Transcripts
1. Welcome to class: A good video essay is an educational video
disguised as entertainment. Your audience wants
to learn something new while also having
fun at the same time. In this class, I'll try
to teach you how to write such video essay yourself. I'm Marton, I've been
making videos for the internet for
over seven years. I have three video channels, TechAlter, The Friday
Checkout, and Technoroma, covering everything from
consumer technology to movie analysis, and my main channel
alone has gotten over 50 million views so far. Like most creators online, I started out by myself
making everything up as I go and relying
on my instincts. But in the last year or so, I started to hire a team. I now have two writers
who help me out with various projects
and I wanted to codify my process and to create a playbook that I can pass on to them so we can work together efficiently and make videos
that all fit together. In this class, I will
share my playbook, that I've shared with my team, with you so you can take it
and use it and hopefully create awesome videos either for yourself or for somebody else. In this class, I'll break down
all of the big steps from ideation and all the way
to a finished script. We'll talk about how
you can keep churning out new scripts without
running out of ideas. I'll talk a little
bit about tools and sources and we'll analyze a few successful videos
from both my channels and those of others to
see what works and why. I hope you'll learn a lot and also have fun in the meanwhile, just like any good video
essay. Let's get started.
2. Ideas list: The first challenge
that you'll have as the creator of video essays is coming up with
lots of new ideas that you can make
great videos about. People often think of
ideas and inspiration as a magical thing that
just happens to them. We imagine a divine hand reaching out of the
sky and placing an idea in our heads while we shower or go to bed or
something like that. But that is actually not
how it works at all. Coming up with video
ideas is more akin to finding wild
berries in a forest. Sure, you can't force or
even guarantee an encounter. Then there is a lot of
chance and luck involved, but the only way to find
them consistently is to go to the woods a lot and
to keep your eyes peeled. It's the same for finding
video ideas as well. You as the creator
of video essays, will have to come
up with hundreds of great new ideas to keep both your audience and yourself interested
in your creations. The only way to do that
reliably again and again over time is to build a process and to keep looking
for them constantly. I mostly write about the
business of tech companies. Me going to my forest means
that I watch hundreds of new device launches by closely following
analyst reports. I read up on the
quarterly sales figures of all the big tech companies. I read endless
Reddit threats from users and interesting
people, et cetera. Your forest, is probably a completely different one and you'll know best how to find it, but remember to
keep going there, and here's two tips for how you can find the berries in it. First, go deep, read books, go on endless Wikipedia
rabbit holes, have discussions with strangers on Reddit, whatever it takes. Dig out all the random, seemingly useless facts that only a nerd in your
field would be aware of. I often browse
announcement videos for devices that nobody else
seems to care about. I follow new releases in far away countries for
devices I can't even buy. I often find myself watching decade old commercials
for fun, et cetera. This in-depth knowledge
is what gives you ideas that nobody else on YouTube will have and forms the basis for
continuous inspiration. Second, you mustn't forget that you're
looking for berries. Train yourself not
just to consume, but to constantly be
on the lookout for new content ideas while
you're consuming, seeing the 100th
press release of new earbuds getting released by every more obscure brands, has to trigger me to not just shrug my shoulders and move on, but to think, hey, explaining why this happens
could be a great video. Seeing a report saying that Samsung has almost no
market share in China, it has to do the same. Or seeing that Apple has
empty social media accounts. Well, you know the drill. This is a muscle
that you have to train as you go
about your day on the Internet reading random
stuff that either seems odd or fascinates you or
other people on the Internet, you have to stop and not just shrug your shoulders,
but you have to realize. You have to train
yourself to realize that, hey, potential video idea. If you can't do that over time, you have built a proper
pipeline of great new ideas. Remember to drop
those ideas into an easily accessible list
as soon as they come to you without being concerned
about whether they are good ideas or bad ideas yet. The point here is to capture
as many of them as possible. I often even like
to do voice memos. I don't even have to
open an app or anything. Every successful video
creator that I know is constantly on the lookout
for the next new idea. Train yourself to have this mentality from the
beginning and hopefully, you have a nice
list of ideas soon.
