Speak Well On Camera

1. Introduction: Video content is by far the most effective and powerful way we communicate in the 21st century that most people don't know how to do it. This course is a masterclass guide on improving the way you look, sound, and are perceived when in front of a camera. My goal is to help you achieve what you want to achieve, whether that's online interviews and you YouTube channel or just becoming more confident in front of a lens. Hey, my name is Nick. I'm a software developer and I also run a successful YouTube channel, a successful blog, and a video production company. I spent most of my working life in front of a camera, and I've worked for years to build a simple, effective road-map to always appear confident, knowledgeable, and professional when onscreen in this class, I'm going to share that roadmap with you and teach you guys how to speak well on camera. This course can provide you with a prototypical template, a valuable behaviors to use when you're speaking in front of a lens. At the end of the day, everybody is different, but good cameras speakers always have a base of effective body language and vocal behaviors that they work off of. I'm going to teach you that base from what to do with your eyes to what to do with your face, to how to move your arms to how even to see your words. The cameras at OSAT, 20 percent of your energy, I will show you how to get that energy back and then some. So I absolutely love helping people improve their confidence on and off camera. And I'm incredibly excited to be teaching this class with you guys. Do you want to improve your charisma? Speak more impactfully and look great on camera, buckle up and I'll see you inside. 2. Eyes On The Prize: Your eyes are the first and most important thing people see when washing you on screen. Welcome to the first instructional video of the class. Now as we talked about in the intro, the way we've structured the rest of this course is going to be very logical. It's gonna be very methodical. I'm going to start from the top of our bodies and I'm gonna work my way all the way down. And along the way we're going to learn the best practices for every individual body part. Then after I'm done with body language in the next module, you're going to learn how to control your voice to sound confident and powerful from the top down, the first important aspect of speaking on camera is the eyes. I want you guys to think about your eyes as the bridge between which the viewer and the audience connect. By crossing that bridge, viewers will see into your personality and also start to mirror your emotional state. Your eyes will instantly tell the viewer whether you're engaged or quirky, or anxious, or uncomfortable, or even dramatic. And this is very different from more general public speaking, like during a TED talk or something similar. Because chances are during a public presentation, during a TED Talk, for example, the audience can't really see into your eyes. You're almost always too far away. But while speaking on camera, usually the cameras just within a meter to your face. And so the people that are watching can scrutinize you very, very closely. So rule number one is stare directly at the camera as much as you can shoot for a 100 percent of the time. But if you slip up a couple times, it's not that big of a deal. Just a heads up. This is going to seem really weird to a lot of you, especially if you guys aren't already very comfortable doing it, it's going to seem artificial, it's going to seem fake. But at the end of the day, remember, so is talking to a camera in the first place, humans, we're not wired biologically to speak into tiny little black circles, were used to faces, were used to feed back. And we're used to looking away every so often that kinda regain a little bit of cognitive strength. So again, it will be weird, but this is the most important part of talk into a camera. And if you guys can just take away one thing from this entire class, just let it be this because just by staring at the camera, he already be ahead of like 90 percent of everybody else out there. Again, i's are the bridge that connects to you in the viewer. So you're constantly demolishing that bridge. They're never going to be able to cross it to connect with your audience. And what purpose is speaking, if not to form a connection with the person that's watching. Now, we talked a little bit about the camera drains 20 percent your energy. And the most noticeable place that it always does that is in the eyes. Normally when you're speaking to your friends or your colleagues, the muscles around your eyes are constantly moving. You are fidgeting with your eyebrows, right? You're squinting, you're doing a bunch of stuff. And this stuff helps regain how human beings communicate. For example, it allows us to really stress a point or in a story to convey a really surprised emotion. And every one of the great cameras speakers over the last half-century have used these tools to help express themselves. Unfortunately, most novices do not, because due to the fact that when you're speaking to a camera, there's no human being in front of you. There's no human on the other side. A lot of the time your brain subconsciously, Let's lot of that stuff. Slide. It. Thanks. Hey, there's no human being, no need for me to be all expressive. Let's just shut that part of me off. Unfortunately with ends up doing is it