Transcripts
1. Getting Comfortable on Camera: Now more than ever, you may be finding that you need to feel comfortable and confident on camera, whether it be through doing webinars, teaching online classes, putting videos on YouTube to promote your brand, using video for social media, or even just doing Zoom calls. We're being called to get comfortable on camera and yet for most of us, it's not that natural or easy of an experience. It doesn't feel supernatural to be talking to an inanimate object like a camera. You may see movie stars, personalities, even popular YouTubers or people in your industry that seem like they're just so naturally confident and comfortable on camera and you might feel like you'll never be able to measure up. Well, I want to let you in on a little secret. Really, all it takes is practice. Like any other skill, being on camera is a practice and you will get more comfortable and confident as you go along. Even the famous celebrities and influencers that you see out there that seem very natural on camera, probably had a moment when they felt exactly like you do. As a filmmaker for over 15 years, I've helped lots of interviewees and people who aren't used to being in front of the camera start to feel a lot more comfortable and at ease when in the presence of the camera. In this course, we're going to go over how to talk and work with the inner critic and the inner judgments that come up when we see ourselves on camera, how to feel more at ease when we're on camera through the three B's of being on camera, which maybe you can guess what those are, but we're going to cover them in this course. We're also going to learn about how to craft a persona on camera that feels really good, and that we enjoy sharing with the world. Furthermore, we're going to go into the technical side of things, looking at how to film yourself because I know a lot of you out there don't necessarily have the time or the budget to be able to hire somebody like me to come in and do a full production, so I want to let you know that you actually can film yourself and you can make a good quality video. Then we're going to move on to how to edit yourself so you can put yourself together in a well-constructed way to get your message across and to feel really good about what you're putting out there in the world, and how you're sharing yourself on video. All with a DIY approach of doing it yourself from the beginning to the finish. As you can see, this is a jam packed course. You're going to learn so much. By the end of it, I have a really good feeling that you're not only going to feel comfortable on camera, but you're actually going to really enjoy being in front of the camera and be able to play with it, and really just have a good time putting ourselves out there and getting the message that you need to get across into the world. I'm super excited for you and I'm excited for this journey that we're about to take. With that, let's begin.
2. One Thing to Start With: What I want you to do is that the next time you're recording yourself, and I really encourage you to record yourself as much as possible because like I was saying, practice is the number one key to getting comfortable on camera. The next time you do that, put a picture of somebody that you're really comfortable and happy talking to nearby your lens. It's okay if you don't look like you're looking exactly into the lens in this moment, but have them there nearby the lens so that you can just pretend you're talking to them and get in a natural flow. I want you to record yourself for 10 minutes doing this. The reason why I want you to do a full 10 minutes is because always in the first minute, it's really awkward talking to the camera. But as we keep going, we start to loosen up and we start to feel more and more at ease. Set a timer for 10 minutes and talk to that person that you have taped near your lens. As you're going along, try just shifting your gaze a little bit more and more away from the image and towards the lens. Just get comfortable keeping that presence of how you would be with your friend or a family member and moving it towards the camera lens. Now another thing you can do is if you have a friend or a family that's a willing volunteer, have them sit down with you and put your camera nearby where they're sitting. Then have again a 10 minute long conversation. Set a timer. Just talk about whatever you want with the camera recording you. As you do that, you'll find that maybe at first again, it feels awkward, but then you start to get into this natural flow of conversation with them and hopefully just forget that the cameras there altogether, or maybe just a tiny bit in the back of your mind, it's still there. But then watch yourself back after you've done these exercises and see the progression from how you hold yourself when you're on camera when you're more nervous, and then how you start to move and flow as you get more comfortable and are just in a natural conversation. Through doing just this one thing, you're already going to start working those muscles of feeling comfortable on camera and start getting into a flow of how you want to be when you're on camera and getting used to it more.
3. Blinking & Eye Contact on Camera: Now we're going to go over some main do's and dont's of being on-camera. They are things that are simple to improve and yet, if done right, can give you a charisma and a sense of presence and peace on camera and if done wrong, will make you look very nervous and very uncomfortable being on camera. The first thing that we're going to discuss is eye contact with the camera, and specifically blinking. I have invited you to make sure and make eye contact with the camera as if you're talking to a friend or somebody that's close, imagine the viewer, whoever it may be on the other end of this camera. As funny as it may sound, really natural reactions, really subconscious actions even like blinking and breathing when nervous and on the camera can suddenly go away and so you'll see a lot of people that are not used to being on camera or not comfortable with it, forgetting to blink. When I'm talking on camera and not blinking and really trying to focus very hard on maintaining eye contact with the lens. It looks quite scary because your eyes might be very wide and even if you're blinking every once in awhile because you can't help but blink if you're straining your eyes and trying to really intently make eye contact with the camera without blinking in a natural way, it just looks scary. As you can see, that's not really going to leave your audience feeling very comfortable watching you. Now as you can see, if you blink too much, it's also very distracting and also a little frightening. Make sure not to go the other direction. What I'm going to invite you to do is sit in front of your camera and just be aware of your blinking. You can talk about whatever you want, but just naturally blink and maybe do it a little more than you normally would even when you are on camera. Just be thinking, I'm going to blink every few seconds and that way you can train your body and your mind when in front of camera not to be so scared and forget to blink. Similarly, as you see me do and as we do in normal conversation, you can look off camera every once in a while or look down to collect your thoughts. This is a very natural action when we're talking to people. However what's different is that a lot of times in social settings, we'll actually not make eye contact very often, we'll be lost in our thoughts or explaining things and look away from the person. Now, you want to avoid this because if you do it too much, if you talk off camera, if you are always looking all around very frequently, this is also very distracting because your viewers going to wonder, what are they looking at, I wonder what they're seeing over there outside or they're just going to feel like, wow, this person is not very engaged with me and so I don't feel very engaged with them. It's all about a balance of blinking enough and naturally letting yourself look off every once in awhile, but not getting so frightened that you either look at it intently the whole time without blinking, or you're looking all over the place and anywhere besides the camera because it's the scary thing you don't want to see you.
4. Breathing on Camera: The next thing that we're going to talk about is another B and that is breathing. Now, it can be hard to remember to breathe when you're talking. Whenever you're nervous naturally, you will tense up and that will restrict your breathing. Now on camera, that can be tenfold, and so what it sounds like when somebody isn't breathing, I'll demonstrate for you and you can hear how the voice and everything starts to become more tense as we continue on not breathing. Here's an example of that. Right now I'm talking and I'm feeling very nervous and I might not be blinking as much, but I'm definitely not breathing either, and so you can see how I keep pushing words out and yet my voice is getting more and more constrained. I might grasp for breath because I can't even continue on without gasping for a little breaths, which is really distracting, and you might hear me talking faster because I'm trying to get the words out before I run out of breath and have to breathe in really deeply. We can definitely see how that would make viewers feel uncomfortable watching somebody gasping and struggling for breath while they're on camera. For this exercise, what I want you to do is again record 10 seconds, five seconds. But remember to breath and actually exaggerate your breath. What that looks like is taking a pause between each sentence, and taking a relaxed breathe in and out. It might feel strange, but you also might notice that your body starts to relax more as you do it. Now obviously you probably wouldn't do a recording like this unless you were doing a meditation. But to practice breathing in between is really important, and will cultivate this peace and leisure within yourself while you're talking on camera. Because you're not struggling for breath, but you're just breathing naturally eventually as you practice it more and more. Another thing I like to do with breath is before I start my recording or as I've pressed play before I start talking about what I'm talking about, I like to do a few big breaths in and out. I like to let myself just breathe and inhale, maybe close my eyes and get centered before it's press record and then just jump right into it. Try that, try taking breaths in and out before you start recording and then also when you're recording, remembering to breathe in a natural way.
5. Body - Moving Naturally on Camera: The final thing that I want to talk about on being on camera is about movement. Now, you may have seen some tense people talking on camera that are very stiff and very uptight. Again, the three can really go together. Right now I'm showing you an example of what it looks like if I'm very stiff and also maybe I won't be breathing as much and maybe I won't be blinking as much. My whole body is tense and I'm not moving. What you want to do is practice moving your hands. You might even do it a little bit more than you would naturally. But for most of us, we do move our hands and we do move our bodies when we talk to friends or people that we feel comfortable with. You might find that as you move your hands, you actually become more comfortable and are easier able to breathe and blink while you're doing it. Now, you don't want to go over the top and use your hands really big all the time because that's also going to be distracting. If you are doing a more playful personality on camera, then you can make movements a little bit more exaggerated. But again, you don't just want your hands to always be moving because people are going to get a little distracted with that. But at the same time, you don't want to be stiff. I invite you now to record yourself and practice moving your hands to make your points. Maybe you're talking about one thing versus another thing. Well, you can use your hands to show that or an amount of space, the amount of framing size, whatever you're talking about, you can use your hands to draw in your viewer, and you don't want to use them all the time. You can also rest them comfortably on your lap, but then remember to re-engage them every once in a while.
