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Every YouTuber deserves to succeed at what they do. Nate Woodbury read a book that’s called How To Shoot Video That Doesn’t Suck by Steve Stockman. Stay tuned as he incorporates this in YouTube videos. Listen in and learn!
So you may have heard of the book or audio book called “How to shoot a video that doesn’t suck?’ It’s usually not a word that I commonly used myself. But that’s actually the title of a book that I highly recommend. We’re going to be talking about it in this video and kind of sharing my take on each of the things that I learned from that great book. -And hopefully this video won’t suck. -Yeah. I’m trying to follow those principles that I learned. -Stick around and see if it does. -Yeah, let us let us know afterwards. Okay, so the author Steve Stockman, he wrote this book. He’s got a lot of experience in film in Hollywood and all types of stuff. -And I suppose you have a copy of the book lying around, do you Nate? -I do. -See? -I keep it in my pocket. -Here goes. -He’s going to… -I do. -I was trying to capture him. See, I wanted to see the book itself. But we didn’t have a hard copy. Oh well, go ahead. -Alright. So, I’ve listed a lot of the points that he makes in his book and I want to share how it applies to me kind of in the YouTube world. So, he talks about thinking in shots. So, a lot of times… Kind of my take on this is a lot of times I’ll just hit record and we’re in a family function or there’s some activity where you just want to hit record and we got to get everything. But listening to this audio book, he kind of taught me to think in shots. And I want to hear your perspective on this too because your come from a different type of filming background. -Yeah. -You know, being an actor. But to me, filming and shots is like, okay. I want… Thinking in shots? -Thinking, yeah. Thinking in shots. It’s like, “Okay, I want to get a shot of this bus going by.” I don’t know what I movie I’m filming here. -Yeah. -But so I get a shot of the bus going by and then I want to get different shot of Scott walking off the bus. And so, now I’m gonna set up over here. So, instead of just okay, hitting record. It’s like, “Okay, what shots do I want to get that will tell kind of tell a story?”
-I see what you saying. Yeah. No, that’s good. Yeah. I mean, I think that’s basically how most directors work in terms of shooting narrative films, right? They show up and they go, “Okay, here’s our set.” And truly a lot of times, they may have thought about this the night before at the earliest. But sometimes they literally just show up, they see what locations have given them and they go, “Okay, here’s the scene. We’re going to want to get you coming off the bus. We’re going to want a wide angle of the bus. An establishing shot of the bus coming into town. If we can get up on that clock tower, we’re going to grab…” You know what I mean? It’s so… There is… There’s a… You need to see the whole picture. I think, you know, without having read the book. But I mean, you kind of do that no matter where you go. Like you say, if something comes up and you go, “I got to get this.” It’s like my mind automatically envisions. Where’s the Sun, where’s the lighting coming from and how will I frame the object with… -So, you’re just trying to get that perfect shot. -Yeah, you want that shot. -You’re just stilling for that moment. -The angle that’s just going to pop and lit right, yeah. -Okay, so tip number 4. I’m going to… We’re going to come back to another aspect that really helped sinking some. But let’s go to number 2. He says, don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes. And I think that there’s definitely exceptions to that. But that means that you can’t have the camera too far back. It’s like kind of getting closer so you can see though the whites. Can you see the whites of our eyes? Are we breaking this rule? -No. I think we’re okay. -Hopefully we’re okay. -Yeah. What if we’re breaking the rule. We totally like… -This video sucks. -So, anyway. Um… -You want detail. If you’re telling a story, I think that’s what they’re saying. You know, you… I think it’s a certain point. A wide establishing shot is fine but generally speaking, when it comes to YouTube videos, yeah. You do want to be able to see expressions and and kind of the detail of the people and… -I mean I found. I found that I like to mix it up. But if weren’t, meaning, I’ll do some back far away shots. But then I’ll definitely get some close-up shots. Because in YouTube, we’re talking to one person right through the lens of the camera here. And if you can’t even… We can we make a connection through through eye contact. And if you can’t see the whites of my eyes, we don’t make that… You don’t make that connection.