turns you into an emotional zombie. You start looking like this. And a lot of the time the rest of the body language follows suit. And this is low energy. It's boring and it's not going to emotionally connected to your viewers at all. So what we have to do is we have to go back into our minds and we have to reactivate that part of the social module, let's say. And the only way to do that is to consciously force your eyebrows to move in your eye muscles to squint, at least initially, until your brain kind of clicks and goes, Oh, that's what we're supposed to be doing. Which brings us to rule to conscious contraction. And a lot of the time at the beginning it's not going to look nice because you'll be overcompensating and your eyebrows are gonna go from 0 to a 100 with nothing in between, you're probably going to look really weird and hyper and crazy and Madigan emotional, but that's fine. Everybody who's anybody in the camera world went through that stage 2. And after maybe two or three total hours of speaking, you'll rein it in event it'll seem a lot more natural. So we've gone over staring at the camera and forcing eye muscles. The very last thing I want to talk about in this video is rule number three. Eyes open. A lot of the time you cameras speakers will unfortunately look to engage and we'll keep their eyes open like this and live a little bit kooky. Or alternatively there will the other way, they'll close them too much and end up looking tired and low-energy or maybe on some sorts of drugs. And if you were talking to somebody in person, you wouldn't really ever have to consciously think about this. Because like I said earlier, your brain will take care of the vast majority of the social stuff automatically in the background. But unfortunately, because you're talking to a lens, those sections of your mind are often shut off until you can learn to reactivate them. So at the end of the day, you want a happy medium instead of here or here, you want something kind of like here, maybe 70 percent open and you're going to have to take a few practice shots and experimentalist kind of stuff because it's very hard to know just how open your eyes are on feeling alone. But what I recommend is to record a couple of sentences. Look at the footage. If you look to engage, dial it down by 10 percent. If you're not engaged enough, dial it up by 10 percent and that's all you need. If you need a benchmark, you can either look at me or you can Google when your favorite public speakers. Okay, so that takes us to the end of our first video. We talked here about I control, which is one of the most important parts of speaking on camera. And a recap, we learned three rules. Rule number one was stair, stare at the camera as much as humanly possible. Rule number two was force your eye muscles at least for the first bit, you need to consciously control your eye muscles to keep things interesting. And rule three was moderate engagement. You don't want to be too engaged, but at the same time you also don't want to look bored or out of your minds. Go for the happy medium in between and I'll see you in the next course. 3. Facial Expressions On Camera: All right, Welcome Nick. Here in this video we're covering the face. Now. If the eyes were like the bridge between the viewer and you, then your face and your facial expressions are like the struts that hold up and support that bridge. Meaning if you guys got Killer eye contact, but you're completely lifeless in the face, then no amount of fantastic wordplay is going to be able to get the viewer on your good side. And just like with the eyes, your regular smooth ability to make facial expressions during a conversation often doesn't translate over super well to the camera because the portion of your brain is perceived as just not necessary. So in order to reactivate it, we're going to use rule number 1, which is exaggerate your emotions basically due to the fact that the camera drains around 20 percent or energy, you need to consciously and often uncomfortable at the beginning, Act 20 to 30% more emotionally than normal. You're telling a story during the happy parts be 20 percent happier than you normally would be, and during the sad parts be 20 percent more sad. And it will probably feel like you're being kinda kooky again. But the reality of the situation is the camera requires a lot more energy than you're used to putting out in a day-to-day conversation. So at the beginning you're going to need to be very consciously fake and very consciously exaggerating or emotions and don't be weirded out by it. Every great speaker at their spent hours attempted, perfect. Every part of their presentation. The truth is you're going to need to do the same if you plan on captivating audiences like they do a lot of the time when I'm coaching people through the process of speaking well on camera, they tell me that they think it's kinda weird about this much work into perfecting a facial expression, are analyzing somebody's smile. But what would really make you feel weirder? Uploading successful videos and easily getting a massive audience or creating hundreds of hours of video and only getting two followers because your presentation skills suck. So this will obviously take some practice to get right. What I did and I highly recommend you guys do as well, is I spent two or three hours telling stories from my childhood to a camera like a loner. And then over the