How to Make YouTube Videos at Home

1. How To Film YouTube Videos: Welcome to your course on how to film a YouTube video. What you're going to learn is how to set up this. We're going to go step-by-step on how you set up your lighting, your audio, your camera, basically everything you need to get going and start making your own YouTube videos. My name is Jeven Dovey and I've been on the platform for around six years. In that time, I've learned a ton about how YouTube works and the things that you need to do to find success on the platform. Now, doing a talking-head video like this where you're just talking right to camera in a spot in your house is the easiest way to get started and it's also one way that you're going to be able to stay consistent on the platform. If you can build a space that you can come back to and just press Record, it's going to make it a lot easier to actually press Record. We're going to go through all the things that you need to think about when you're filming this kind of a video and you'll see a few different variations of how you can set up this kind of a look for the types of videos that you want to make. By the end of this course, you're going to be ready to start filming your own videos. One thing I want to mention before we get started in this course is that I'm going to talk about a check and when you're first starting out, it's a good resource to use because it's going to help you make sure that you don't miss anything when you're setting up your shot. Let's just dive right in and we're going to get started on how you film a YouTube video. 2. Gear Prep: I've provided a checklist. This is dummy-proofing in the entire thing. I've broken down my step-by-step-by-step in an easy-to-digest checklist, so that as I do this, I'm going to follow the checklist that I have created for you guys, and as I go along, follow along on the checklist and you'll be able to see how everything comes together to build this. Let's get into the demonstration on how to build this kind of lighting-audio-camera setup. Now the first thing that you do when you're getting ready to shoot is you lay out all your gear, and the reason that you do this is just so that you don't miss anything. One of the worst things that can happen is you get ready to shoot, you have everything set up, and you're missing one connector cable that basically connects your audio to your camera. This is something you do before you leave if you're on location. If you're at home, just lay everything out before you start setting up just to make sure you have everything and you haven't lost a piece of gear. Few simple things that make your life so much easier when you actually start shooting. 3. Find a Background: All right. So all your gears good and now you are ready to start setting up. Well, the first part is figuring out your background. When we talk about background, what you want to find is something that makes sense for what it is that you're shooting. If I was shooting a piece about film making, I wouldn't put a bunch of dolls and makeup behind me because that's not what I'm shooting. I'm shooting something that has film making in it so I'm going to want to put my computer screens behind me. Whatever it is that you're shooting makes sure that you have something in the background that makes sense for the subject matter of what it is that you're shooting. If you're just trying to do a basic background or you just want something that looks good, but it's not necessarily like exactly what the subject matter is, just think about different things that you can put in the background. Could it be windows, could it be a long hallway. Is it that you want to be outside in nature with the trees? You got to think through the background because it's important and if your background doesn't make sense for the subject matter, or if it distracts from the subject matter where people are thinking, why is this thing in the background, then it's going to detract from your content. It's super important to think about, and that's why I put it towards the front of the whole process because you want to make sure that your background makes sense before you start setting everything else up. If your background doesn't look good and you set up all your gear, when you go to press record and you realize that this background looks awful then your wasted a bunch of time and you wasted a bunch of energy, especially if there's more people with you besides just you working on the project. First things first, think about your background. Try to come up with an idea. Try to come up with a look that looks good in camera. You don't necessarily have to set your camera up to get the shot. You can hand hold your camera, walk around, just look through the camera lens and see what different backgrounds you can find in the space that you're at. Here is a sample of a background where I just wanted it to look good and try not to necessarily tie it exactly to the subject matter. I just wanted something that looked decent out of the space that we had. As you can see, there's a lot of different angles I could have chose in the space, but I decided to do something nice with the windows just to give it some texture back there so that when I lit my subject and I put them in the shot, they have the focus, but as a whole, the image looks good. 4. Setup Camera: Okay so now that you have your background idea, what you're going to want to do is set up your camera and frame your shot. You've eyeballed it or you've used your camera to kind of find, roughen what your shot is going to be. The next step is finding the level that you're going to want to shoot it. That's about your eye line. You're going to make adjustments to where you're shooting later, but the first thing you just got to do is set up the tripod and put your camera on it and frame up what you think you're going to get. Now if you're sitting down, obviously the camera's going to be lower. If you're higher up, you're going to want the camera at eye level. You never want to be shooting up at someone. When you shoot up, it looks really bad. It's just not a pretty angle. If I was shooting like this, I'd have to tilt my head down and you get that really awful look. See, here's my mic, but it's just like it's a very fattening, just gross look overall. What you want to do is shoot eye level or a little bit above eye level, because having a slight tilt down actually makes people look much better in camera. You have this eye level shot or just above eye level and you just got to rough it in. What we're doing first though is trying to figure out the background. Because I'm sitting, I have it about eye level where I sit and I set up this shot. Now when I sit, it's obviously going to be a little bit different. The idea is just to get the camera setup and kind of get you in the space of what it is that you're doing. We're not worried about the other gear yet. We're just setting up the camera and the tripod. 