6. Blink, Breath, Body - put it all together: With these three things, blinking, breathing, and moving your body and your hands specifically, you will automatically start to look and feel more comfortable on camera. For this last part of the exercise, I want you to record yourself again, doing and being aware of all three things. Think about blinking enough. Make sure you're taking pauses to breathe, and then also use your hands and maybe tweak in and refine how much you do each of these. Watch the video and see, maybe I'd move my hands a little bit too much that got distracting, so I'm going to take that down. Or maybe I wasn't blinking enough where I was blinking a little bit too much, so I'm going to try to refine that, or I felt good about the other two, but I could still see how I wasn't breathing that much. Through this, you can start to see how incorporating these things will automatically make you look more confident. Even if you're not, necessarily, internally feeling totally like a rock star on camera, if you do these things naturally, you're going to look a lot more confident. That in turn, when you watch yourself looking confident, will make you feel more confident about how you present yourself on camera.
7. Theater vs. Film Acting: In this video, I want to go over some key differences between filming for say, a feature length film, narrative film, and doing a theatrical acting. Then how you present yourself on camera when it comes to videos for YouTube, for your online classes, for webinars, all of those other things. When you're being filmed for a narrative film or a piece like that, where the audience is really playing the role of watching life unfold as it is, film is such a precious gift. Because it really gives us the opportunity to see into private moments that we otherwise wouldn't get to see into in other people's lives with a carefully constructed script that leads the viewer on a journey through the hero's story of evolution. That is why with filming for narrative or feature films, it is a different type of acting. The person isn't going to be looking into the camera lens, unless they're breaking the fourth wall, but that's a very stylistic choice. It is not used very often. Normally, the camera serves the role of the audience, just watching these actions unfold almost naturally. When you're on camera in that way, you want to act really natural. You may have heard that before, where the camera amplifies your actions a lot in that sense, you will normally be told to bring things down. When I'm directing a narrative piece, if I have actors that aren't used to being on camera, or maybe come from a theater background, a lot of times, I'll say, "That was great, but now try and do it a little bit less large." For that type of acting, you really want to be focused on being as natural as you would be, if you were actually experiencing that scenario in your real life. Taking on the role and the worldview of the character that you're embodying, but really making it feel natural. Whereas, with theater acting, you're presenting yourself to the farthest person back in the theater. You want to be really big, and large, and still be believable, but make your actions larger so that you can reach and fill up the space. It's interesting because when you're doing video for YouTube, and online courses, and all of those things, you actually don't want to go as much the direction of what you would do, if you were acting on film for a narrative feature. You want to go a little bit more the direction of theater, where you don't want to go so big that it's crazy, unless that's the persona that you're embodying. You do want to be a little bit more embodied. Like we've spoken about, you want to be able to move your body, and engage the audience in that way. It's really interesting because you're not trying to act natural in the sense of how you would talk to your friends. I'll do an example right now, if I'm just talking to my friend, maybe I'm not going to be that animated. I'm just having a conversation about my day. Now, when it comes to YouTube, when it comes to webinars, when it comes to teaching things, it's not super engaging to watch somebody that is very natural, in a sense, but is very relaxed and calm. Obviously, you want to be relaxed and calm within yourself, but you also want to be animated. You want to be engaging, and bring users in, and so it's a little bit more like the theater. If you have a theater background, or you have a really big personality, you might be naturally inclined. Actually just naturally embody how it's good to be when you are on camera for these specific uses. When you're on camera for these uses, you want to merge the two. You want to bring a little bit from the film, the traditional narrative film style, and you want to bring a little bit from the theater style, and not be so large that it feels weird. But also not be so small and casual that it feels like you're really not that engaged with who you're talking to on the other end of your lens. Be thinking about that, and watch films. Notice how they are acting pretty natural and pretty small in a way. Then watch some theater performances, and see how big they are. Then play with yourself in understanding where that line is for your own acting when you're presenting on camera. Watch yourself, and do a really big performance, see what that looks like. Then do a super casual performance, and see what that looks like. Then find that sweet spot in the middle for yourself, where you are engaging the audience, and you are bringing them in so that they feel excited to watch you.
8. Choosing your on Camera Personality: For this video, we're going to look at fun and creative ways that you can start getting those juices flowing about who you want to be on camera and how you want to present yourself, and also thinking in terms of who your videos are made for. The first thing that I'm going to invite you to do is go and watch a lot of videos of other content creators out there that are in a similar field as you are. Elect out a few different people, you might have certain people that you already follow or you might want to type in a specific field like photography or in TED talks or whatever. I have pulled up a few of the people that already follow and I'm just going to start watching their videos. Watch how they present themselves, watch how they talk to the camera. How much are they moving? How animated are they? What things are they doing? What images are they showing? Let's look at another one. Here he is a little bit different of a presentation and just really study how they're doing, what they're doing, and what they look like when they're doing it. Notice how each person has a slightly different persona that they're carrying forth and yet you might find some similarities to what they're doing and what type of persona they're presenting. What you're going to do is look at several different people and take notes about what you like that they're doing, what you don't like, what you think you could incorporate into your own practice and your own presence on the camera, and then what I want you to do is to open up your photo booth or your smartphone or whatever, some way easily recording yourself and just go about trying on the different personas that you notice people have crafted on their YouTube channels and just play around, even exaggerate, get as wild as you want to be with being those people but really just play around with embodying what they're like and seeing what that's like for you to try out, embodying this person and then that person. Really you're just going to get a sense of how different people are presenting themselves and how you feel presenting yourself in that way. A lot of content creators have created their own personal brand and this means that they have crafted who they are and how they present themselves on camera in a very formatted and strategic way to make sure that they are presenting a self, a person that they know their audience is going to enjoy watching, and that's consistent. It feels like you're really building a relationship with your audience as you go and they want to know you. This doesn't mean that you have to be the you that you are in one specific setting because we present ourselves on lots of different ways depending on who we're around and who we're talking to and what the situation is. But you really want to feel comfortable in the persona that you are presenting, as well as know that it's the right persona for your intended audience, your intended viewers.
9. Trying on Different Personalities: [MUSIC] In this exercise, it's going to be fun. I really just want to invite you to play. It's so important, and I think that as we grow up, we don't play nearly enough. With this exercise, we're going to be getting our muscles strengthened for acting so to speak. But really going back to the idea of how we have lots of different personalities that come out in different situations. You want to be thinking about what personality would best come through to reach your target audience? The exercise that we're going to be doing now is we're going to pick different little prop items from around our house. With you, what I'm going to do is explore three different personas that I see regularly in videos. There's the really playful fun style where they're joking around the whole time, cracking jokes, putting in little clips of themselves even messing up to get a laugh. There is the more studious persona who is a highly specialized person within their field. They will present themselves as that authority. But remember, even if you're going for that persona just still be relatable. Then the last persona that we're going to explore is more of a personal coach or somebody that's helping people on an emotional level. That maybe is more gentle and speaks slower. What I'm going to have you do, and what I'm going to show for you is to find three little props around your house that are helpful in bringing out these different persona's. The persona that we're going to explore first is the authority persona. For this, I have some glasses that are not mine, and so I can't really see at home, so I'm going to leave them down on the brim of my nose. I'm going to begin talking to you about whatever I'm presenting. In this persona, you do want to come across as knowledgeable and confident, but also warm and welcoming. Play around with this. Maybe you actually wear glasses and you could put on your glasses to feel more educated. Or perhaps you have some other item that would help you to really bring across and bring through this persona. Notice how when I speak through this person, I take my time, but I also make sure to not be too overly animated. Now, you want to smile, you want to make contact with your eyes, with the camera. But again, this persona is really about bringing across the information and not distracting from that too much. Now, let's go into the complete opposite, which is the more playful persona. For this one, you can be really silly if you want to. I see this persona a lot when it comes to bloggers or people doing tutorials who want them to be interested. People really who're building a personal brand that's based upon entertaining their audience and they want their viewers to come back again for their personality, for some laughs, and also learning all the wile. But really so this persona is playful and it's okay with this one to move around a little bit more. It's okay to be more animated. It's okay, even to do bloopers and to include them in and let the people know that you're not perfect. You're actually far from it, but that's okay because we're all in this together. Now your voice might be faster, but makes sure to still breathe. Make sure to still take time and pauses to give your audience the opportunity to think about things and make sure to be fun and play. I mean, that can be really helpful with this one too, to have other people that you can interact with and you can play off of their energy, you can joke with. If you have fun and playful friends, you might want to bring them in on this persona. If that's your target whether you going to be using, thank you, my little killer whale friend for being in on this one with me. Now, for the next one, we're going to look at a more personal coach. Somebody that's helping you with emotional or lifestyle type of things. For this persona, you may notice that my voice changes a little bit. I want to keep it not monotone, so not one flat rate, but give it a little waves and crass, some really almost a melodic type of singing voice. With this really taking time to dive into a deep presence with the camera. Which is actually your viewer on the other end is how you always want to think about it. Taking time with breath and pacing and making sure that whoever is watching you feels both comfortable in your presence and feels like you are capable of guiding them through whatever things that they may be experiencing. For this type, just play around with how does it feel to be really almost relaxed on camera, but also very focused and piercing attention on the viewer in a way that makes them feel both invited into your content and really interested in what you're going to be saying next. Thank you for taking that journey with me. What you need to do now is find three props in your house that you can play around with three different styles of presenting yourself. As you do this, feel which ones feel more comfortable, which ones feel like more of a stretch. The beauty of this exercise is that nobody else ever has to see it. As with all of these videos and what you're producing, you're in control of your content. If you don't want to release it, you don't have to. Really invite yourself into playing with it and into seeing all the different personalities that you can bring out of yourself. Once you've done this, once you've played around with this, then go back, watch it, see how you feel and start developing one of them that feels like it will both be the best one for your audience, as well as it feels the most comfortable to you. As you do that, then in the next exercises, continue to have that person that you are presenting yourself as in the back of your mind and try to bring them through more and more in practice, bringing that specific side of your personality out when you are on the camera. This can help with the nerves that come up from being on a camera and the stiffness that can come with it. Because through bringing this other persona, which is a part of yourself and your personality out. You can feel more like acting and you don't have to feel as pressured about who you are. It just takes a layer of tension off of it by being able to channel this very certain specific aspect of yourself, which will now be your video aspect for the courses or webinars or whatever you're doing.