course of those two to three hours, I'd fill in a bit and then I play back the video and just look at my face. But I would turn off the audio from the video. And that turning off the audio bit is super important because it allows you to separate the auditory components from the visual components. And at that time, since I was working on the visual, this gave me substantially higher degree of granularity with wished I could really dissect my own presentation. What I would do then is I would keep that video playing and I put it over here. And then I would load another video over here. Because at this time I'd find a really engaging speaker on YouTube or something. And then I put that video over here and with no audio from other video, I would compare the two. And after a few seconds, I get usually almost instantly figure out whether or not I looked weird, whether or not I would like I was trying too hard, that sort of thing. And if I was overly emotional, Abdullah down by 10 percent and repeat the process until I got it right. So like I said, I encourage you guys to do the same. Pablo Picasso, one of the greatest and most successful artists the 21st century, once said, good artists copy, great artists steal. And I think of that quote like this, There's nothing inherently wrong with having a role model or somebody to emulate, especially when you're first starting out in any skill and in public speaking and cameras speaking specifically, there's nothing that's helped me grow more than finding somebody who's already really successful and then studying and analyzing the things that makes them so successful before applying those behaviors to myself and occasionally tweaking them for the better. Now the next rule is something that a lot of people already know, something that they think everybody already knows. And it's rule number 2, genuine smile, outrageous. You're probably saying I already know how to smile, and some of you probably do, but realistically around half of you likely do not. I've mentioned this a couple times. My other classes, which should be a testament to how important this is to public perception. But smiling is a full face enterprise. Smelling does not just involve curling the ends your lips upwards. A true smile involves micro contractions of a series of small banded muscles around the eyes. And oftentimes these eye muscles are very difficult to recur voluntarily, like when you're told to smile for a photo or something, which results in the super weird, lifeless, creepy half smile thing that looks like this. The reason human beings find this sort of thing creepy is because in the past we were wired to look for full face smiles as indicators of genuine comfort, relief and happiness. And both the lower half and the upper half of your face both coordinate together to provide that indicator. But when you only see a small and the bottom half of the face and not the top half of the face. It kinda sets off these weird alarm bells. If you've ever been told that you're not photogenic, this is probably one of the big reasons why when you're out with your friends and somebody tells you a joke, you look totally normal because of these muscles are directly linked to all that brain stuff, processes humor, and the brain will send signals to contract them as a show of enjoyment or happiness when you're posing for a picture and nothing is particularly funny or heartwarming, just like when you're speaking on camera, that part of your brain is usually off. So just like we did with the other facial expressions, we have to consciously reactivate it, at least for the first level while. Now if you guys been following along up until this point, we don't really know what I'm talking about. An exercise that helps is to go on YouTube, load up your favorite comedian or funny show. And I want you to put your hands like this. When you laugh. I want you to feel the different bands of muscles contracting around your eye when you smile. Most people have never done this before and it usually feels really weird. But it'll give you a strong understanding of the kinds of muscles that I'm talking about. It's this very thin ring of muscle right around here. And he performed that exercise. You'll get it now because these are muscles and like any muscles in your body, they grow with US. You can actually train these muscles to grow stronger and so you can contract then it will whenever you want. And a lot of you can probably already do this. I mean, if you've ever had particularly a funny or heartwarming lives, you should be able to contract those muscles. But if not, you can also just do that exercise I told you about by putting your hands underneath her eyes. Watching maybe around half an hour comedy or funny show per day until you get it. Now since these muscles are usually so small, all you most of the time need is a couple of days of conscious awareness of them for you can start contracting them on your own. Then anytime you're on camera and your storytelling or maybe you're telling a joke, smile using those muscles, it'll make a very big difference. All right, That takes us to the end of another video this time on your face. Here we went over the two important rules or controlling your face during a camera presentation. And those were number one, exaggerate your emotions, aka crank up every facial expression by around 20 percent to compensate for the low-energy drag of the camera. And number 2, genuine smile, which was to consciously control the small sets of strided muscle right here. Next time you need to smile a camera. 