5. Light Background: Start your cameras setup. You have the background, roughly what you think you're going to get. You have to light your background. If you're using a space that has natural daylight spilling in, then you could just expose your camera for the background. But if you're like this, where you're bringing lights in to set up your background. Maybe you're adding some lights like I have back there, some colors, or you have some lamps. There's different ways that you can add light to the background. What you're going to want to do is light the background first. The idea being that once you light the background, you can get your exposure roughed in where you want to go. Then from there when you light your subject, you make sure that you're not having a huge difference between the background and the foreground. For the background, take a look at some different backgrounds round on the web of different videos that you like or different people that you like when you're watching content online or on TV, see what's in the background. Sometimes people use small things like lamps to give it some texture. They'll use color lighting. Sometimes they'll just put like a shaft of light across the wall. There's different ways that you can bring in lighting that subtle but gives some texture in the background. What makes sense for the background that you have? Once you see your background, take a look and if there's no lights whatsoever and it's falling a little dark, that's when you got to think, maybe I'll add something to it. With these lights off, it's a pretty dark background. It could work. It definitely does not have the same texture that it has once I turn the lights on. The idea with the background is just to give your image more depth and it's separate from your foreground because we're creating two different areas to light. When you have a background that's lit separately than your foreground, you have more control over your image as a whole, and you can create this awesome textured look where the background looks really professionally done. Then your foreground is lit nicely so that it works well with your background. 6. Camera Settings: Now you've put some lighting in your background, and you're ready to dial in your settings to make it look good. This section in particular is just to get you going so that you know what to do with your camera to start shooting. The first is frame rate. I shoot everything in 30 frames a second. That is an aesthetic choice for me that I have chosen. I think it looks good when you jump down to 24 frames a second which is the standard for Hollywood cinema. Basically, you're putting less frames in each second. What happens is the footage actually looks a little more chopping. This doesn't mean that you can't work with 24 frames a second. A lot of people do, and a lot of people think it's the standard for creating videos. But I know a lot of you this doesn't really matter. What only matters here is that you do what looks good for you. I suggest shooting a couple of videos, shoot one in 24, and shoot one at 30, and watch them side-by-side so you could see the difference between 24 and 30 frames a second. This way you could see aesthetically what looks better for you, and what you prefer to shoot in. But what I've found is that especially for this content, for a shot 30, and people loved the way it looks. Even my high-end clients, I've shot 30 for all of them. They all love the footage that I get, and nobody really cares as much about the frame rate. The next setting that we're going to talk about is white balance. White balance is how your camera is reading the color of a scene. Light is broken down by color temperature. At one end of the spectrum you have 10,000, and that's like a cloudy overcast day and at the other end, you have a 1,000 which is like candlelight. To our eyes, we don't see the difference. But when you're using a camera, the camera will pick up the difference between daylight, and say candlelight. Candlelight and incandescent lighting is orange, daylight and when you get into cloudy and all that it's blue. In the center, you have a mix which is fluorescent lighting. Now, this is important because depending on where you're shooting, you might have a mix of light, and you have to deal with that. You can't walk into a situation, have daylight spilling in, and then light your subject with tungsten balanced bulbs. What will happen is that your subject will turn bright orange because you're lighting them with orange light. Same thing will happen if you're in a space where it's all tungsten lighting, and then you bring in say a fluorescent or an LED light to light that person, they're going to turn blue. You have to understand what color temperature is. You have to look at your scene and first ask yourself what lighting do I have in the scene? Is it daylight? Is it tungsten? What lighting do I have? When you purchase lights, you can make a choice either daylight, tungsten, or a by color. What by color is, is basically it gives you the ability to adjust your Kelvin from 5,200 down to 3,600 and basically you can dial it in depending on what situation you're in. All the lights that I use are balanced to daylight. They're all at 5,200. The reason for that is most of the situations that I shoot in, I use daylight-balanced because I normally have daylight spilling in. For you guys when you're trying to figure out what color temperature you should be shooting at your white balance, I would say first set it to auto and see what the camera adjusts to. Then just look at your lighting, and do you have daylight? Is it a little overcast? Are you in tungsten, or are you in fluorescent? There's usually settings for each of those as presets. You want to use a preset because when you're on auto, the color will fluctuate depending on what it sees in the scene. If you move around a little bit, it might try to re-correct the color up and down the Kelvin scale, and you'll see this shift in color. That does not look good while you're recording. You want to lock in your color temperature, and that's why you would