50 videos, are for your audience where you can worry about providing value. Now, what are some other ways that we can make YouTube more sustainable? I think another big one is making sure that the goals that you're setting, are goals that are 100 percent within your control. When I first started YouTube in 2017, people would ask me what are your goals for YouTube? How many subscribers do you want to get to? I never had a subscriber goal. I thought in the back of my mind that if I can get 4,000 subscribers in my first year that's pretty cool. But that wasn't really a goal. The goal in my mind was, I just want to make one or two videos every week, and I want to get a little bit better with each one, that was it. It wasn't even the second part. I want to get a little bit better with each one because the whole every video needs to be better than the last is not really something you can sustain forever. It's like if you're into weightlifting and stuff, when you're a beginner, when you are new, you can always lift a little bit more this week than you could last week. But then you get to a point where you plateau and suddenly you actually can't just keep on lifting higher weights. You have to actually get stronger. It's the same with YouTube. For your first few videos you do genuinely get really good, a lot better with each one. But then it comes with a plateau point. At that point, having the requirement that your video has to be objectively better than the previous one, is actually not particularly helpful. If the goal is something that's within your control. Like for me, making one or two videos each week, is actually a goal that's 100 percent within my control. Whereas getting a certain subscribe count, getting a certain view count, getting a certain revenue count, those are things that are actually not within my control. Their partly within my control because I can do the work. But they also require other people to watch the videos, and to like them and to comment on them and hit the Subscribe button. It's not a goal that I have fully within my control. For me personally, when I have goals that are outside of my control, that's quite demotivating and it makes it less fun doing the thing. I think the third way of making stuff more fun, is by making progress visible in a way that's different to views like subscribers and all that stuff. Yes it's really nice, when you start getting the views, you start getting the comments and that really fuels the dopamine hits and like yeah, things are working. But in the early days before you start to get that stuff, you need to have a more of an internal sense of progress, and an internal sense of leveling up. This comes from you knowing internally that this video that I'm now making, is a little bit better than the one I made last week and my skills are improving a little bit. The way that I did it, is that after my first few videos, when I first got the hang of editing, I would watch a bunch of other YouTubers, and be like, in my next edit I want to incorporate this thing that I saw from Peter McKinnon. Or in my next edit I want to incorporate this storytelling technique that I saw Martin Vela use. I spent lot of time watching a ton of YouTube tutorials to be like how to make transitions nicer, how to deal with background music and stuff. Just that feeling of like acquiring mastery over time, that feeling of making progress, is a big part of what makes tough feel more fun for us. This is the concept that games tap into when you're leveling up in a game during this grandeur activity, game designers know that sense of progress, that feeling of mastery, that feeling of getting better and leveling up drives a profound amount of intrinsic motivation to continue to play the game because it's genuinely fun, and it's the same with YouTube. We just need to find our own internal sources of intrinsic motivation for it, rather than relying on the external metrics like views, subscribers, comments, and that stuff. I think another way to make things more fun is to recognize that actually is okay to take a break. When we start on YouTube, everyone pedals this whole idea of consistency. But to be honest, the official huge team behind YouTube, has done the analysis and they say that taking a break from your channel, will not negatively adversely affect it in terms of the algorithm performance. Yes, if you take absolutely ages away, then your viewers might then lose touch with you. But especially in the early days, where you don't have any viewers, or if you do there's not that many of them, it doesn't matter too much if you take a break of a week here and there. Because if real life gets in the way that sometimes real life gets in the way. It's better to produce, two videos a month than zero videos a month. Because yes in a dream world you'd be making one or two videos a week. That's like a good spot to be in. But if you can only manage two videos month, three videos a month, that's also better than nothing. What you don't want to do is think, I can't commit to doing this every single week for the rest of my life. Therefore I'm not going to get started at all. Sometimes stuff happens, back in the day, I don't think I missed an upload for like two years in a row. But there were some weeks where loads of stuff was happening in med school, or when I was working as a doctor. If I had a weird shift pattern, where instead of doing a video, I will just do a live stream. These days YouTube has shorts. Instead of doing a video, you can make a short. There's all these ways that you can lower the bar, for the videos that you're allowed to make. Speaking of lowering bar, that's also a generally good strategy for making things fun. We can easily get into this perfectionist trap of like, oh my God, this video needs to be good. But what I found is that as my channel has grown, I've got to actively fight that default inertia of the bar going higher and higher, to the point where now if I feel bad uploading video that I think is low quality. But as long as it feels authentic to me, I'm trying to lower that bar as much as possible. Even some videos that we do on the main channel today, we're like two and-a-half million subscribers are videos that I just have an idea for. I have