3. Picking winners: Hopefully, you'll eventually end up with a nice
little list of ideas. Now the next question is, which of the topics that you've
come up with is actually worth making a
proper video out of? Well, I'm sorry to disappoint, but this part is a little
bit of black magic. It's a bit of guesswork. I have never found a single
creator who can reliably predict how well or how poorly one of their
videos will perform. There's just too many
moving parts in there. But there are a couple of general guidelines that we've
learned over the years, and I'll try to demonstrate
those using examples. The most obvious
type of video essay that can work well is one that simply explains a complex topic that lots of people
are interested in, in a way that is fun
and easy to follow. Think of real
engineering's breakdown of how the James Webb
Telescope works. My explanation of how China's
digital currency works, poly matters explanation of
how Lego makes money, etc. If you can consistently
find interesting things to explain that haven't been well-explained on
the Internet before, at least not well
enough then sure, this can work wonderfully, but I generally find
this type of video a little bit difficult
to pull off long-term. You will typically be
competing with dozens of other videos explaining
the same thing already. You have to work to
stand out or find an unexplored niche
talking about a current topic like the
James Webb Telescope, while it is launching can be a good way to capture
a peak in interest. But remember that everyone
else in your field is probably also trying to capture that same
interest as well. So being in constant
competition is quite difficult. The other approach and the one that I
personally find more interesting can actually be
found in videos like these, grown in Argentina, packed
in Thailand by BritMonkey. What eating the rich did
for Japan by a Asionometry. Why airlines don't make
money flying and quietly became banks instead by
Wendover Productions. The world's most dangerous
blood type by real science or the man behind the world's
largest phone empire by yours truly. The common trend between all of these is that they don't just promise to explain something
relatively obvious, but instead they ask a weird question that
makes you stop and wonder. Like, what? Yeah, why on earth are we shipping fruits all
around the globe? The Japanese society
really have some kind of socialist uprising that
I was never aware of. How on earth could airlines not be making money from flying? Can blood types
even be dangerous? How is there a mysterious
person running all of these tech brands that I as a techie have never
even heard of. None of these videos are promising a general
explanation of a very broad topic like the global supply chain and logistics of canned
fruits, for example. Instead, they pose
a very specific, very odd and sort question that I as a viewer
see. It makes me stop. I just think I want to
know the answer to that, and now, I have to
watch the video. So as you go through
your list of ideas, think of not only which one
is interesting in general, but also whether you can come up with such a narrative for any of them and prioritize the ones where the answer is a yes. Focus on a concrete aspect and question within
a broad topic, you want to talk about
a single product, a single person, a single event, a single anything you want
to be concrete and not vaguely talking about
a topic in general. If you can find some
maybe contradiction or an odd question or an odd
event or something like that, if the topic is
still interesting, of course, then you
probably have a winner.
4. Testing ideas: We have some good
topics prepared. Now before we get to writing, I like to do one last test. These ideas sound
great in your head. Let's see if they really do. Pick the top three, four, or five ideas and make a
thumbnail and title for each. I often find that when I do, I realize that I can't quite
summarize the topic in a single sentence short enough to make for
a good video title, or there is no concrete
thing that I can put into the thumbnail that
is interesting enough. I sometimes also tweet out a vague theory and simply see if people engage
with it a lot. If yes, chances are that there's a lot of interest in
the topic in general. For example, I did just
that with my theory on why everyone is
making earbuds. People loved the tweet, and that gave me
confidence that I should flash that out and
turn it into a video. Making a great video
is a ton of work. Before you commit to whichever topic that
you've selected, make sure that you can
package it in a way that people will actually
want to watch it.