use the presets. A lot of cameras also have the ability to dial in your white balance manually where you can put in the number of Kelvin, but most of the time you can just use a preset. Just look at your scene. Are you working with daylight-balanced lighting? Then you're going to put it on the daylight setting. Let's talk about shutter speed. Shutter speed, I've said has to be at 160th of a second. Now the reason for that is because we're shooting at 30 frames per second, and your shutter speed is double that of your frame rate. Now why the shutter speed has to be doubled out of your frame rate? While it comes down to motion blur, and the threshold look for cinema is achieved when you shooting double that of your frame rate. If you can't keep it at 160th, and you've used all your other exposure settings and you still have to bring the light down in your image, that's where ND filters will come in and basically what an ND filter does is its sunglasses for your camera. When you're outside, there's a lot of situations where your camera settings won't work to get the exposures that you need and keep your shutter speed at 160th. Another aspect of exposure is your ISO. When you're setting your ISO, you don't want to push it too high because what happens is your image gets very noisy and it doesn't look good. The idea with ISO is you want to keep it at its base, or just above it depending on what camera you're working with. With the GH5, the base ISO is 800. I'm not going to try and shoot above 800. I'll push it to 16. In this setting right here, I'm shooting at 1,600. But you're not going to want to go beyond 1,600 because your images are going to start getting noisy. But you can go under that. If you are outside, you can shoot at a 100 ISO, and your image will look great. For ISO you have a range to play with, but don't push it too far above your base ISO. If you're not sure what your base ISO is that's something that you can quickly find doing a Google search. Just go and type in your camera and see what its base ISO is, and try not to push it too far above that. The next thing that you're going to adjust when you're doing your camera settings is your aperture. Now I would set your shutter speed and your ISO first, and then go into your aperture. Your aperture is basically how much light is coming through the lens. You can make the whole either huge or you can make it small. When smaller, less light comes through. Edit F2.8 which is as big as possible on a lot of lenses, you get a lot of light coming into the camera. Then in reverse when you're at F22 which is a tiny pinhole, you get very little light coming through. You'll use this to dial in your settings to get the exposure looking good. Right now, all I want you to understand is that using your aperture will brighten or darken your image, and that's your main tool to be able to dial in your settings to get the image to look good. The last thing that we're going to talk about is your color profile. A lot of cameras have different color profiles. I shoot on one called Cindy v in the J5. I like the way it looks. It's more contrasted. I don't have to do any color grading and post. However, you could use the standard profile. It also looks good. A lot of cameras will have a series of color profiles, and they have different looks. Depending on which camera you have, just do a quick Google search. There's so much information on the web and look for the color profiles in your camera. You'll be able to identify which menu settings to get to be able to find them, and then record each color profile. The best way to figure out what you like best out of your camera is to record every color profile, and just look through them on your computer screen, and see what looks good. You might want something that's more contrasted, or you might want something that looks a little more flat depending on your subject matter and depending on what you are shooting. Those are all the camera settings that you need to understand when you're setting up your camera. One thing that a lot of creators want to get is the blurry background. If you look behind me, it's out of focus. You get that by opening your aperture up. If you're shooting at a 1.8 which is what I'm shooting on a full-frame camera, you'll get this blurry background. You could shoot at a 2.8 or a 1.2. Basically, you just want to open up your lens as much as possible, and that's going to throw your background out of focus depending on your sensor size. If you're using a micro four-thirds camera or something like a smartphone, you'll probably not going to be able to get the same look as you would on a full-frame camera. It's just something to think about. If that's the look that you're going for, you open up your lens wide open, it gives you that shallow depth of field. Now, when you do that, you're going to let a lot more light into your lens. One thing I do want to mention is that I've talked a lot about shutter speed and using double that or frame rate. You don't have to use double that of your frame rate which in my case would be 160th unless you really care about motion blur. I like to have my videos looking natural which having motion blur makes your video look natural. That's the standard across Hollywood movies, and anxious the standard across making videos. When you boost your shutter speed, it'll give you a more jittery feeling. Now it's not wrong to have that look, but if you're just getting started and you're newer to filming, don't worry about the shutter speed. Just dial in your settings to make the exposure look good because that's more important than having motion blur in your shot. 7. Lighting Yourself: You've got your camera setup, you've got your background setup. Now it's time to bring in your subject and light your subject. You're going to bring in your subject, whether it's you or someone else, and you're going to put them in the position that they're going to be in. The idea now is to look at how they look on camera. If they're super dark, you're going to have to bring in some lighting. Now if you position someone so that the window is right in front of her face so right behind the camera, you can create a nice look, but you have to watch it because you could overexpose really easily. It's also going to bring a lot of light into the scene and the background will start to fall dark because sunlight is so strong. Something to think about if you want to use natural daylight to light your subject, just be able to control that light in some way so that you're not