How to make your filming natural

Are you making a video for a blog post, or maybe for youtube????I think the most important thing, and the most difficult thing, is to make your filming?natural.

Talking to a camera isn’t a normal thing to do, and it takes a bit of planning and a bit of practice.??(And it can’t be avoided: these days you HAVE to have videos on your website, videos to communicate with your team or your investors or customers, videos for social media etc).??And your videos do need to be natural or you’ll just come over all 'wrong'.?

Here are my top 10 tips.

1. Practice, it’s just something you’ve never done before, it feels like it should be easy but it’s not
2. Know how to edit (it’s easy if you use iMovie, it really is!) so you’re not bothered about mistakes and you understand the process of fixing them, and how to make that process easy, e.g. staying in the same place to make joining easier.
3. Do two takes even though the first one was great, because the second one will probably be even better - and also there’s no pressure on the second take because you’ve already got a good one in the bag.
4. Don’t try to remember all of your talk because then your brain is clogged up with what’s coming up in the future – use notes as described next.
5. Don’t try to peek at notes slightly out of shot because the camera will see your eyes moving,?- but instead, stop and look at your notes, then, while the camera is still running, restart talking while standing in the same place, and cut that joining bit out later.
6. If it's just a short video, don’t get an autocue and read from a script - it’s really hard to do this naturally, and it’s loads of work to write and perfect the script.??Worth doing for professional videos you will SELL but not for these chatty friendly videos.
7. Have a little post-it note with an arrow pointing to the camera lens on your phone so that you always look at exactly the right place.??Did I mention that your phone will be good enough quality???Because it will.
8. Check that everything is okay by filming 10 seconds and playing it back before you film the rest. Then when you’re filming you?know?it’s going to be fine.??You are checking the sound is working, the lighting is OK, your hair isn't adrift, nothing is poking out of your nose, and whether you’re standing in the right position (in shot, not blocking the whiteboard or something growing out of the top of your head etc)
9. Don’t worry about how you look, nobody cares, as long as you don’t look distractingly odd!
10. Use a whiteboard and do a bit of writing - it gives you something to do with your hands, positions you as an expert, and makes you more natural.?You can even use it as a cue for what to say next if you have one word or some initials already written up there as a reminder for each part of your talk.
11. Be slightly more zoomed out than you need to be, so that you can crop afterwards, because then if you’re not standing in quite the right place you can fix that when you do the cropping.??And crop the whole video before you cut it up and edit out the mistakes and breaks, so the cropping is the same all the way through.
12. I could go on, but that’s already more than ten.??And remember, this is only about how to make your videos natural, not everything you need to know about filming.??That might be the subject of a future post….

Onwards and upwards!

CC