5. Research: All right, you've selected
your topic and now it is time to start
your research. The exact research process
will depend person to person, topic to topic, etc. I'm not going to go into
too much detail here, but there are some general
overall best practices that I would recommend
for everyone. First, give yourself time. I typically take
one day, two days, sometimes even more where
I just let my curiosity take me wherever it
wants to on this topic. Just explore it as
much as you want. The only thing that you should
remember while you're in here is whenever you find
something that has interesting, you should grab that
right away and throw it into a sort of
unstructured notebook. I like one-note because it is an open canvas where I can place my stuff however I wanted. I can drop images, files, I can draw on top of everything, but you do you whatever
tool that you prefer. The point is the
time you spend here helps you achieve two things. First, you'll often
find that a topic is maybe less interesting
than you thought at first, or maybe you created your
narrative and a bunch of assumptions that turned
out to be not true. Or maybe there's just not
enough data to actually conclusively prove the thing
that you want to prove. For example, I had this idea for a video recently
where I would compare how different
phone companies launch new products, how many events they
have in a year, in what countries, how much
they spend on promotion, etc. I spent about two full days researching and collecting
stuff before I realized that there just isn't any reliable data for me to draw any good
conclusions from. I abandoned the idea
and that's painful, but it's also good. You want to realize that a video topic will
probably not work for you before you spend time writing it and
perfecting descriptor, maybe even start editing. Just realize that there isn't enough footage to show
for it or something. Second, while you're
roaming around, you're also probably
going to find a lot of random fun facts and
hidden details that the average layperson
just vaguely interested in the topic would never be able to
find themselves. That is going to create
the depth that are sort of flavor the density of a video that will actually
make it worth watching.
6. Checks & balances: Now while you are roaming around and doing
research for your video, you should always keep
two things in mind. Always check your sources and
always check your biases. Take this tweet I recently
came across, for example, it's from a generally reputable
Indian tech publication, and it is confidently
claiming which phones emit the most radiation citing
Statista as a source. Well, the first
clue that something might be a little
bit fishy here is that Statista is often
misquoted as a source. Statista, if you don't know, is an aggregator that shows lots of data sources
from other places, all in one website. So I decided to actually
go checkout where this data could be coming
from and here's what I found. In the original chart that
they seem to be referring to, we can see that the
radiation values that they have quoted were it taken from the German Federal Office of Radiation Protections, which means the only
phones released in Germany were tested and that this chart specifically
omitted phones from brands like Vivo and
Realme entirely. That might make sense
for a German consumer, but it is rather misleading for an Indian consumer which
this publication is generally writing for
and it is definitely not painting a global
picture either. Mistakes like these
happen all the time. It's highly likely that this post wasn't
intentionally deceptive, but just a poor unpaid
social media intern who has to hit a quarter, who doesn't have time to check 100 posts and make sure that
everything is correct, etc. But the point is, you come across data that
seems convincing, but it's actually
wrong all the time. It is your job as a video essay creator
to track as much of the data that you're
quoting it back to its original
source and to make sure that it's
actually legitimate. Second, also check
your own biases. I often find that I have an
assumption about something. I go to Google, I search
for it and voila, the Internet confirms
what I thought all along. It turns out the
Internet confirms just about anything if you just Google hard enough for it, somebody will have written an article that agrees
with you eventually. So be sure the expand
your search terms, maybe search for the
opposite of your assumption and don't just look
for confirmation. If you Google iPhone
sales improving, you'll find articles saying
that Apple is doing great. But if you Google, the
death of the iPhone, you'll find plenty of articles
predicting just that too. Don't just go with your gut feel , double-check your bias.
7. Focused writing: You spent your last couple
of days in the weeds, you've done all your research. Now, it is time to
move on to writing. But before I do that, I typically like to
do one last check. I step away from my script, from my computer completely. I go to my girlfriend
and I explain to her what my video is about
completely from memory. I find this to be a
great way to zoom out of the details that I've been surrounded by for
multiple days now, and to figure out
what actually is important and interesting
about this topic from me, from memory, and to my
girlfriend as I tell it to her. If I forget about some details, probably they could be deleted from the video
script completely, or at least de-prioritized. So I recommend stepping
away from the details a little and trying this
technique for yourself. After that, it is time
to get to writing. I recommend using your title and thumbnails as
your starting point. If they are any good, they should have put
a central question in your audiences head like; what eating the rich did
for Japan, for example. I love this question. Answering that question is
the goal of your video, so start with this. Your audience should
enter the video with an existing curiosity for the question that
you've just posted. The goal of your script
is to grab them there, draw a beautiful narrative arc, and end up at a
satisfying conclusion, a satisfying answer to the question that they came
here to have answered. Ideally, you want to over-deliver on that answer
because that is what's going to turn them from
viewers into subscribers. The best video
essays tell a story. They're not a collection of
loosely related fun facts. They have a clear focus
on a tight narrative, and any paragraph that doesn't
specifically help move that narrative forward is probably noise and
should be cut out. People watch YouTube
while they cook, while they're on the
bus or whatever. They're trained to have
short attention spans, and they're almost certainly not experts on the topic that
you're talking about. So it's especially easy
for them to feel lost, bored, or confused, and just click away. That is why it is especially
important to have a super-clear and
super-compelling narrative that goes through
the entire video. Maybe repeat or heavily emphasize the main points that you're trying
to make as well, so that an audience that
watches it with half of their attention or just doesn't super understand the
topic very well, can still follow along and be interested all along the video.