10. Authenticity vs. perfection: One thing that I see a lot with my clients as well as with myself is this feeling like I have to be perfect when I present myself on camera and when I put it out there into the world. A lot of times that can stifle one from actually getting it out there. Maybe you had this experience where you've had something that you recorded of yourself, and you wanted to share it and you felt like really the message you were sharing was pretty important to get out there. But you just couldn't quite master the courage or desire to actually post it out into the world. I am going to teach you different techniques of editing to be able to cut things out. Some ums and some uhs when you mess up so that you can refine the message that you're getting out there and you can make it sound a way that you want to. But at the same time, I think that a really big thing that people are looking for in this day and age is authenticity. Part of that authenticity is being human. As humans, we mess up as humans we do um and uh sometimes and so it is important to be really to favor being authentic and real, which means that you might mess up sometimes and you might not sound perfect over this hyper polished and very precise to the point where you don't sound like a human anymore, but you sound like a robot. When we strive for perfection, really we rob the viewer the opportunity to know us as we truly are, which is really what people are looking for. Some other people that I've seen have the most success on YouTube and through creation of courses and creating their personal brands online have been people that aren't perfect. It might seem strange, but really people are looking for those quirky characters out there. They're looking for individuals who are themselves. When you strive too hard to be perfect and are too afraid of putting anything out there because you feel like it's not good enough. You are actually creating a less relatable persona because you are making it so that you're absolutely polished to the point of not seeming human. That's just a quick little word of advice that I wanted to give you is put your stuff out there. Even if you feel like it's not good at all, you can and will grow a lot as you continue to create content, as you continue to be in front of the camera more and more. But if you wait until that stage where you feel like, this is perfect, this is good enough, now I can put it out there. You might miss out on a lot of opportunities to grow and to continue your journey and to get your message out there quicker so you can build a following be it for your online courses, your personal brand, whatever you're hoping to accomplish by being on camera. Authenticity over perfection. Just remember that we're all on this journey of getting more and more comfortable in front of the camera. It's okay to just put it out there before you feel like it's perfect. You might find that you actually like it more than when you arrive at this perfect way of being on camera. You might say, actually, that first video I recorded really held more of my essence and who I am.
11. Lighting - How to Look Good on Camera: Now we're going to look at lighting. First I wanted to show you this standard three-point lighting. We have the first key light, and that's the main light that is illuminating the subject. Here you see object but probably since it's going to be you being filmed, you're subject. Next, we have a fill light, which is a light that fills in some of the shadows cast by the key light. Then finally, we have a back light. This light just helps to set the subject apart from the background. Now, in this course, I'm going to be going over natural lighting quite a bit because most likely you want to utilize natural lighting and you really can use it in a way that makes it look great. I'm also going to show you what not to do with natural lighting because you can get some really harsh shadows that are not flattering. But as far as cinematic lighting goes, and if you want to utilize any type of lights, you can keep in mind these three lights as your main kit, so to speak, for lighting yourself if you want to use lights. First, let's look at an example of just a basic outdoor shot. Now, this is using entirely natural lighting but I want to go over some things not to do while lighting yourself outside. First, you can see that the background is much lighter than the subject, me, in the foreground. You want to avoid that because it's going to draw the viewer's eyes to the background and be really distracting. Similarly, as this progresses and I move backwards, one, you can see that I'm not in focus obviously, but also I have half of my face being covered by a shadow and then the front part of my face having a really harsh direct sunlight on it. Now when you're shooting outside, you really want to try for a day that has some natural overcast going on. Here's another example of if you film directly into the sun and you have really harsh light coming at you. You want to pick a cloudy day instead to film on because if you have those really harsh lights, as you can see they're not really flattering, they make the subject have to squint and they just cast really harsh shadows in ways that it's not going to make you look like you want to look on camera. Similarly, the shot again is an in-focus. You've got to be careful with the focus to make sure you can see it's on my hairline but you always want to make sure that the subject's eyes are in focus. Next, I moved indoors. This is coming through a window, this lighting is. But again, you'll see that it's pretty strong light from the outside and it's blowing out, meaning it's putting too much light where there's a loss of information than in the image and it's blowing out the side of my face. Now all in all, if you want a cinematic look, once it gets down to be less blown out, it is nice to have a little bit of a shadow for a more cinematic look. As long as the person's eyes have sunlight coming into them, an eye light which will make their eyes feel alive and expressive, that's okay. As you can see, the window is over here and it's casting just a key light on me, there's no fill light. There's a little bit of back light being created from the reflection of the light from outside shining onto the beige wall. See how I'm being separated from the background. It's also pretty. It's actually a cool shot how it has the dark background over here and the light over here. That could be a stylistic choice. But again, the lighting is a bit harsh and also it's not even down here on my chin and the rest of my face, so that looks strange as well. Ideally, you can see as the outside a cloud passes by, then it gives a much nicer, less dramatic harsh light on my face and just creates some interesting shadows, some depth in my face, and yet it has a nice look to it. Next, I want to show you what it looks like when the window, and I'm goofing around in this video, but I'm facing the window directly so it's a more even light. It's not as cinematic and then it's not casting as much shadows on my face, but I'm facing the window, so the key light is shining directly onto my face. Again, I'm not using any external lighting sources. This is all natural sunlight. But in this moment, the sun was behind the clouds so again, it's not too harsh of lighting and it's coming to me straight on and so it's looking much more even along my face. I have something in the foreground that's catching some light and might be a little distracting to have something like this that is the lightest thing. Again, like we talked about before, this being the lightest thing you might draw the user's eye over here rather than being on the subject. But again, I want to show you what that looks like with a more flat light and me goofing around. Don't mind that. Next, what we're going to go to is just some natural lighting from the side, and I think this is a nicely composed shot. This time, the key light is coming over from the other side over here. It's just a window. Windows are really nice at diffusing light even if it is a sunnier day. It's casting a nice light on this side of my face and then a little bit of shadow and depth on this side but you can see how it's not as dramatic as the other example where I showed it to where it was really intense light that was casting a shadow on the side of my face. In this one, the room is bouncing around some light and so it's balancing some light over back onto this side of my face. It's all nicely in focus. My eyes are lit a little bit and so there's some character and dimension within my eyes. This is a good example of just natural light what you can get. Then I moved on to a shot with a little later in the day. In post-production, which we're going to go into, I can show you how to lighten up the image a little bit. But again, I'm using the natural light from the window, and then I have a fill light happening. I just put a lamp because I really wanted to show you what you could do just with the lighting around your house so you don't have to buy a bunch of equipment. Just with a lamp, I turned on a lamp on this side of me over here. That way you can see it's illuminating and making the shadows a little bit less harsh, and even giving this nice warm tone to my cheeks over here. Now what you will notice is it's casting a pretty intense shadow from my hair right here. That might not be ideal. Maybe I'll pull my hair back or I just leave it. I just left it because it didn't really bother me that much. I thought it looks like a nice shot. But again, when you do have external lighting going on, you want to be careful not to cast shadows that are going to be awkward or detract from your shot. Now, I'm going to go into an example of some back light. I wanted to show you this setup. I have this nice warm salt lamp behind me, and I'm using this as a bit of an illumination of a back light. I came over, I was setting up, here I am. Again, I have the natural light, the key light coming through the windows, just the sunlight. Then you can see this little glow that's happening behind me, setting me apart and illuminating me from the background. That is from the salt lamp that I put behind me. I didn't do any fill light here so you can see how again the shadows are a little bit harsher, but my eyes are both illuminated and this is a pretty cinematic work. You could even make it more dramatic if you wanted it to be more cinematic. Now I want to show you an example of front-on, no fill light again, just a key light of the window coming through the window. This one is in-between of that one where you saw where it was flat on of me and having big key light from the window coming just directly in my face, and where I'm really having it towards the complete side of my face and it creates a harsh line. This is having the light come more from this angle inward so it's not as dramatic as having it come from this angle, but it's coming in forward, and that way it's creating more subtle shadows. There's a little shadow of my nose, but it's not closing all the way and making a really strong distinction between the two sides of my face. I really normally like this. I find this to be very flattering. It gives a little bit of depth and dimension, but it doesn't create really strong and harsh shadows. Think about all of these things when you're thinking of where to place yourself in relation to your windows and how you want to let yourself using just natural window light. Now in this example, what I'm doing is I'm taking a little light and I'm moving it around my face. You can see depending on where the light is, it's more or less flattering. You don't want to have your light shining from underneath of you because that casts harsh shadows up. It's spooky and it's just definitely not flattering. You don't want to have your light cast super dramatic where you can't see one of your eyes unless you're going for a really spooky look. Again, you don't want to cast really harsh shadows from your hair so people cannot see you. Here you can see how just moving the light around really changes the shape of my face and it really changes how I look from one angle to another. Think about that when you're lighting.