4. Arms & Gestures: In this lesson, I want to talk about something, but a lot of people miss when it comes to public speaking, both in front of the camera and off the camera. And that's talking with your hands. Talking with your hands is one of those things that basically nobody's going to consciously pick up on. But the effect it makes to your end viewers subconsciously is huge. And what I mean by that is nobody is going to watch your video and go, Man, that guy really executes his hand movements well, but instead it will be more Wow, that guy was really passionate, like I was really assertive and confident. And obviously this is something that you want. So let's get into how to do it. When humans talk, they use three separate groups of gestures. The first is what's called adapters. Adapters are basically signals that you're nervous or you're anxious and there your body's way of getting rid of excess energy. A lot of the time this involves stuff like playing with some kind of object like a pen or a phone or twirling your hair or running your hands through your hair, or even rubbing the back of your neck like this. Because when you're nervous, it's very hard for you to remain totally 100% still. You have all this extra energy and excitement and your body finds ways of getting rid of all that stuff. The reason that adapter signal nervousness is because other people use adapters as well. And over thousands of years we've grown to really pick up on adapter display subconsciously to kind of assess how uncomfortable or anxious and other personas you guys have ever seen an interview or a talk show. And he noticed that somebody who's super fidgety right there, I was playing with their hands or they just can't sit still for whatever reason, then it's usually because they were nervous and as a result of them being nervous and they were engaging in adapters. So adaptive behaviors are quite clearly not something that you want to be doing well, you're on camera speaking because the subconscious signaling that you're giving out is that you're nervous. And a lot of the time, if you show that you're nervous, it can be really distracting the other person. It can really interfere with your end message. Obviously, almost all of us have some kind of anxiety when speaking for other camera or in front of the public. And that's perfectly fine. The important thing is to be able to hide that anxiety so it doesn't interfere with the information that you are trying to get across. The second kinda gestures are what are called emblems. These are really simple. They're basically gestures that we as a society have collectively agreed to mean something like thumbs up, thumbs down, rolling your eyes, you know, sticking your tongue out, I kinda think. And in contrast to adapters, you do want to use emblems while on camera. They often express emotions and emotions represent that extra dimension that you can get feelings across the viewer with. So whenever you have an opportunity to use them, go ahead, right, if you're telling a very sarcastic story, roll your eyes. Or if you're recreating that epic scene in Gladiator thumbs down you want, and if you're new to speaking on camera in general, don't worry about overusing them at first. It's always better to get in the habit of being comfortable doing silly stuff on camera as quickly as possible to cut your learning curve down. The third kind of gestures are really the meat of the pie. These are the ones that you're gonna want to use the most when you're on camera. And they're the ones that add the most, I guess, natural and organic field, your presentations, they're called illustrators. Illustrators are basically hand gestures that convey visual information like how big something is or sequentiality, right? Here's one thing, here's another thing is another thing or emotion. Like I really want you to understand this later. And they're almost free form. There are no real hard and fast rules on your hands need to look like or how they need to be shaped when you're doing them. Especially since most people already subconsciously do at least some of them when they're talking. But there are a couple of guiding principles that I want to mention to help cut down the learning curve of understanding illustrators. The first thing is speed. I myself struggled a lot when I started and I had a lot of people to another look really jerky and not smooth. On top of adding emphasis or providing more information of what you're saying. Hand gestures also imply that you're at confident speaker that knows what you're presenting inside and out. However, if you are darting around from one place to another all the time, or your movements just don't look smooth a lot of the time this can give the viewer the exact opposite impression of competence. Another principle is stay close to the body. Don't gesture all the way out here. So that looks inorganic and somewhat awkward. Instead, if you're about to make a hand gesture, stick to generally no more than about a foot away from your body. And sometimes even that's too much. So this would be perfectly fine, but this might seem a little bit strange. And another principle is to stay away from pointing. Since in many places around the world, pointing is perceived as a sign of other disrespect or