completely just blasting people with light. If you're bringing in lighting, I like to use aperture lights. These are my favorite lights to work with because the lights work very well. They're LEDs, they don't get hot and you can dial in the settings so easily. My favorite light to work with for this setting is my aperture 120 d. I put it at a 45-degree angle with my softbox and my light grid on that but the idea that you want to get is put your light at a 45-degree angle to your subject because when your light is at a 45-degree angle, it creates some shadows on the other side, which actually gives the image more depth. If you have the light fully frontal, you're going to blast the subject, which for some people, that light is what you're going for. You're going for that beauty light, if you're doing a makeup tutorial or you're doing something where you really want to look bright than you want full frontal light. Instead of having your light at a 45-degree angle, you want to put your light front. A lot of people will use a ring light for this situation because a ring light will go completely around the camera and it will fill in any shadows in the face and it's a beauty light it makes you look really good. For those of you who are doing anything where you want to have that really bright look. A ring light is what you're going to go for. My light, my aperture 120 with my softbox is right here at a 45. I have a second light over here so you can start bringing in two or three lights to build your scene and light the individual. This side over here is being used to light part of my face on the side and give me a rim which basically separates me from the background. If you wanted to do three-point lighting, which is like the traditional lighting style for interviews or a person just sitting here. What you'd have is your key light, you will have a fill light right here, which basically fills in the shadows on this side, but not to the degree that a ring light would. Then you'd have a light straight behind out of frame a Pi that would give me a perfect rim around my body and my head. That's the traditional, what you call three-point lighting, and what it is is your key, your fill, and your hair light, it just makes people look very good. If you have three lights and you really want to have that high-end, high production look to it then you go for three-point lighting. It can make your production look way more professional than if you just had one light. Personally, I'm using a two-light that's doing something similar, but I don't need the whole three-point lighting and I do want things to follow darker just for the look that I was going for. I have a two-point lighting some fill some hair, but I have some shadows mixed in there. You've got to think about what your subject is that you're shooting. Do you need beauty lighting or do you want something a little darker? Now, I could pull this light even further to the side and make it even more aggressive with harder shadows. One of the best ways to figure out what lighting you like for the situation that you're shooting is to sit behind camera and have someone just hold the light and walk around your subject just use one light. Just use your key light and go from directly behind camera and walk all the way to the back because it shows you how light is affected on the face and in different kinds of looks you can get as you move the light around a subject. Once you're done lighting the whole scene, you might have to go through and reconfigure some of your settings because when you're lighting the foreground, you're hopefully not going to change too much of the background, but sometimes it happens. This is a good time to talk about foreground versus background. The reason I set you up to light the background and then bring your subject forward and get them away from the background and light them separately, is that you want separation. If I was pushed back here against my desk, you're going to see shadows. You're going to see a big black shadow across the wall or the desk or somewhere like that. What your goal is when you're lighting is to get the shadows to fall down there on the floor and not in your shot. One of the biggest beginner mistakes is that you put yourself right against the wall. As soon as you put yourself right against a wall, your shadow is going to fall on the wall and then you're going to see that shadow in your shot. The idea is that you really just want to create separation, you want space between you and your background because it makes the whole image look way better and it makes you look way more professional. As soon as you start seeing shadows and they're unintentional, that's when your production will start looking cheap. Create that separation makes sure that whatever your lighting in the foreground here is not affecting the lighting in the background back there. You're creating two spaces and you're lighting them independently. 8. Audio: Now that you have your camera set up, your lighting set up, everything is good to go except for you don't have audio, so that's when you're going to set up your microphone and I do this last because you want to make sure everything looks good in terms of lighting, in terms of camera, and you don't want to be fumbling with your audio, trying to get that going until you're ready to shoot. For audio, there's two ways that you can go about it. You can use a lavalier mic, which is something that just hooks right on you. You've seen those, I've been using them in my demonstrations. They sit on you, but you also do have that visual component here. You're always going to see it. Now there's ways to hide lavalier mics. If you're using a button-up shirt, it's a lot easier to put a lavalier on, but for t-shirts, you always have a black thing right here. Other way to mic, is from above using a shotgun mic and this is the way I recommend if you're in this kind of a setting. Now with a shotgun mic, what you do is you set it up so that the microphone is pointed at, so it set up right in front of her mouth right here, the arrow is pointing straight down there because what it's doing is it's getting the audio just as it comes out of your mouth. The best way to do that is to set up a C-stand and get the microphone pointed straight down towards your lips right where the audio is coming out, and that's where you'll get the best sound. Let's talk about setting your levels. This is something that I really want to stress because this is something that will make or break your video