12. Achieving a 'Cinematic Look': Here's the shot that we're going to be working with it. I gave a little bit of a blurred focus in the background by pulling myself, the subject, far away from the background. You can see, if I move myself closer to the background, there's less of a blur because there's not as much distance between us. This is called the depth of field. But really all you need to know is that we get that cinematic look by having the background be a little bit out of focus. If you want to achieve that, just bring yourself, the subject closer to the camera and then have the background further away. Right now I have it in auto-focus, it might be something that you probably want to use. You can definitely manual focus your shots, but if you're doing it on your own like I am, it can be hard to make sure the shot is in focus. Then if you get a perfect shot and it's out of focus, it's a really depressing thing. Although auto-focus has its drawbacks, like the camera may be confused. Especially if there's a lot of movement going on and try to focus in the background or try to focus somewhere else which will pull you out of focus for a while and make the shot a little bit distracting. If you have a relatively static and easy shot like this one, you, when filming yourself, can get away with just doing auto-focus. If you're filming on your phone or something like that, probably you'll most likely only have the option to do auto-focus.
13. Editing in iMovie Part 1 - Starting a New Project: This probably won't come as a surprise to you. But a big part of feeling confident about how you are on camera, comes down to editing. A lot of people that seem really put together and polished while they're on camera, have done editing to the pieces they record. They don't just record a piece and then put it up there for the world to see. In this section, I want to take you through how to edit your piece that you've recorded of yourself together, and different tips and tricks to be able to make it feel really polished, professional, and have you feel really good about how it turns out. Now there's a lot of editing programs out there. Some are free, some are more expensive. The one I primarily use is Final Cut Pro. But that one's pretty expensive. For this class, I'm going to teach you how to do it in iMovie. But you don't need to get hung up on the specifics of which program you use. Because really this is more a general talk about how to edit, in general, and general things you need to consider. I'll link in the resources, some other tutorials on different editing platforms for the technical side of things. But really here I just want you to focus on the pieces that I'm teaching you, and not get too hung up on iMovie. The good news is, if you have a Mac, it comes free on your computer and that's why I'm choosing to do this program for a tutorial right now, because I want to show you how to use a general one, as I want to give one that a lot of people potentially may have. But there's so many and so really it's up to you what you feel comfortable and what you want to use. To begin, what we do, is we open iMovie in our applications. Here it says welcome to iMovie. You can see that there's software agreements. You can just say Continue, and they walk you through a few things. We're going to get started. What we're going to do first is pretty obvious. We're going to click "Create New." They give me the option to do a movie or just a trailer. We're going to do a movie. Trailer is really if you just want a template to work through. Here is the layout. You can see they've already imported some photos from my photo stream, they have music from my music library, and then they have titles and backgrounds and all of those things. But over here, we're going to go to My Media. I'm going to begin by creating a new composition in here, which is my timeline. What I'm going to do is go to up here this Import button, that. Then you'll see here I have my external hard drive plugged in. Now I'm going to get some clips from this class that I'm teaching right now. You can see here you can just preview through some of them. Here let's take this one right here. I'm going to say Import selected. Now I have this first clip here, and it's importing. What I'll do is I will take the whole clip. If I select it by clicking on it, then I'm able to select the whole clip and drag it down into my timeline. Now if I just want to select a little portion of the clip, you see these handlebars here, so I can just select out a little portion. If I hover over the clip and press the space bar, it will play a preview. I'll pull this down here. Now I have the whole clip down here in my timeline. You can import more clips at any point, by just pressing this button here. Then by clicking on different ones, looking through them and importing. As you can see in the background, what it's doing is it is fully importing the clip. Now some other basic things to know. Over here, you can zoom in on the clip or zoom out. If you want to get a bigger view of the full clip, it's pretty long clip, then you can zoom and that will make it easier to do more precise editing.
14. Editing Part 2 - Cutting Out Sections: Now if I want to cut that little section out where I take a breath, pause all of that. I put the play head scrubber right where I want to start where I'm going to do it and then I go modify and I go to split clip. Now, as you can see, it's split the clip in two. Then I go to the other end. Again, modify and split clip. Which you'll see there's a keystroke you can actually use to do it as well if you don't want to go up to the menu item. Again, I'm going to Command Z where I split it just now and instead of going to the menu to split clip, I have it in the same place and I do Command B and it splits it. Now, to get rid of that I just select the clip and I press ''Delete''. Now it'll go straight from being me talking here, talking, talking, talking, and then there we go. No pause in between. You can then watch through your video, look through it, and cut out parts where you mess up, cut out parts where you take gulps, cut out parts where you're not really saying anything. Here's another part where I messed up a little bit. Again, I'm going to select it Command B, now it's split the clip there. Then I'm going to go further, select it, Command B, and then I'm going to delete it and now here we go again, a seamless little part where I'm just talking and not taking any pauses. A lot of times with the transitions you'll probably want to just leave it being a hard cut, meaning it has no transitions in between and that can look good. Sometimes it can be a little jarring so you might want to put some kind of transition in between the two. We go up here at the top in the transitions options and then a really good one, normally the one you'll probably use the most is cross dissolve. Here we go and I'll just put it in between those two clips and now as you can see, instead of being a hard cut it's a little fade. Now, you can play around with all the different options, fade to black, cross blur, fade to white. All of these, they are so many. One thing I'll say is that you can get a little carried away and it can start to look cheesy if you use too many different transitions or if you use like really exaggerated ones. Like some of these, there's a right moment and time to use them but if you're just having it wipe and slide and page curl all over the place, it's not going to look very professional, so just keep that in mind. But here we have this little transition right here. Another thing I want to talk to you about is the audio and the audio levels. As you'll see, there's a preview of the image up here and then there's this right here is a preview of the audio. Here if you hover over that blue space you're able to drag down or up the audio levels and you can control if you didn't talk loud enough, you can boost it up, if you talked too loud you can take it down, and so just keep that in mind that you can adjust the audio right there for all the clips. Now, if you want to detach the audio which you might want to do this if you have some B-roll happening or just some reason that you don't want the audio to be in that clip anymore. Again, you go up to modify and then you go down to detach audio and now here it is. It's a separate track and you can move it around too if you want it to be in a different position, you're able to move it around freely from the clip itself and here we go if we just press ''Delete'' we delete it right out.
15. Editing Part 3 - Adding Stock Footage: Now I have some clips all added together in a way that I cut out the parts that I don't like and I've muted or gotten rid of the audio in certain sections. Another thing that helps make videos feel more professional and like they're moving along in a really polished way. I really want to draw this in, this is a great way to hide if you have an abrupt cut and it doesn't look good to put a transition, or if you have a moment where you feel like it's dragging and you're saying a lot, but the audience might lose attention. We're going to talk now about adding in B- roll. Now B-roll, which just means some visuals going on while you're talking. It's extra visuals that aren't the main subject, aren't the main focus. What you can do is you can record yourself, say, working on the computer or doing whatever action you're talking about. You can put that in over top over here. But what I'm going to show you is a subscription-based online source where you can get a bunch of B-roll. You pay a yearly fee and then you have all of this royalty free. You don't have to pay for videos that you can use and you can utilize for your projects. There's actually a lot of sources online where you can find both free stock footage and paid for stock footage. Really, it's hard to dig around for free stock footage, although you can do it if you're determined, but I'm going to show you some paid stock footage options that I like to use. I will link these in the class resources. The first one I want to talk to you about is called storyblocks. I use this. You pay an annual fee and then you have so much stock footage and you're not paying for the individual clips. You can look they're tremendous giant catalog of all of the video clips that they have. Let's say that I was talking about being on the computer in that clip that I have in my iMovie sequence. I'm going to put in person on computer. Now here you'll see there are tons of stock footage videos, and you can load more. There's an endless amount. You can hover over them and see what the different ones are. Let's say I want to just find somebody working on the computer. Once I want it then I click the "Download" button. Normally for web purposes I'll pick a lower resolution one because it doesn't have to be super high and that saves me processing power on my computer and storage space. Then I'll click this "Download" button, then it will begin to download the clip. Now I have that clip. Now moving over, there's also Adobe Stock. They have tons of clips. The way this works is you type in whatever you're looking for, then these you pay for individually. You click on it. Go get a preview, and then you'll have to buy the license for individually. Their prices can range, but they're pretty expensive as you'll see. I'd recommend storyblocks or just finding royalty-free stock footage, and just making sure that you're able to use it for the purposes you intended for. If you're using it for social media, make sure you can use for that. If you're using it for promotional videos, just make sure you get the right licenses so you don't get in trouble down the road. Those are two great stock footage resources. Again, you can film at yourself too, and you can find free sources. You can even find images. A nice image source for royalty-free images that I like to use is called unsplash.com. Here you can just find still images. It's not going to be as powerful as videos to put into your thing but say we want a person on computer. You can get still images and have those happen. I will download one of these too just to show you the difference. Download for free. I'm going to do a medium sized one. Now that's downloading. Now what you'll do is you'll go back to your video that you're editing together. You can go into your downloads and you'll see the two clips right here, and you can just highlight them and drag them into your project. Now we have these two clips in our project. One is a still photo and one is a video. A really nice thing about iMovie is that they'll add a little motion to your photo just by default so you can drag it out to be a little bit longer, and then this is happening while I'm talking in the background. Here we go with this one. Again, there you see you can't drag longer because that's as long as the clip itself is, but you can make it shorter. Say that's what I wanted. Another good thing to note is if I press it in here, you'll see it's overriding whatever I'm putting it on. So just be careful with that. You might unintentionally make your clip shorter than you want it to be if you're dragging it over it. Here we go. Now we'll see that if we press "Play" I'm talking and the video is playing. Obviously this isn't lining up because that's not exactly what I'm talking about. But having B-roll that comes into the clip and is playing while the person is talking, really helps to make your audience more interested and its absolute production value. That is another great thing to think about.