aggression. Don't do that. If you're addressing the viewer, use an open palm gesture, something like this instead, since this is relatively neutral. And the last principle is don't move your hands all the time in order for something to be emotional and impactful, it also needs to be absent every once in awhile. Otherwise, your gestures will become more or less background noise and you'll kinda look like you're trying to our all the time. Remember the entire point of using her arms to be organic and to be natural. Focus on flow, on blending different hand gestures together at opposed to thinking about each one is a separate behavior. And at the same time, don't be afraid to kind of break out of that pattern over a few minutes. Add emphasis to a particular sense, particular point. The best analogy I've seen so far has been to pretend that you are conducting an orchestra the majority of the time, the movements of the conductor are slow and graceful, but every now and then they do something intense that breaks the mold and gets your attention. And if you currently don't speak with their hands at all, then you need at least some kind of home-based. So don't be afraid to blatantly copy somebody at least initially, what I and a few other friends you to do is we'd find a video of somebody successful that we'd like to emulate, usually some big business guy. And then we'd play it side-by-side with a video of a speaking. Then we turn the audio off of both videos so we can focus on just the gestures and not the words. And then that would allow us to very easily make notes on the differences between us and the example speaker, which would then guide our speaking later on. And if you can't think of anybody to emulate, feel free to use me. Just turn off the audio and have me side-by-side a video of you speaking with arm gestures. And once you've successfully learned my gestures over time, you'll naturally tweak them to become your own and you'll be able to absorb and integrate them into your sociality. All right, That takes us to the end of the video. We started off learning the three different kinds of gestures, adapters, emblems, and illustrators. We also mentioned how adapters are primarily negative stressful behaviors and how we should probably avoid them wherever possible. Emblems, on the other hand, are agreed upon signals like thumbs up or if the peace sign. And because they help convey an emotion and information, we should use them as much as we can. The last gesture illustrators are really the meat of the pie. These are the gestures that you're gonna be using the majority of the time, stuff like this. And we learned a few general principles about them as well. Stay smooth, stay close to the body of weight pointing at people. Instead, use an open palm gesture and don't leave your hands all the time. Remember, in order for someone to be emotional, it also needs to be absent every now and then. 5. Vocal Tonality: Many of the characteristics that make a great public speaker in general carry very well over to the camera. But there's still a few important differences, particularly in your cadence and in your emphasis. And in this video we're going to be going over how to get Effective vocal tonality on camera so you can capture your audience's imagination and hold their full attention. So before we get into how to get Effective vocal tonality, we need to know what vocal tonality is. So here's a quick primer. If you guys have already taken my previous classes, by the way, you can skip ahead and metadata to you. These are just going to be the basics, okay, so first of all, all vocal tonality really refers to is the change of your voice pitch over time. Throat, either a sentence or even just a single word. If you guys have ever heard the idea that you can say the same word and a bunch of different ways to change its meaning. And this is a good example is, hey, hey, hey, right here, hey gets a bunch of different connotations based off how I change the pitch of the word. So it, with that basic concept, we can now group all of the many possible permutations of vocal tonalities into three major groups. For simplification, there is seeking rapport, neutral rapport and breaking and rapport. And don't get too caught up in the names. But the word rapport here generally refers to the idea of approval or friendship. So seeking report analogy basically means the tonality use when you are looking for seeking for approval or a relationship. Whereas breaking report tonality is basically the opposite. It's the tenacity that you most often used when you don't really care about approval, you don't really care about relationship and you're just trying to get your point across. Neutral reports analogy, on the other hand, is the middle ground, it's neutral. It's not really super one way or another. Now every time it's analogous sounds different. For example, this is seeking report. Do we have to know somebody pitch goes up over the course? The sentence seeking report analogy is characterized by an upwards inflection over the course of a phrase. This would be neutral rapport. Do we have to hear it? My pitch doesn't really go up, it doesn't really go down super noticeably. It's just kind of more or less equal. It's more or less neutral over the course of a phrase. And this would be a good example of breaking rapport. Do we have to? Here my pitch goes down sharply over the course the sentence and breaking