shoot. If you have your microphone set too high, it's going to over modulate and what that means is that as soon as it hits that top barrier of what the microphone can handle, you're going to get this distortion and it's going to get staticky and it sounds awful. You can really pick out when someone doesn't understand what they're doing with a microphone. On the other side, when your microphone is set way too low and you barely have any levels coming into your camera, then you're going to have to bring it up in post and what happens is it brings the noise floor up and basically that means static, so you're going to get a ton of static in your noise and again, it sounds unprofessional. There is a sweet spot between negative 12 and negative six decibels. That is where you want audio to land and ideally when you're shooting, you want all your audio to hit between negative 12 and negative six. Now the issue is, is if you have a consistent sound throughout a shoot, but then you spike and you start yelling, you're going to start over modulating, so you have to judge what it is that you're shooting and if there's going to be a lot of dynamic range going on in your audio soundtrack. Now with the GH5, there is an option to put a limiter on your audio so that it never goes above negative six. Now, this is good. You just have to understand how to use it. You can always get decent audio using this, but you also don't want to have your audio so high that it's just sitting at negative six because it will sound awful at that point. You still want the dynamics of voice going up and down with the wavelength, and when you bring it into the editing software, you really see this. You'll see the dynamics of vocals. But if you ever have audio set too high and you have a limiter, you're just going to have a flat line and it's going to sound awful. Now in the iPhone, you don't have the option to bring your levels up and down, it auto-adjusts for you depending on the vocals that are coming into the microphone, and you just have to rely on its software to be able to put the audio where it needs to be. With auto audio, it basically puts your levels between negative 12 and negative six but if you spike, it's sometimes doesn't catch it and you'll have moments where you have these high spikes, so I always set my levels manually and I adjust them for the situation and for the person that I'm shooting. 9. Test Record: The last thing you do before you shoot your project is do a test record. This is just so that you make sure everything is functioning, and so that you get a little idea of what it is that you're shooting. Obviously, the better you get at this, then the more you do it, you don't necessarily have to always do this test record. But it is a good idea to just do a recording, and then look at it on your computer away from the camera so you get a sense of how the audio levels are, how the image looks, how the lighting looks. You just want to look at everything and make sure that you're happy with it before you go, and then go shoot an hour-long take. Because the worst thing is to shoot an entire sequence, and then realize something's not working properly, or something just looks awful and you didn't catch it until you saw it on your computer screen. So do a test record. Just take a few minutes, check it out, and then you're ready to start rolling, and shoot your video. 10. B Roll: Beginning to end, that was everything for shooting this scenario. However, that's not what videos are always made of. Not everything is just a person sitting there talking. It is a very important part to figure this out because once you've figured out how to shoot like this, you'll start getting an idea of how to shoot other situations. But if you're shooting these videos, you're going to always need B-roll. You've been seeing me add footage throughout all these videos. You've been seeing me add what's called B-roll. And B-roll is footage that is additional to what it is that you're shooting. So to explain B-roll, I'm just going to break it down very simply at first, and I just finished shooting a conference down in San Diego, it was a fitness conference, and my production company was in charge of basically covering the event. It's a great way to explain what B-roll is versus A-roll. At this conference, I was shooting a mix of interviews, and then footage of the actual conference. the difference between the two is that A-roll is the main subject in the main story. On the other hand, B-roll is all the footage that basically stitches everything together, it's the glue that holds the entire project together. B-roll is that extra footage, it's the footage that gives you a look more into what's going on around the specific subject. To make this very simple, when I was at this conference shooting the event, the A-roll was the interviews, so that was going to each booth and talking with the different people at each of the booths and that is A-roll. That is the main things that we needed to capture was these interviews. Now the B-roll is all the footage that I captured off the booth without the interview. To really break it down, A-roll is your most important footage, it would be your interview, or your storyline, your talking bits, and then your B-roll is the sexy footage, the slow mo, the different shots that really show what's going on. When you're working on a project, say you're working on a YouTube video on a vlog, your A-roll is going to be this, it's going to be those moments when you're talking to camera, or if you're out vlogging, walking around, it's when you're talking to camera, and basically moving the story forward. Your B-roll is all the extra footage, so if you're in a specific location and you're getting wide shots of the city, or you're getting like a drone shot or like a slow mo shot of the food, whatever it is that you're doing, that is all the B-roll. You need both, you need A-roll, you need B-roll, but your A-roll is your main story bit, and the B-roll is actually a lot of fun to shoot, because once you start diving into different creative ways to shoot B-roll, you can also tell your story using B-roll. However, it's more in a visual sense rather than your A-roll, which a lot of times is the talking head bits. B-roll is that added footage that enhances the story, or enhances whatever that you're doing so that your viewer becomes more engaged with the content that you're creating, and it's also the footage that just shows more of what's going on. 11. Demo #1: We're going to go over just a