8. Story blocks: There are very few fixed rules when we're writing for video, but there are, of course, a couple of best
practices that I try to hold myself to in
most of my videos. The first one is almost
always to start with a hook. YouTube videos tend to lose, maybe 40 percent of their
audiences in the first half, a minute or so. This part is perhaps the most important one
of your video. Also, since YouTube started auto-playing the
beginnings of videos, it looking visually
enticing is almost as important as a thumbnail
be well-designed. This is a big part of why
tech YouTubers, for example, put their most cinematic
and impressive intros right in the beginning. This is also why you
should make sure that your first thirty
seconds are on point. Your visual should be great. Your first paragraph
is super important, and it should create a sense of curiosity and interest in
your viewer right away. Then once our viewers are hooked our next job
is to keep them interested and engaged
for as long as possible without any big drops. Retention charts
like this show us where people drop off
and they serve as the most important
indicator to YouTube that your viewers are actually
finding your content valuable, so you really want to keep
these as high as possible. How do you do that? First, spread out the
interesting information evenly across the video. There can't be any boring parts. Second, cut out any
unnecessary paragraphs, trim. Third, there is the concept
of curiosity loops, where you introduce
the next question to your audience before you
answer the last one. Your viewers never really
have a natural exit point. Honestly, though,
I'm afraid there no real shortcuts here. You just have to make sure that your video is super interesting
to your audience from the beginning all the
way to the very end without any boring
parts in the middle.
9. One last check: All right. If you've
done all of the above, you should now more or less
have a finished script. We're going to do
one last check-up, checking on three
specific things, flow, language and
audio visuals. The best way that
are fun to do this is to take my computer
with my script, then it goes to my girlfriend and just read the
entire thing to her. I find that presenting the
whole thing in one goal really highlights any of the shortcomings that your
script might still have. By the way, if you don't
have a girlfriend or boyfriend that you can
constantly bother with this, then here's an alternative trick that I've learned from
software developers. Pick an inanimate object. The traditional world would be a rubber duck and pretend
that they're a person. Read your stuff to them, it works almost as well. You just really have
to hear yourself talking and I guess at least
a duck won't complain. I typically also tried to make my scripts not
sound super formal, so at this stage I also add
some intentional ohms and, alls and pauses and
fake laughter and whatever else to make it seem a little bit
more conversational. After all, our goal is to entertain and create something
lighthearted, I suppose, and then it is time
to move onto what I like to call the audio visuals. Will there be music? When should it
change for impact? Will there read chapters
or any other pauses? What should roughly be
shown during each segment? Adjust your script for those
as a final step and one up, you should be ready.
10. Next steps: That's my playbook for writing a script for a video essay. I guess the next step after this would be to
create a storyboard, which is instructions that
I pass onto a video editor, or for myself to actually
create the visuals with. I'm afraid that's a whole
other topic though, so if you'd like to see a
separate class on that, let me know and I'll see
if I can do one as well. Before you go though, I do have a bit of a project for you. I want you to think about
what your channel is about. I want you to come up with three different ideas
for new videos, and I also want you
to come up with at least one compelling
narrative question for each. Write all of that down, put it into a document, maybe also tell us about
how you came up with each of the things
in your document, and submit it as
a class project. Maybe we can help each
other out then come up with some great new ideas for
your video projects. I hope you enjoyed this class. I hope many of you
will go out and create kick-ass video essays with
your new-found knowledge. If you do that, and
if I was helpful then do maybe tag me on Twitter, or send it to me on
Instagram or whatever, and I guess if you
want to see my work, if you're interested
in tech videos, explainer type videos, then you can check out TechAltar or The Friday
Checkout on YouTube, or Technorama on Nebula. I'll see you hopefully
in the next class.
Marton (TechAltar), YouTuber, Online video creator