apart tonalities characterized by that downwards and flexion from the beginning to the end of the phrase seeking rapport and like its name pretty much suggests, is where you're looking for approval or you're unsure yourself, or generally you're just unconfident. You don't really want to step on anybody's toes. So everything you say more or less sounds like a question. Example. Let's see that John's here we are seeking the other person's approval. Breaking rapport, on the other hand, is where you don't give a damn about anybody's approval. You're really sure yourself, or you're either really confident. Think of a boss stock went to an employee. The example being, had my file done by 4. In this example, the boss isn't seeking the other versus approval and if anything, the employee will probably be seeking the boss's approval. The last report is neutral rapport and that's what you use when you're hanging out with people that are kind of already your friends and you don't really need to suck up to them, but at the same time, you don't really need to talk down to them either. Gabriel, pass the chips. You're not really seeking approval here, but at the same time you're not exactly begging for the chips, right? It's kinda neutral. So those were the three types of vocal tonality. Now the question is, which ones should you be using when you're presenting on camera? The answer that question is obviously nuanced because you could be presenting on a million, billion different things. But in the vast majority of cases as an over 90 percent of situations, you're going to want to speak to the audience in either neutral rapport or breaking rapport. And you want to avoid seeking rapport at all costs. This is for the simple reason that you should almost never be seeking approval from your audience. The very notion of seeking approval is usually unattractive, distracting, and it interferes with the actual intellectual integrity of your content. Your content. And this especially goes for informational content should be strong enough to stand by itself without you needing to suck up to an audience that most of the time you don't even know. And it's incredibly difficult to get through any sort of video. And a speaker always talks like this with seeking report tonality, write their voice always goes up at the end. I'm sure you guys see what I mean, and I'm sure all of you have heard that before. Instead, it's better to assume rapport and then work off that. Most of the time you're probably gonna wanna stick to treat the audience like your friend. And that's actually another problem with seeking rapport. By the way, it kind of implies that have yet to win over the audience. But instead of that, pretend the audience already likes you and use both neutral and sometimes breaking rapport to deliver whatever you need to say. Just like that example, we were talking to your friend, Hey dude, pass the chips. If you went up to a completely random person and said, Hey dude, passages, hogs are, they'd probably wonder if they knew you from somewhere. And that's the vibe you want to have, what the audience you want them to think. How do I know that guy from somewhere? You want them to think they've known you for a very long time. So talk to them like good speak to anyone who you're friends or family members through neutral rapport. Now breaking reports analogy comes in when you need to either stress something or really backup what you're saying with confidence and power. You guys are saying somebody who you think might be controversial or even just something that you really want the audience to think as important or that you believe in breaking rapport is perfect. And it's also good for if you're making an argument for something or against something and when your videos. So a quick recap. Tonality is the change in pitch throughout a phrase. And there are three camps of vocal tonality. They're seeking rapport, neutral rapport, and breaking rapport. When it comes to you on camera, always assume familiarity. Always talk to people on screen. Let you talk to your friends AK with mostly neutral rapport and avoid seeking approval as much as possible. It's distracting and it detracts from the size and the strength of your content. Instead, let your skill speaking to the camera Stanford self. 6. Loudness & Timbre: In this video, I want to talk a little bit about loudness. And it's not the first video I've done on being loud and it's definitely not going to be the last. But because we're dealing with speaking on camera specifically, this video is going to be a slight departure from the type of things that I normally say. So normally, okay. Off-camera, you want to be as loud as possible without yelling. This has beneficial because it adds to your perceived social value and you come across a substantially more confident and substantially more competent people perceive loudness as more confident, like I said earlier. And we perceive confident people to be more attractive and just better in most ways. So in summary, you always want to be loud, but on camera, obviously we have to deal with stuff like the microphone clipping and redlining and distortion. Just for a second before we talk about loudness specifically, I want to talk a little bit about Mike placement. Normally, if you were to speak as loudly as you could do a microphone that was within a few feet to you, the mike would probably clip. It would read line, this