like three bullet points on my phone, and I just film the video, and those videos turn out great because people are like, Oh, you're being authentic, you're being true to yourself. Whereas often it's the more scripted videos that do less well, because people have realized that it's scripted and people at some point want to see more of the authenticity and the personality shining through. I think lower the bar, be okay with producing some content that isn't quite as polished as some of your other content. It's totally okay to do community-themed videos. This is something we haven't yet touched on in the course, we talk a lot about this in our YouTube Academy. There's basically three different types of videos. There's discoverable videos, there's community videos and the sales videos. Discoverable video is a video that you want to try and get it to attract a new audience. You're trying to put your best foot forward for a discoverable video. Whereas the community video is a video designed to only appeal to your existing viewers. When I do a Q&A video, or when I do an answering assumptions video, or when I do a what's in my bag video, I'm not expecting those videos to be viral hits that new people will discover. I'm just expecting that people in my existing audience are interested in me doing a Q&A. People in my existing audience are interested in me doing an assumptions video. Those are often the easier videos for me to film. If I'm having an off week or I'm having an off month, or if life at work is tough, or if real life is getting in the way, I can always lower the bar and create more community content. That's easier for me to film rather than feeling that every video needs to be a discoverable, heavy lift that really appeals to a new audience. Those are just a few thoughts on how to make things more fun. Hope you found that helpful, and really, the name of the game is to find a way to make it sustainable. Because so many people quit YouTube before they have a chance for the company to take effect. So many people quit YouTube because they don't see progress in the first 30 videos, and then think, oh my God, I'm doing something badly. But I think just reset the expectations. Your first 50 videos are for you, and then your next 50 videos for the audience. Within those first 50, that's when you need to enjoy the process, try and make and sustainable and slowly level up over time, and now, once you're in the realm of trying to please the audience at that point, the equations on what changes but still, trying to make things fun is always the way forward. Thanks for watching. Hope that this was helpful and I'll see you in the next one. Bye-bye. 28. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] Welcome back. It is the end of the lesson. In this little video, I just want to share some final closing thoughts. Firstly, if you've gotten to this point, well done. You've made a big step in putting out your first YouTube video. I really hope you have done that. If you're watching this on Skillshare, please do post the class project in a project area. It'll be cool to see what other students have come up with as well for their first videos on their YouTube channels. Really, I just want to reiterate that the thing to keep in mind is that your first 50 videos are for you, your next 50 videos are for them. You shouldn't really have an expectation of growth while your videos still suck. Hopefully, over time as you get better at making videos, as you develop that skill, then you can switch towards actually thinking about trying to make videos that are good for the audience that are high-quality that people will get a certain amount of value from. For some people that will be 50 videos, some people that would be a 100, some people that's five videos, 10, 20, 30, I think 50 is a good number and 50 was the number I had in my head when I first started my YouTube channels where I thought, you know what? I know my first 50 videos are going to be crap but I'm just going to get through them. In fact, I will put that thing from my first video in 2017 right here so you can see what I mean. For the past few days, I've had the idea that it would be really cool to start vlogging. I really enjoy watching vlogs on YouTube. They say that whenever you're starting on YouTube, your first 50 videos are going to be terrible. I'm hoping that over the next year, I'll make my 50 terrible videos and then when we hit August the 1st 2018 when life as a junior doctor starts, then I'd be able to hit the ground running and be able to actually film decent vlogs maybe once a week talking about aspects of being a junior doctor and hopefully, people will find it interesting. Just keep going, keep it sustainable, keep it fun. The thing that I tell students who are part-time YouTuber Academy is that if you can publish a video every week for the next two years, I can basically guarantee that your life will change. I can't put any numbers on it. I can't tell you how many subscribers you'll have or how much revenue you will be making, but I can 100 percent guarantee that your life will change, provided you make one video a week, you upload consistently to YouTube for the next two years and you slowly aim for marginal improvements over time. If you want to learn more about YouTube, you can totally check out my course, the part-time YouTuber Academy that'll be linked down below. I also have a class all about editing with Final Cut Pro. If you want to dive deeper into editing for YouTube videos, that'll be linked down below as well. Now we've got a bunch more things like productivity for creators and like camera confidence, a few other things. Anyway, all of the other stuff that I've done around the sphere will be linked in the video description. You can also check out my brand new YouTube channel, the part-time Creator Academy, which should hopefully launch by the time you're watching this, which will have free content galore about how to be a part-time creator. So thank you so much for being with me in this journey. It's been a fun two days of filming. I hope you've enjoyed watching this course and I really hope you got some value from it. All the best with your YouTube journey. And hopefully, I'll see you sometime soon. Bye-bye.