16. Editing Part 4 - Color Correction: We have ourselves cut together in a way that feels really good, and we're happy about it. Another thing that you might want to do is a little bit of color correction on yourself or the image, the clip that you're doing, whatever. Here, if you press this button right here, clip filter and audio effects, and you go here to clip filter and click on it, you'll see that it gives you some different options. If you hover over them, it will start to auto play them, and it shows you how the different preview of one row look like. Now, the options are a bit limited as far as their presets go, but you do have some options here. Let's say I liked the vintage. I'll click on it and now the vintage is added to this clip. You can see it might look a little overly stylized. But if you're going for that, then you know how to do it. Some other things you can do as far as how to improve or change or alter the image quality is here in this button and now let's say skin tone balance. I select my skin tone. It just makes it a little bit more balanced. It might turn out well, it might not. If you like it, you press check, if you don't like it, you press x. Here maybe we'll try to do the white balance. Let's see if we can find something that's white, and so then if you like how it did, it made it a little bit less on the light green hues you leave it if you don't, you cancel it. I'll press check on that one. Now if you go over here, you can really refine and tweak in the different colors and the way it's showing. By moving around these dials here, I'm changing it and you can see how it's giving it more contrast or less contrast. These are the extreme versions of it. But you can find a nice in-between where if you up the contrast a little bit, it can make the image look a little bit more sharp. Over here, this will affect the color, hues and tones of it, make it either more saturated or less saturated. This is a 100 percent desaturated and black and white. This is going more and more and more and that's really an exaggerated saturation, you can play around with that. Then this is going to affect the color temperature, making it more cool or more warm. This clip started out cool. If I add up the warmth a little bit, you can see how that's really coming together as a nicely composed and color corrected image. Again, if you don't like it, you just press reset and we'll go all the way back to the way it was. Again, over here we have a more stylized, exaggerated filter on top of it. Then over here, I'm just going to Control Z to go back to what I had done. Here you can see we have the color corrected version of it.
17. Editing Part 5 - Adding Music & Exporting: We learned how to color correct. We learned how to add different filters that we want on top of our image. A few more things at this top, just to know about. If you have this selected, you can work with the audio and you can shift it to higher or lower volume of other clips so you can mess around with the audio in here. Over here, we have a way if you have a lot of background noise going on or if there is some kind of weird hum, or your audio is just not coming through in the way that you want it to, you can click on this to reduce the background noise. You can also play around with voice enhance, music enhance, loudness, hum reduction. Maybe say this clip had hum on it. I'm going to do that. This is how you mess with it and play around with the audio if you wanted to edit the audio a little bit. Obviously it's limited what you can do on this program, but it's pretty robust for what it is. Now if you go over here, this is stabilization. Obviously this clip, I had my tripod, so it was a very stable shot. But if you're doing a handheld shot, it might be really shaky. You can click on this button to stabilize the image for you. Lastly, here's one where you can mess with the speed and speed up the clip, slow it down. Here you can just go slow, fast, freeze frame, and custom. That will change the speed of your clip. You can also then reverse the clip so it's playing backwards. I don't know what situation you use it for a promotional video where you're talking to the camera. But for a more creative video or whatever, you might want to know how to change the speed and reverse it around. Those are those little tools just to know a little extra as you might not use them all the time, but now you know where they are. Say we want to put a title on our video. Now, in one of my other classes, I talk about how iMovie on the phone frustrates me because the title options aren't that great. However, on the app on your computer, they're actually pretty good. You can scroll through and look at different titles that they have. They have movement, they have all sorts of fun things. One thing I'll say is if you go with these more stylized ones, just using really wisely, because they can look cheesy if you're just using them for effect and it doesn't really make sense. Let's say we like this one. I again, like there are certain ones that are just very clearly iMovie titles so every time I see a video that has this one, I know it was made in iMovie. Really more what I tend to do is just go with a super basic one. Let's see if we can find a very basic one here. See all of those are a little bit too much for my taste. But let's just say expand is a nice one that we like. We'll put it on here. Again, you can drag it if you want it to be longer and then you'll see that when the title's selected, it gives me options to start editing it. I just double-click in there and I can pick different fonts. I like let's say this one right here, that'll change the font. I can change the size of it to be smaller, to be larger. They give you a few preset options. I can change how it's oriented, I can make it bold, I can do all of these different things. I can make it have an outline and I can make it italic. I like the italic. Then I'm going to write in my movie for now. Then here we go. We have the clip on there. That's a really frightening freeze frame. But you'll see they all give you options as much to move it around or anything so you really want to make sure you have the right one. For this clip, instead what I would want, and I just pressed the "Delete" button when it was selected, I think I want a lower third one that shows, let's say a title for my name. Here we go. I stretch it out the [inaudible], I double-click on it and I say my name Nisha, and I say class teacher. You can change the font here. Now when it's this style, the sizing is locked in. But you can also change the color that you want it to be by clicking that and then just selecting the color wheel, and we'll change that. Here you go. Now you have a title to go on your project. The next thing that I want to move on to now is talking about in these final steps, you have your titles, you have the transitions. You've made your audio good, you've color corrected. Now it's in the last stages. If you really feel like it's dragging or you could use a little extra pizzazz for your video, a great way to do that is by adding in some audio. Here we're going to go over to an audio library. This is YouTube's audio library. It's free if you have a YouTube account, which you should add if you're making videos to upload on them too. Even if you don't have a YouTube account, if you have a Gmail account, you can really easily from your Gmail account, your Google Suite, create a YouTube account. Assuming you already have a YouTube account, you go to the YouTube audio library. If you type that in and search, that'll be what comes up. Here I'm going to just show you YouTube audio library here it is in the suggested. Then you'll see right here, the second option is the YouTube audio library. So I just click on it and here I am. Now what you can do is you can go through the different songs and you can listen to them by clicking on them. That was a very classic one. Let's see if I can find one that I can like. That one's jazzy, I don't know if I'd really use it, but for this example I'll use it. I press the "Download Track", and again here I've downloaded it. Then I go to my downloads and I grab this and I just drag it right over into my iMovie. Now I'll have this track playing while I'm talking. You'll see how it's pretty high. The audio levels when it gets red and yellow or orange colors, that shows that it's too loud. What you want to do is just drag it down a little bit and have it be a nice volume level. Let's listen to that. That's definitely still too loud, let's drag it way down. There we go. We have some audio in the background. Again, I'm just showing you how to use these things. I'm not creating the video that I would export right now. That music obviously feels way too jazzy for how calm I am and what I'm talking about. But this is just to show you all the elements that you would use and you would put together. Here let me just move these over here. Let's click this clip and if you want to just shorten the clip, you click it and then you drag this little bar back here, and you can drag it to shorten it. Now I'm going to delete the rest of these clips. Just for this example. I'm going to delete them all out and say this is the final project, I'm really happy with it. Maybe I will put a little outro text so I can drag it and just put it right there. Another thing that I'll show you is say that I wanted this clip to not be over my talking anymore, but I want it to be its own thing. It's just so easy, iMovie, you can just drag and drop, but lots of other programs, editing programs, you can do the same. So don't worry about the program itself. Just know to move things, you just pick them up and you drag them around. I'm going to drag this over here. I want it to come in this part right here. You'll see the transition got moved. You can pick that up even and drag it back to where you want it to be. Now it's going to fade, here we go, at the end of this clip and then it's fading into that. Then I have the end title. That's awesome. I'm really happy with this piece, obviously. I'm not for example sake. This is my finished piece. I'm so happy with it I'm ready to export it. Now what you do to share your project is you go up here and you go to share. It's really straightforward. You can share it to an email, YouTube, pair for Facebook, Vimeo, image, but I do file, that'll save it as a file to my computer. Again, I'll just call it my movie. You can add a description if you want to, you can add tags. The resolution 1080 is a good high one. If you wanted to make it smaller, just to make it a smaller file size, you can, but I wouldn't recommend doing that. Quality high but again, you can choose. This will take a longer time to export, but this will be really high resolution and compress faster or better quality. You have these options here. Now I click "Next". Once you've pressed next to name what you're going to save it as. Maybe I'll say this the final version of my movie. You can pick where you want to save it here, but I'll just save it to my documents. I'll say "Save". Now what it's doing is it's exporting the movie. This could take a little while, but you just see up here, this shows you the progress and you can still work and edit around with the video as it's exporting. Obviously the changes that you make when you're editing, while it's exporting won't be reflected in the final version, but you can re-export it if you've made some changes you like, or you can work on other projects. Or you can just have it happening in the background and browse the web, or just wait until it finishes exporting. We'll just wait, wait, wait. It's happening pretty quick because this is a really short project. You see this little time countdown. It's going to be exporting. Once it exports all the way, it'll give you a notification that it's exported and then that file will be wherever you put it. If you had it in your documents, it will export to your documents. If you put it on your desktop, it'll export to your desktop. Now it's finished exporting and it's all there. See, it says right here, it lets me know I can go look at it or I can just close this notification and keep working. There you have it. That's how to edit from start to finish on iMovie. Again, you can really follow this format for any programs and I'll link some other programs. But iMovie is one of the most universal ones, especially if you're a Mac person. Now you know the fundamentals of editing yourself together. You can feel really good about the quality level and how polished you are by cutting out those little moments where you messed up, you didn't say it right and by adding some nice B-roll and audio and correcting the color and making it to look a little bit better visually too. I really hope this helped and let's move on.