quick demonstration of how you set up your shooting space from beginning to end. Now I've included this sheet, which is basically your step by step guide. I'm going to follow it just as you would follow it when you're at home doing this or wherever you're at shooting. The first thing I have on the sheet is layout all your gear. The reason for this is that you just want to lay out and see everything. I'm using two lights for this. Then I have two stands which I already have set up. You'll have all your power cables to make it work. You'll have your camera, your cards, your batteries, your microphone, your cables, your tripod, everything in that gear list, you want to lay it out. It's just all here and you can visually see it. That's step 1. Then when you have all your gear, that's when you're like, let's start shooting. Let's move on to step 2. Check all the batteries. So that's one thing that you don't want to start shooting with a dead battery. You're going to check your batteries, makes sure that all your batteries are charged. Once you've know that all your batteries are charged, will go to the next part which is check your memory card. When you check your memory card, what you're looking for is, that it's cleared. If you have some footage on, it makes sure that footage is backed up and if it's not backed up, go back it up and then come back, erase the card, reformat it in camera. That's a key thing. You want to reform it in camera and then you're good to go. You have a full fresh card. Our next step is going to be finding your background. From my office, my background is basically my computer. I've set up this mirror over here of mountains. I have this picture of me standing on a cliff in Laguna Beach. The idea behind creating a background is something that's going to make sense for your videos. For my videos on YouTube, I do adventure, I do travel, and I do film making. I have my film making, my whole editing stations set up so that you're going to get that sense that it's the film making station and I got some pictures that represent who I am, my adventure in my travel. Then once I close this mirror, I have all my gear, so that is my background and beyond just the background, I've also added lights into the background. This is what you're going to do is you're going to let your background separately, then your foreground, whatever it is that you're shooting. If you're shooting yourself or you're shooting someone else, you're going to have a separate lighting setup over here. You're going to get your background though, to look like something that you want as your background. This is our setup. I've got my blue lights over here, my orange lights here, but basically that is my background. Now one thing that I personally don't like is how bright it is in this room. But what I do is I go through and I shut the windows and I basically blackout the room. All you're seeing are these colored lights. I'm going to wait a second to do this because, well is exposure. Now the next part is find your shot. You're going to set up your camera and your tripod to try and find the best shot. You're going to want to try and set up a shot that looks good for your background. Essentially, when you sit down and you're going to have to decide, do you want that as your background? Do you want more of that? You basically come up with your framing, which you like. My framing somewhere around there. Obviously the exposure is not where it should be. It don't worry about your exposure, any of that yet. We'll get to that soon. Right now it's just overexposed and just is what it is. But I have the general idea of what my background is going to look like so that now I can start figuring out where my subject is going to be and how I want to position my subject. Before we get into putting me here because I'm lighting myself, we're going to figure out the exposure and the lighting for the background. Because that's like you're going to start with that and then you'll work to your foreground, to your subject. I'm going to black out the windows. I don't need the exposure from this. Sometimes you might want to use the light from a window, but I personally am going to do all the lighting myself. [NOISE] I've got this fancy way of blocking out my light, a couple of pillows. We're going to adjust our settings so that we get an exposure in the background. Now this isn't going to be completely set right now. This is just to get an idea of what it's going to look like. We're getting closer. When you're dialing in your settings for your camera, the things you're going to want to focus on our white balance first. A lot of times they'll start with auto white balance, but depending on what you're shooting, I particularly liked to find a white balance that works for my lighting so that the color is not fluctuating. I'm going to start with this one. I liked the way it looks when you do that. We're going to adjust your shutter speed so that it's 160th of a second. We're going to adjust our aperture and our ISO. We don't want to go too high with it. My settings right now are to 2.8, 1/60, 1600 and we're going to hang out there because I'm going to adjust some things later on. The last thing you want to think about is your color settings. Every camera has color settings. My photo style, I like using this CNEV. But you could see as I flip through these, there's different types of settings. Depending on your camera, you can use your just standard that's going to look good. Or you can go through and find maybe one that has a different look. I like more contrast, so I'll use CNEV in my camera. We've got that setup. Now we're going to set up our subject and we're going to light the subject. I'm going to sit here in this chair. The good thing about having a flip that screen is you can see yourself. Here we are. I'm not lit at all, so now we're going to set up our lighting. I've got two lights and the reason for this is this is my [NOISE] key light. It's a big soft light. This is going to focus just on me. [NOISE] We've got my big soft light here, which is going to be my key light. Obviously as you can see, it is way too bright, but we'll get to a second. The second line I'm going to use is just to give some detail, to give some separation from me and the background. It's a film making concept when you light, your hair or your shoulders, it gives you separation from the background. [NOISE] I've got my hair light setup and this is basically to give me a rim around the edge of my body so that I've separate from the