is going to cause a bunch of monkey noises and you're going to end up getting kind of a sound. Your viewers are watching with headphones or something. This can also be incredibly unpleasant and a total deal breaker for a lot of your videos. But at the same time, being loud is so important. And if you've come across a soft spoken and mumbling, just because you don't want to read land the mic. It can often completely changed the energy and completely change the vibe of your presentation. So what do we do? Well, this is going to be pretty counter-intuitive to a lot of the general best practices out there in terms of Mike placement. But for most of you, you're actually gonna wanna move them a little bit further away from you, then it's probably explicitly recommended. Obviously not too far. You don't want to put it in the next room, but I would probably take whenever the recommended distances to your microphone and multiply it by a time and a half. What this is going to do is it's going to allow you to speak much louder and game the many positive benefits of that loudness, like more energy on camera, more confidence, more attractiveness, and so on and so forth. Despite the fact that yes, your audio quality will probably suffer, the degree to which it will suffer will likely be barely perceptible if at all, as long as you increase the loudness of your voice to compensate. And obviously you'll have to play around a bit with this recorded a certain distance, listened to it, move the mic and adjust your voice accordingly, but it is 100% worth it. Instead of talking like this, I'll low energy and boring, you get to seem excited and energetic pretty much all the time. And that energy is going to translate to your viewers and bring substantially more interest to all of your videos. But okay, we talked about mike placement. Now how do we actually become loud? Well, it's really a two-part process. Step 1 is you're breathing and step two is where you're speaking from. So step one, most people mistakenly and unfortunately used their chest to breathe. What I mean by that is when they breathe, their chest rises, but believe it or not, the musculature that surrounds your lungs is actually very weak in this area, a much stronger band of muscle exists near to the stomach, which is called the diaphragm. If you breathe with your diaphragm and your upper chest actually barely moves. And instead your stomach goes up and down pretty significantly like that. So if you guys ever want to make sure that your breathing the right way, make sure your stomach is moving way more than your chest is when you take those deep diaphragmatic breaths. Now, diaphragmatic breathing is way more efficient because the diaphragm basically wraps around the base of the lungs and then like pulls them open way more extensively than your chest muscles do. If you think about a glass getting water poured in it, which part of the glass fills up first? Obviously the bottom, right. Think about your lungs as if they were essentially a glass of water. You always want to fill in the bottom first by breathing diagrammatically. And this is going to ensure that you get a lot more air into your lungs and you can speak a lot louder. Part two is to use this air correctly by resonating that sound in the right place. Most people unfortunately speak in a very nasally kind of soft voice. And that's because they place where their voice resonates, is usually up here. It's usually close to the nose and the chambers of your trachea and voice box are actually pretty small and weak up here. And just so you guys know what I mean, this would be an example of that kind of speech. Notice how it's first of all a little bit higher. It's higher in pitch, it's higher in sound and almost sounds like my nose is congested. Instead, what we wanna do is bring her, that voice resonates down and down and down and down into the bulkier throat where the chambers are much larger. Inner voice comes across as much thicker and ultimately more powerful. Now you can do this by simply humming high and then transitioning lower and lower and lower and feeling where your voice is coming through them throughout the process. And it might seem kind of weird obviously, but we had been very weird in this course already. And it's the simplest way to fix where you're speaking from. Now when you feel the hum as far down on your throat as possible, somewhere around here, then start speaking. So if I were to demonstrate, it would look like hmm, right around here. The tricky thing is maintaining this over long periods of time. Obviously, if you're not used to it, this is going to be a conscious process at first, but just like anything, after a short while of speaking louder and speaking deeper and thicker, it will eventually become second nature. And the added confidence, attractiveness, and energy on camera, it will more than pay you back for anytime that you guys spend practicing. All right, so that takes us to the end of this lesson. Here we started off by talking about Mike positioning and how counter-intuitively you should actually probably move your mike a little bit further away from you. We then learned about how to breathe correctly and to resonate your voice so that the end of the day you could project a much louder, deeper, and more energetic voice. 