18. Self-Judgement on Camera: When I first film clients, an initial reaction across the board a lot of times, especially if they haven't been on camera before is, that's a nice video, I like how it's produced, but it's really hard for me to watch myself. I don't like how I look, I don't like how I sound, and it's just making me cringe to watch myself played back on camera. This is especially true if they haven't seen themselves on camera very much or if they don't have practice being on camera. Now a big reason for this is it's just different. We're not used to seeing ourselves presented in that way. Maybe we look at ourselves in the mirror, maybe we talk to ourselves in the mirror sometimes even, but it's not the same as watching it played back in a video version. It is unusual to hear our own voice outside of our heads and it's unusual to watch ourselves, but the judgment that comes with that I'm going to say is not necessary and we don't need to have that be a standard for how we feel about ourselves when we're looking at ourselves on camera. A lot of times these judgments might not even come from within ourselves, even though they're spoken in our own voices. That can be because there's a lot of different factors. Be it teachers in the past, or parents or friends who even meant well by critiquing or saying something about how you present yourself. But it wasn't really that helpful, and it stuck with you as this voice in your head that is giving negative critiques, especially when you see yourself on camera. Now, a huge part of getting confident on camera and putting your unique gifts that you have to bring into the world out there is about getting rid of those judgmental voices once and for all. I'm not saying that I'm going to give you some magical technique that immediately will rid you of all of the self judgment voices. But with practice and with consistency, you can silence those voices, turn the volume down on those ones, and turn the volume up on the self appreciating and self loving voices so that you're then able to present yourself on camera confidently and let the light of who you are shine through, let the charisma of who you are truly shine through and come through on camera and then draw your audience in. A big part of confronting those judgmental voices is really tracing back where they come from. Understanding are they voices that are totally internal, are they voices that maybe society has implanted by saying, you need to look this certain way or act this certain way in order to be good on camera. We've all seen movies and television where there are these perfect looking and acting people. But you have to remember that they have years and years of practice being on camera and they have a whole team of people making sure that in every moment they look perfect, their scripts are written so they sound perfect. It's a very consciously constructed image that you're seeing. Whereas when you're creating your own content, it might not be a Hollywood level presentation, but in this class you are learning techniques so that you can make it look good from a technical standpoint. You're learning techniques so you can know how you want your presence and your voice to come forth on camera and now we're going to learn a technique that we can get rid of those nagging little voices in the back of our head so that we can be truly present with the camera and not distracted by what those voices are saying. Furthermore, you're going to learn to be able to then watch your video back from a truly objective standpoint, rather than seeing it filtered through this lens of how we are so nit-picky on every detail of how we look and how we sound to the point where nothing would ever be good enough to put out there to a place where we're like, you know what? I like how this is and I don't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be perfect on camera. I know that my message that I'm trying to get out there is important enough that it needs to get out there and I need to not stifle myself by holding back until everything is 100 percent perfect.
19. Where Judgement Comes From: My own experience with this voice is that when I was in college as a student filmmaker I put myself in some of my pieces actually. I put myself in a lot of my pieces for two reasons. First, I think that in college it's definitely the time of exploration of self and self-portraiture and self understanding, developing through our creative pieces. Also because as a student you don't necessarily have the budget or ability to hire professional actors for every one of your pieces so you have to just put yourself in some of them. Well, when I'd show this particular piece to my class for critiques, my teacher gave me a really harsh one about particularly how I was on camera. She said that I smile too much and I wasn't very believable in my acting. Now, whether or not that was true, it really damaged my ability to be on camera for a long time. Whereas before I had felt like I enjoyed being on camera, like it was fine. I mean, it was still a little bit of a stretch as it is for everyone but I actually did enjoy being on camera. After that critique I couldn't stand being on camera and it was really hard for me to watch myself and I didn't put myself in as many pieces. A part that we're going to be getting into later is that it's really important to know when and how and from who you are asking feedback about yourself on camera because it can be damaging just as much as it is helpful. We'll get into that later. But I told you that story about my own journey which it did take a lot of time and work to unlearn what she had taught me about myself and to realize that I needed to take her feedback with a grain of salt and just keep going in my journey of being on camera. I want to offer this gift to you now about getting rid of those voices that may have stuck with you so that you can present your true self on camera and not a self that might be influenced by negativity. Being on camera is actually as corny as it may sound, a journey of self love. Because we go from this place of judging ourselves really harshly on one camera and feeling really uncomfortable because of that, to feeling okay but not really enjoying it that much, to actually learning how to enjoy our specific personalities and our specific ways that we present ourselves and through that, really loving who we are and when you come to that place of feeling more you're comfortable with yourself and how you look on camera, then you come to this place where you actually enjoy creating content of yourself and you enjoy putting it out there. Now I'll just say we're going to become narcissists or self obsessed but really self love is something that we have been trained out of and really lost in our society. Even if we show lots of images of ourselves on the beach and on Instagram and on Facebook, there's still those lingering voices that are saying you're not good enough or that image isn't good enough and we really need to get rid of those in order to be able to be comfortable on camera and to put ourselves and our unique gifts that we have to give out there more. What I'm going to have you do now for this exercise is to take time and watch yourself back from some of the exercises that we've done before and write down any voices of self judgment and any judgments that come up when you watch yourself on camera. As you do that, just make a long list of it and maybe it's short and hopefully it is if you don't have very many. But however many there are, just get them all out there. Now next, what I want you to do is trace back if any of those voices sound familiar from what other people have said and where you may have picked them up along the way and try to get as far back as you can and try to really dissect it.
20. Getting Rid of Judgement: Want you to take that list, look at it, think about it, reflect on it for however long you want to, and then destroy it. Destroy it somehow, flush it down the toilet, rip it up, burn it, put it into a fireworks container and shoot it off into space. I don't know how these things work, but just get rid of it. With that, really take the time to say, "You know what, I know that I've picked up these voices along the way, but they're keeping me from putting myself out there on camera and from accomplishing all that I need to do, and so I don't want those anymore." Now, what I wanted you to do after that is to watch yourself again and no matter how hard you try to remember those voices of the past, you're not going to be able to. What you're going to do instead is write down all of the things that you like about yourself on camera. All of the ways that you present yourself, all of the things you do, and those quirks that before might have seemed like a bad thing or irritated you, all the sudden are going to be transformed into something that you're like, "That's actually a cool and unique part of who I am and I enjoy that on camera." Make this list of the parts that you really like about yourself on camera and keep that list somewhere nearby. Especially when you're filming or when you are having a moment of feeling a little unsure or critical, just keep referencing back to that list and make it longer as you go. Build up your self-esteem because really, a lot of times we approach critiques and we approach putting ourselves out there in this way of making sure we find all of the things that are wrong so we don't put them out there, so other people can't judge them, but actually we are our own worst critics. Other people are never going to see us in as harsher light as we see ourselves. Remembering that, really don't be too concerned with the parts that might not be perfect. Embrace those and enjoy all of the parts about yourself and yourself on camera that you really like. By strengthening that muscle of self appreciation and self-love, you're going to find such a dramatic change with how you feel in front of the camera. Because it's no longer about hiding your flaws from the camera, it's really about shining a light in who you are out there more.