background. You've got your setup, you've got your lights. I've got this slide over here, this light here that's lighting me the subject. That's your foreground and your background is exposed for those lights back there. [NOISE] Now, super bright, this is way too bright. What we're going to do is dial in our lights to look good for this exposure because I already set the exposure for my background. I just brought my light down to 20%. This is a reason why you use aperture lighting because I can just dial it in by 1% and you can actually do it with a remote. You could be having these lights over there. I can be dialing in that light with a remote. This is looking really good if you have any issues after you've dialed in your lighting for your foreground and you need to adjust your background, this is where you can go in and start tweaking. You do a little bit of lighting tweaks, you check it on your camera, do a little bit more lighting tweaks, go back and forth until you find a look that you're happy with. We're going along the chart here that I've made for you. The next thing is just focus your subject because you don't want to have it out of focus. I always shoot manual focus. That's the thing because you don't want your focus dancing around when you're actually recording. Cool, set the focus. Now you're lighting setup, your camera setup, everything is good to go [NOISE], but we don't have your audio. I'm using a shotgun mic right now for this video, I'm using a lavalier and you can use either. They both worked great. Shotgun mic goes right overhead and you basically want the position of your shotgun mic to be right in front of your face, but just out of your frame. I've set up a C stand here. The C stand, I have a cable going from my microphone and it's going to be going into my camera. The reason I use a C stand is that I can get this microphone positioned exactly where I need it to go and have it right overhead and not have a bunch of gear falling over and stuff. C stands are very stable. Bring this into my camera. We'll turn on the microphone, play with the settings on the side. It looks like that now we have audio and so you'll just from here your levels on your microphone, you can go into your settings on this camera, particularly I haven't XLR adapter, which basically allows me to use XLR cables. If you don't have a way to bring an XLR, you're going to be just doing a configure within the camera. You can see right here, there is a icon right there to basically adjust the levels. But on here, you could see how I'm just way too hot. Whereas if I bring this down, it's just you don't hear me at all. The idea with audio, you want to make sure that your levels are bouncing between negative 12 and negative 6. On a visual representation, that's the 75% of your audio meter. If you're going too high, what happens is if you get excited and you get louder, it's going to spike and it's going to destroy the audio and vice versa if it goes too low, you're going to try to bring that up and post and then that audio is going to be very noisy and it's going to sound awful. We want professional looking videos and audio in this. Now we're set up, we have our audio, our lighting, our camera. Everything's set, our exposure, we're happy with. Everything looks good. We're going to do a test record. I'm going to hit "Record". Hey guys, what is going on in this video? I'm doing absolutely nothing. Great. I did a little test record. Now what we do is bring them to the computer, makes sure everything looks good. Make sure your audio is not spiking too high. Make sure lighting is good and then we come back and if you're ready to go, you start shooting. If not, you do a quick little adjustment, do another test, go back to the computer. But once you're set up your ray, start shooting and start making awesome content. That's all the steps it takes to actually get going when creating this entire setup. Whether you're shooting yourself or if you're doing an interview with someone else, it's the same setup. Just you're behind camera and not necessarily in front of camera. 12. Demo #2: I'm going to show you a quick demonstration with how you set up using minimal gear. We're just talking a few pieces of gear on top of your iPhone. It's the same process that I went through with the other demo, but this one is less gear and you're just trying to use more natural light. If you have my handy-dandy checklist, then we can go through it the same way. The first thing you want to do is lay out all your gear to make sure that you have everything that you're going to use for the shooting. As you can see here, I've got a tripod, I've got a holder for the iPhone. I've got my iPhone. I've got a microphone and one light just so you have one light to work with. You're not using a ton of gear. This is a very cheap, inexpensive light and it's a great one to use just to give you some nice feel on your face. There you go. All the stuff is here. I'm going to check and make sure that my batteries are charged and that I have enough memory on my phone. It looks like we got plenty. We're good to go. Like I said before, you want to make sure you have battery with what you're shooting with and you want to make sure that you have space. With a phone, it's a little bit different. You're not going to wipe your entire memory card, but you just want to make sure that you're going to have a decent amount of space so that you're not running into a situation where you're running out of space on your phone during recording. The next step is we got to find a background. Let's take a look at the space. Mike, what would you like for a background? If you're shooting out here what encompasses you? What I talked about earlier is that your background is something that maybe gives your viewers a look into who you are as a person. Like mine is adventure travel, filmmaking. You, you have that beach lifestyle. I know. For around here, I mean, the bikes are obviously a good indication of the beach lifestyle. You've got this furniture and all this good stuff. I don't really want to shoot this way because when we shoot this way, you see the kitchen. If you look over here, this isn't very pretty for a background. We're going to go with this over here, but we're going to find a background which is essentially this region and we'll play around with that a little bit. The next is to set up the camera and find your shot. Let me get the handy-dandy little tripod. Another inexpensive piece of equipment. A very simple tripod. You don't need to