7. Cadence: So cadence is an interesting topic in public speaking, it's generally accepted that best practice is to speak in a slightly slower, more persistent kind of rhythm. The main goal being to sort of hypnotize your audience and get them to synchronize themselves with whatever pace you set. But as always, cameras speaking as a couple of things they throw in there to make it slightly more nuanced and difficult. It's true that you do want to speak with a slower and more persistent rhythm. However, the thing that video can do that real-life never CAN, is InVideo. If you make a big mistake, you can always just cut it out. You just cut back a couple words and then reshoot. Now this might be unnecessary to say, but you can't do this in real life. And unless you guys have a time machine, then nobody has told me about if you guys mess up halfway through your big, beautiful camera speech, all you need to do is stop talking, rewind a sentence or two, and then begin again, making sure not to cut in the middle of a word or something else like that. And pretty much everybody does this as much as I myself like to pretend like I'm completely flawless. The truth is that we are all flawed human beings, and we all make mistakes. And given that people very rarely do perfect first takes, there's a strategy we can employ in our speaking to make this a lot easier. And the strategies this, at the end of each sentence, pause just a bit longer than you normally would in day-to-day speech at the end of a paragraph, aka at the end of a big speaking point, pause for maybe an extra second or so. The goal is to make this barely perceptible to anybody. But you, assuming you're the one that's going to be editing this later. And if not, all you're gonna be doing is making your editor's life immensely easier. The reason that this has beneficial is because it provides a very opportune and non-destructive cut point. It's almost like a quick save and a video game. It's like a backup point that you guys can return to anytime if anything fails. And if you guys do fail, you just rewind one sentence to the last one. Cut right at that 2.5th pause and then keep going. So it becomes substantially easier. Any workflow gets two if not three times faster in many cases, it also helps to avoid the jarring mid-sentence cuts that a lot of people, especially on YouTube, I love doing. Now, I don't know about you, but I find cutting inside of a sentence really throws me off, especially if you're delivering some kind of informational content. Now in some cases you're actually going to want to have those fast jump cuts because it's part of your aesthetic or maybe you need your video card it under a certain amount of time. And in that case, go for it. You've got however many times you want it, that's fine. But because of the way human beings process speech, usually cutting in the middle of your sentence can throw people off. So in all of the situations, I recommend avoiding it as much as possible. Aside from that, stick to best practices, republic speaking, which are number 1, takeover fast you normally speak and slow it down by 10%. And number 2, focus on maintaining that average speed throughout the video. Little changes in speed here, there are perfectly fine and are actually necessary to provide that dynamic to your speaking. But if you start the video speaking like this and end the video speaking like this, people are eventually going to become somewhat perplex and it's going to show as a lack of professionalism. Now this is going to give you a lot more breathing room when it comes to improvisation, as well as giving you the opportunity to more dynamically change your tonality and emphasis throughout a sentence, it's really hard to be impacted when I'm talking like this. But when I talk slower, I can add pauses between my words to really emphasize certain points. And that's the end of another video. This one is pretty short and simple. And in it we talked about ketose. We started off by mentioning the big difference between real life and the virtual world, which is that in the virtual world you can cut out your mistakes and you definitely can't do that in real life. We then use that to inform our on-camera k1 strategy, which if you guys remember, was to just pause a little bit at the end of every sentence and then pause more significantly about 2.5th or so at the end of every paragraph or big point, then last of all, we talked about how other than that, just stick to the general best practices for public speaking, which were number one, top 10% slower than you normally do on average. And number 2, add dynamism throughout your presentation, through pauses, tonality changes, and stuff like that. All right, That takes us to the end of our class. Here we went through every major body part, from your eyes to your face, to your hands, and even to your voice. And we picked up some excellent skills along the way. I sincerely hope you guys enjoyed learning about speaking on camera. I mean, I know I certainly love teaching it. Video is a medium. Definitely isn't going anywhere. And the next few decades are gonna give you plenty of opportunities to be able to flex these skills and your career and your relationships and in your social life. I can't wait to see your projects. If you guys have any questions or something you'd like to follow up with me on, please leave me a comment or review and I'd be more than happy to do so. Thanks so much for your patience and your time watching these videos. And I'll see you guys in another class.