21. How to Ask for Feedback: As we are nearing the end of our course, and you have a lot of videos amassed from all of the recordings of yourself you've done and all of the different exercises we've gone through, you might want to ask for some feedback. You might want to see what other people think about your presence on camera. In this section, I want to give you advice about how and when to ask for feedback, and the right way to structure feedback so that it doesn't stifle you along your process of getting your work out there and getting more comfortable on camera. As I talked about before, in my past, I got some feedback that was very harsh and did stifle my ability to be on camera for quite a while. I want to protect you. I feel protective of you as we've gone along in this course, and as we have developed more and more ease and comfort in being on camera. I don't want that all to be negated because somebody gives you bad feedback. When I was in school there, I had very harsh critiques that time. But I later went on to major in digital arts, and I had a really great department, and I had many really excellent critiques that weren't easy on me in the sense of really letting me get away with whatever, but they were structured in a way that the feedback was received and really helped evolve my process. I'm going to give you that technique right now. The way that we are going to structure asking for feedback when we ask for it from our friends or family, whoever we're asking from, is the sandwich method, which you might be familiar with when it comes to delivering bad news or giving feedback on something, where you say a nice thing and then you say the feedback, and then you say another nice thing. I want to encourage you to ask for that specifically when you're getting feedback on your videos. For the thing that is the critique, I would take it a step further. When I work with clients and when I direct people in more narrative style films, I like to give feedback on their acting in a way that I feel really helps to bring out their best performances. I've found that if you are really direct and blunt, oftentimes even really good and experience actors can get to in their head, and some directors do take that technique and are really harsh onset. But I think that the end approach is actually more successful one and I've seen it help bring out better performances in a lot of my actors. That looks like saying, you did this wonderful. I really liked this, which is the first nice part, and how about for this next take, we try it a little larger, or we try it a little smaller or whatever the feedback I'm giving to give it as an and, and to give it in a nice way, that it doesn't tear them down and it doesn't make them feel they're just across the board doing a bad job at acting. Then when you're asking for your feedback, ask for the person to deliver the critique in a nice way. It might look like, wow, I really liked how you animated you were, and I think that maybe you could work on looking at the camera a little bit more, because I noticed you were looking off quite a bit. I also liked how you were able to just talk to the camera like it was a friend. There you can see that, that feedback is both helpful but also building up your confidence and self-esteem when it comes to you being on camera. That's the first thing that I want you to do.
22. When to Ask For Feedback: The second thing is, mistake that I've seen a lot of clients make is that they film themselves and sometimes they hire me to film them and make this whole big promotional piece, and then they put it out there with the caveat. They say, "Friends and family on Facebook," wherever they're putting it out, "Please tell me what you think of this. Give me honest feedback and critiques about how I could do better." Please don't do that. When you ask people for a feedback, they feel obligated to find things that are wrong, even if they genuinely enjoyed it. Though overall you did a great job and really don't have that much feedback to give, if you implore them to find something to give feedback about, they will. If you put it out there that you want, have many people who are friends with hundreds of people, to all way in on how your performance was on camera, you're going to get a lot of critiques and they might not be in the way that's going to help you. Everybody has opinions, not everybody's opinions are the correct opinions. So don't do that. What you should do is ask one or two trusted friends or family to look at it when you're ready to have some feedback and ask them to do it in the way that I've laid out. Really just do it in a structured way and be a little bit bossy. It's okay to say exactly what you want and how you want it when it comes to feedback about how you are on camera. Because it is a vulnerable and sensitive space to be putting yourself out there on camera for the world to see. Really getting the right type of feedback at the right time is super important. Which that's another thing that I wanted to talk about. If you ask for a lot of feedback early on and you get negative feedback, it might stop you from continuing down this path when you have an important message to share. I don't want to see you getting stifled by negative critiques. Please just make sure you're far enough along in your process that you're really ready to start receiving a little feedback. Make sure it's only from a few trusted people. Then when you do put yourself out there in a bigger way on Facebook, ask for positive feedback. What I mean by this is encourage people to like, encourage people to leave nice reviews if it's a class, encourage people to share it with their friends if they enjoyed what you were saying. When you're putting it out there in the big way, rather than asking for critiques, ask for positive reinforcement. This isn't about being self-obsessed or too self-promoting because in the stay and age, we really do need to be our own best PR people to get our message out there. It's about one, of course, it helps the algorithms and it helps boost your stuff so it's seen more, but also it helps you as a creator to see that people enjoy what you're putting out there. The people that you're wanting to get responses from are the people that you're trying to reach with your message. If you're getting this nice feedback as you are putting yourself out there, you'll be more likely to continue to be on camera, which is going to continue your growth and your comfort levels on camera, and it's going to continue your evolution on camera. Whereas, there can be a self-fulfilling loop of badness, if you ask for negative feedback, you get a bunch and you think, "Oh, I'm terrible on camera, I'm never going to get better, just not going to do it." Don't take that route, take the positive route. Along those lines, if you are enjoying this class, I must practice what I preach. Please leave a nice review, a nice comment, share it with somebody that you think it would be helpful for. It means a lot. I've put a lot of work into this, and I appreciate positive feedback.
23. How to Deal with Haters: Now, we need to have a little note about the haters out there. There will be people that gives negative feedback. It might be for the sole purpose of cutting down because they're just not very nice people online, or it might be because they truly do feel like they're going to be helpful to you by giving this negative feedback. To that I would say, yes, look at it maybe it is something that's helpful, and also take it with a grain of salt. They might not be the style of person you are trying to reach. Like we've talked about, you have your intended target audience and you have the persona that through the exercises we've done, you've crafted to reach a certain type of person, and so maybe the persona that you have crafted for this segment that you're trying to reach, maybe the person giving negative feedback isn't that person, and that's okay. Not everybody has to like you online because if you really resonate and really help somebody, then that's really valuable, and so it's okay that maybe somebody, the personality that you've created doesn't work for one specific person, so take that with a grain of salt. Now, on the other side, if you are getting a bunch of feedback that whatever you're doing on camera isn't working. You might want to assess that and see if the person that you've crafted for your on-camera presence is the right person to reach the viewers that you're trying to reach. Maybe it's not the right persona. Maybe you've taken on the golf ball when really you need to be more than the teacher, or maybe you've taken on the teacher when you need to be more of the personal coach. It can be good if you're getting a bunch of feedback that's saying may be what you're doing isn't working. They're probably not going to point specifically to, hey, you're not properly reaching your target audience, but it might be saying that you need to go back and refine what your online presence is to reach the right audience.
24. What's Next: Congratulations on making it to the end of the camera confidence class. I hope that the skills and tools that you used within this course will really help you to shine through on camera and share your unique message that you have to get out there and feel confident while doing it. As you may have now started to do more and more of the practices and develop those camera confidence muscles, I hope that you're finding that you actually really enjoy being on the camera. I know for myself the more and more I do it and watch it back, refine upon the process, the more and more confident I feel. I really hope you're finding the same thing. With that, let's talk about what's next for you in your camera confidence journey as well as your overall DIY branding journey. I imagine that you have some voice, brand, company, personal brand, something that you really want to get out there into the world. I really hope that this piece of feeling confident on the camera and feeling like you can be on camera and feel natural and at ease is going to play a key role in getting whatever your message is out there and really sharing and being the face of your brand if you choose to do so. Next, I want to tell you that what you need to do after this class is practice. You have to practice being on camera. If you've taken the different modules and learn the different lessons and not practice putting them into action, you're probably going to find that it still feels like an edge to be on the camera. I invite you to every day for say, 14 days. Let's make it a 14 day challenge. Film yourself for at least a minute to five minutes each day. You don't have to have it be for any specific output but you can just practice being on camera and using the different techniques. For 1-5 minutes each day, do that. You'll find that when you look back on those videos, you'll see this steady progression and also within yourself, you may think going into it, oh, I'm not going to feel that much more confident even if I do film myself every day. But by the end of those 14 days, I imagine that you're going to be feeling like a camera confidence pro if you don't already from this class. Definitely keep practicing. I would love to hear how your journey goes for you and how it all went. Leave me feedback, leave a review. I would love to hear how this course helped you and I'd love to share out what you're doing too with your new found camera confidence. Make sure to reach out to me and to leave a review. Another thing you can do as you continue your DIY branding journey is that I have other courses available and also other courses that I'm developing to help you along your way. I have an iPhone videography class, which really specifically looks into how to use an iPhone to do everything you need to do as far as recording yourself. If that's the medium that you've chose to record on, you'll probably definitely want to check out that class. Another class that I have is a morning routine for productivity and self-care course. It's really great because I have a really strong morning routine and through doing that, I find that I'm able to get so much more done throughout the day and accomplish so much with setting a really great tone for the day by having a very strong morning routine. That's self-care, taking care of yourself and balancing out both your work as well as your internal life is really essential to getting your message out there, to getting your gift out there without burning yourself out. That's another course I'd really recommend. Furthermore, if you want to sign up for my email list, I have some amazing courses that are in the works. I have a full DIY website design course. It's going to give you ways to design your own personal website yourself, which is so amazing if you want that creative control with an ease. I go over various platforms that make it really easy to plug and play for website design so that you can make sure to make your website exactly how you want it and get it out there regardless of if you have limited funds or limited investment abilities for hiring a professional website designer. I'm also doing a create a logo in Canva chorus where in 5 to 10 to 15 minutes, you're going to be able to create a really professional, really great looking logo for your brand, which is so important as you're getting your brand out there more and more. I'm going to have so many more classes that fall under the DIY branding umbrella. It's really a passion of mine to be able to take all of the knowledge and skill that I've developed over these 15 years of experience in the graphic design, film making, and website design worlds, and translate that over to you. Since I'm not able to work as much with one-on-one clients, I really want to give you the resources and all the tools that you need to succeed and to build your own brand, whether it be for a personal brand, your small business, whatever you're working on. I really believe in what you need to get out there into the world and I want to make sure that these technical and different pieces that could get in your way don't. I want to make sure that you have all the tools you need for success. Thank you so much for taking this course. Feel free, please share it with anybody that you think you could help. Anybody that you see out there creating a really amazing thing, but maybe needs a little help feeling more confident on camera. I would love to be able to support them in that journey through this online course. Thank you so much. Here goes to you creating a great product, putting yourself out there in the world, feeling super confident and loving being on camera.