go all out on tripods, but you just need something to keep your camera stable so that you don't have to handhold it all the time. For this one, we're going to do a standing shot. Unlike the other one, I was sitting, this we're going to stand and what you want to do when you do a standing shot is, get your camera above eye level. I'm looking at Mike because Mike is going to be our guy on camera. We're good. Another thing when you're shooting with an iPhone is that your iPhone is not going to go right on a tripod, just doesn't work. I've got this handy-dandy little attachment that you just stick your phone and it has screw holes for your tripod. But I also like this one because you can put microphones on top and some other things so that if you want to use this handheld, you can have a light on here, you can have a microphone so you could have more of a setup rather than just hook on a tripod. We've got the camera mounted on the tripod here, and I'm looking for a shot that looks good. Something like that is not bad for a background. We have some information back there. We're going to put Mike in front of this. We'll tweak it. We'll go from here. One thing to note when you're shooting with the iPhone is that the camera in the iPhone is great but the app to actually control your camera settings is not good. I suggest downloading the app. It's called FiLMiC Pro, and it basically gives you complete manual control over all of your camera settings, whereas if you're using the app that comes with your iPhone, then you're basically going to have issues figuring out exposure on that because you don't have as many controls. Now that we have the app up and we have the background, I'm going to dial in my settings. First things first, we got to make sure we're shooting 30 frames a second. Resolution, you could shoot 1080, or I usually shoot everything at 4k, just so it gives me some extra flexibility. You can actually do some cool things and post. We are going to set the background exposure. Now, on this app you have the ability to adjust your settings, and differently than other cameras. But one of the issues is, remember when I said we want to shoot at 160th of a second. If you're in a bright setting, there are some situations where you're going to need to put ND filters to be able to shoot at 160th of a second. We don't have any ND filters with the setup, so we're going to get as close as possible, try to keep our shutter low, but still get a good look in the background. It's a little overexposed, but we'll see how this plays out in a minute. For white balance, we could use the auto, but it's daylight, so we also could use daylight. I'm going to set it to daylight so we don't have any fluctuating with the white balance. Then in terms of color profile, I'm just using the standard that is on the iPhone. Now the next step would be to bring in our subject. If it's me, I would step in there, but we're going to bring in Mike. Mike, let's have you come stand. I'm going to have you right in front of this table. We have a shot of Mike, but he's not lit very well. That's where our light comes in. Basically, we have a nice-looking background, but we need our subject to look good. We're going to grab our light. Mike, you can hang out. Sorry for the wait. We've brought in our one light and we just put it as close to the camera, right off to the side at about a 45-degree angle. That's your standard interview lighting trick is put it at about 45-degree angle, a little bit closer to get both the ice field and make it look good. Now, as you can see on the screen record Mike is still a little bit darker than the background. That's going to be one of the issues that you'll encounter when you start doing this setting and you're using your smaller lighting is that they're just not powerful when it comes to something like the sun. What I do is I compensate. Now that we'd have this setup, we're going to readjust our exposure for Mike because that's more important than the background. That's not bad. I actually can get my shutter down to a 160th, which is perfect because that's exactly where I wanted to shoot it at. We've got a decent shot going here. The next part, now that we have the shot set up, what we're going to shoot, we're going to get the microphone set up. Last part of the puzzle. This microphone is a Lavalier mic, unlike Shotgun mic, which I was using on the other one. Lavalier sits close to you. It's basically what I've been using to shoot this whole thing. You could use either both are good to shoot with. I prefer when I'm shooting in a situation where I have a Shotgun, I prefer using a Shotgun, but for these kind of situations, we can use a Lavalier. Lavaliers will get you a nice close sound, but there is a little bit of a visual. You'll see the Lavalier, but it's not that big a deal. Now we need to set our settings for the audio. We're going to go to our audio in this app. We have a headset microphone. We're going to set that up. Great. Mike give me a little audio test. Testing one, two, three, four. Testing one, two. We got audio. Now we're going to do test record. Hit record. Mike give me a little just, "Hey, this is Mike. Welcome to my house." Hey, guys. This is Mike Karpenko. Welcome to my house with Javan Dolby. Hey, I've been part of this great. [LAUGHTER] Now what we'll do is we'll bring that onto our computer and just check to make sure everything looks good. Readjust lighting from there. Maybe we'll reposition Mike somewhere else because if we don't like the way this is looking. All right, guys, that's it for setting up with your iPhone. 13. Time To Start Filming: That's everything that you need to know to start shooting YouTube videos. Like I said at the beginning of this course, the easiest way to get started on YouTube is to do talking-head style videos, just talking directly to camera. It makes it a lot easier than having to try and shoot in a bunch of different locations and trying to capture all of this B-roll. It's just a great way to get going and get the whole process started. Now if you're just getting started with filming and editing and building your YouTube channel, then I highly suggest checking out some of the other courses that I have here on Skillshare. I have one all about editing, and I have another course all about YouTube, how you come up with your ideas and how to actually make your videos so that you can build and engage audience that enjoys watching the videos that you're creating. Make sure you check those out and I'll see you on the next one.