25. BONUS - Zoom/Video Calls 101: It's no secret that we've all had to get used to being on Zoom meetings a lot morally or other video calls and video conferencing. There are a lot of intricacies about how to be comfortable on a video call that we've all been thrown headfirst into. In this little video, I want to give you a download about how to feel more confident when you're in Zoom and how to set up your environment so you feel really good and ready for your video calls. A lot of the techniques that you learned in the class or that you will learn in the class will apply directly over to Zoom and video conferencing. But there's some little tips and tricks that are going to help you to feel even better about your presence when you're talking in a very unnatural environment of talking to your screen rather than other people. The first things to keep in mind again, are to get yourself comfortable when you're starting up a call to take some deep breaths and to really prime yourself for a call. What I really like to do, I'm going to share my screen now and show you how I get ready before I get on my Zoom calls. Sharing my screen, I like to open up Photo Booth. If you have a Mac computer, you will have that. If you have a Windows computer, you'll probably have something comparable to Photo Booth. Basically, Photo Booth just enables you to preview your video. I'll show you where to do this in Zoom as well. But Photo Booth can be a great tool to take it out and make sure before you get on your video call that you have the framing that you want, that you have the lighting that you want, that you have the background that you want. You can really just get it all dialed in before opening the Zoom meeting or before opening the video conferencing meeting. It's very helpful. I like to just take my computer when I'm getting ready. I like to move it around and just see where the best framing is. Make sure I don't have a bed or something weird in the background. Make sure that I am in the right framing for myself too, that enough of myself in the overall video, that I'm not too close, that I'm not too far away. All of these things can be great. You don't even need to take a video within Photo Booth, but you can just prepare it and you can prepare what the overall image that others are going to be seeing looks like beforehand. That's a great tip to know about. I'm going to close out Photo Booth now so there's not two of me talking. But again, remember just when you're getting ready, open up Photo Booth or another program that's similar. Just set the scene for it and get ready and maybe even practice moving your hands, moving your body and just feeling comfortable talking. The next thing that we're going to do is I'm going to stop sharing. I'm going to talk a little bit about the lighting. As you can see, I have my window open here and it's causing quite a bit of light to come in from this angle. Like that, I might feel like it's a little bit too much light, and so I can always go over in Photo Booth beforehand when I'm not on my Zoom call and adjust these things. Then I see that, okay, it might be a little bit darker, but it's also not creating all that spill light in there. Now you may notice how nicely my face is illuminated. It's not just the lamp, it's not just natural light, it's actually one of the items that I had discussed from the cheat sheet that I gave all, which if you haven't gotten that, you can download it for free on my website and the page for this course. But it is a ring light that I have going here that is very beautifully illuminating my face and giving me a little extra light. You can see as I move it closer, it gives more. As I move it further away, it gives last. But I love ring lights because they really do just nicely and evenly light your face and take it to the next level. They're relatively inexpensive too. It's a great way for video calls as well as any other type of recording of yourself that you may be doing to give yourself that extra confidence by just having your face really nicely lit. It also makes you stand out from the background because you are the main illuminated subject and your background is a little bit darker and you can play with the lighting. But I would definitely recommend getting a ring light for all different types of video calls and also recording in general, it's a great just one tool to up the production quality of your videos. Another thing that you should keep in mind when you're on Zoom is that it might be tempting to look at your self or others or have your kids go all around and be distracted. That's fine when you're listening to others to look wherever you want. But you'll notice that I'm looking straight into the camera. Again, when you're talking to people on Zoom and on different video calls, you really want them to feel like you are connecting in with them and talking directly to them. Look at the little green light at the top of your computer, which is right next to the lens of the computer. In that way, it'll really feel like you're looking directly at them. Your image may be placed in different parts of the Zoom window and that can get really distracting sometimes even watching yourself talking. We're not used to doing that normally. Or you might even just be like looking at yourself a little bit, but that can then make you look over here, or look down here, and people won't really feel like you're connecting with them as you're talking to them. Again, look right into that little green light. People really feel like you're talking directly to them and addressing them and feel a lot of connection and presence with you, which is what you always want to cultivate, whether it's a YouTube video or a Zoom meeting or any other form of talking on camera. The last tip that I'm going to leave you with is how to adjust this image if you want to even further than just with the lighting and just with the framing. Again, I'm going to share my screen. This way you can get all of those fancy Zoom effects you may have noticed others doing with the virtual background. I'm going to go here to the virtual background, and here's the preview of it over here. I'll make this a little bit smaller so we don't get distracted by it. You can see I have some options. I can blur the background, and that gives a nice blur effect. If you're not crazy about your background, you don't want people to be distracted by it, then you can just blur it out where it's thought as jarring necessarily as having a completely digital background, like I'll show you with this next example. It's a bit cinematic and it's a nice way to make your background so it's not the center of focus, but still have what your natural environment is. Now as I showed you, you can also have more fun and playful backgrounds. They have ones here as presets. You can also go in and you can do a video one, but you can go in and add a background. What you would do for that is that you would go, find a background that you like. I'm going to start a new window on a Google search and I'm going to type in, let's see, office virtual background. Lucky for us because lots of people are using Zoom, there are tons here. Then I can click on one that I like. I will right-click it. Then I will say save image as. I'm just going to name it background. I'm going to save it on my desktop. Press "Save". Great. Now I have that background there. Now I'll go back over here and I'm going to add a image. We go here, add image. Then we go to desktop, background.jpeg, open. Now I have this fun office image. I don't know that anybody who would necessarily be fools into thinking that this was the background that I was in. Obviously, when you move your hands quickly, people can tell, but everybody is very used to that nowadays and they don't mind. But this is a way to completely bump out your background. This one might be a little bit more professional than say, the blades of grass, just depends what type of meeting you're in. Again, remember that you can always go to this blur background if you want something more subtle. Another thing that you can play with is if you go over to the Video Filters tab, you can give some effects to your video. This one looks like it changes the contrast and darkens things a little bit. This one makes it black and white. This one makes it a little bit warmer tones. You can play around with these subtle photos and see if there's one that makes you look away that you feel very confident and maybe enjoy more than just the basic lading and the basic color tones. But again, you'd probably, for most feedings, don't want to get too carried away with these. Although they can be fun. You probably want to keep it relatively simple, but that's a way to add just a subtle little shift in the coloring for your video if you like that. I'm going to go back to none. I'm going to close out of this option and stop sharing my screen. Maybe I don't like this. You can always get back to those options. You can even do this in real time when you're in your video conference or your video call. If you want to subtly change your background mid call, you realize you have when you don't like, you need to make any adjustments, I would recommend stopping the video and then going in and choosing your virtual background. Then I'm going to send it back to none. Then I'll do that. Then when I start the video again, it will start it back up without any of the effects on it. I hope that these tips have helped you. Again, remember to just try out your scene in your environment before getting on the call by using Photo Booth where programs similar to that, to check out what the image that your camera on your computer is going to be getting. Remember to look into the green dot. That is essentially making eye contact with whoever you're speaking with on the other end. It might feel a little unnatural, but in my class, you either learned or you're going to be learning how to get used to talking into a lens. Keep that in mind and just try to make as much eye contact as you can with the lens of your computer. Then finally, you know now how to adjust the background and change the color temperature on your video. If you want to subtly adjust those things, you'll be able to get the type of image that will be the best suited for whatever meetings and presentations you are doing in Zoom or another video conferencing platform. I hope these tips and tricks helped. Again, if you've already taken my course, congratulations for learning how to become more competent on camera. If you haven't taken it yet, make sure to head over to my website, [inaudible] britain.com to the camera confidence class. It's very comprehensive. It has so many different tools on how to feel more comfortable on camera, how to feel more confident, and how to really shine through when you're on-camera, which we all are having to do so much more in this day and age. It's great to get that extra level of competence so you can really present yourself like you want to be presented on camera. With that, thank you so much for this quick Zoom meeting download about how to be comfortable on video conferencing. I really appreciate you watching it. Bye everybody.
Nisha B., Filmmaker. Marketer. Creative.