So, that’s what that one means to me. Alright. Keep… Oh no. Oh, this is shot number 3 is what I meant when I said 4. Keep your shots under ten seconds long. Okay, so when you start thinking about shots as being… I’m not thinking about, “Okay, I’m going to hit record and I’m going to film a ten minute episode.” This really applies to telling a story or creating a vlog or a home video that people actually want to watch. If I’m hiking Arches National or going to like the delicate arch. -Yeah. I might say, “Okay, I’m going to film for 10 seconds of us getting out of the van.” Okay now, we’re at the trailhead looking at the sign. There’s another 5 or 10 seconds. Okay, now we’re walking past this cool thing. Okay, now there’s a lizard. And I’m just… When I piece this all together at the end, I see if I just… It’s clearly going that’s action. I’m not just, “Okay, we’re walking along. Oh awesome.” So, because I’ve listened to this book and a couple times. And you laugh at the “Listen to this book.” Let’s… But that’s honest. It’s honest because some people still say you know, “I’ve read this book.” And they really haven’t. You know, they’ve listened to it. -Yeah, but… -I think that’s good. -And because I practice this as well, when I went on we’re filming stuff, we’re at Disneyland and my wife wants me to film in some things I always film short clips. -Of course. Because when you piece it together, it makes for a really good video. -Yeah. And when my kids will take over the phone, now for me, it’s kind of like, “You’ve been recording for a minute long?” We’re only going to use a 5 seconds of this. So, it’s like stop, you know, only record in 10 seconds. -And just for practicality sake, you know, most… If a kid is holding a camera or anyone else for that matter, they’re not a tripod, they don’t have a Steadicam vest on. I mean, you truly just visually, you go any longer than 10 seconds. And I would say much shorter even still. But the movement, the swaying, the jittery, whatever even if you have the stabilizer on. It just, it’s just for variety sake. Take shots of things, be done, move on. It just, it is… It’s more pleasing to the eye. And your brain needs change. -He gives a couple examples. Here’s an example of a soccer game. That if you are watching you know, your child play a game of soccer and you were just filming it. You know, “Okay, I’m just watching my boy the whole time.” Oh, you know, hopefully the ball gets to him. Versus you know, you’re you’re watching the coach as he’s getting mad, you know? Like, “Come on guys!” And then you’re over here. The goalie totally missed that and then the parents are… One parents cheering their kid on and you showed that kid and you saw the person with the ball. -And a lot of that’s done in the Edit process, right? So I mean, you might shoot a long section of the play itself so that you get it. But just don’t forget to get those cutaway shots, reactions… So, I’m going to skip ahead to this point here because he says focus on what really interests you. So, if you are filming continuously planning on editing down to the shots you don’t just follow your kid the whole time. Hopefully he gets the ball. And you get some good shots there. I say he, it could be she. But if there’s somebody that’s angry and yelling at the ref or something, then get that. You know? Just focus on what’s interests you. And he also gives an example of, if you’re recording a band performance or require performance at the school. And it’s a 30-minute performance if you just… My wife won’t let me film it shots. Because she wants… So, I’m filming the whole time. -Yeah. -But we’re never going to watch the full thirty-minute thing. -Yeah, right. -Right? I might send it to my in-laws. My in-laws will watch it one time and that’s the only view that that 30-minute video will get. But think about if I had a camera with the zoom lens. And I was able to zoom in to the conductor. And then it switched over to my son or my daughter. And then somebody was playing a solo is switched to that person. And then it switched over to somebody in the audience that’s sleeping, you know? I mean, it’s at least it’s entertaining. -Yeah. -And it’s going to get more views. -Yeah, I mean ideally. But we’re talking about single camera stuff. But ideally, you would just have you know, if you could bring a tripod with a camera and just record the whole Orchestra, the whole recital and then pick up all these cutaway shots with your phone or another camera. I mean, that would be great. Because then you would have that single music bed underneath that never changes. And you’re overlaying… -I mean, let’s say you’re a professional. You. Let’s say you’re a professional videographer that’s going to come in and you’re going to record.. -If I were a professional, yeah. -And they’re going to. You’re going to record this band performance for the high school. The high school is paying you to make this video. -You’re going to get the master shot. -What are you going to do? Just sit there and record it? -You’re going to… Well, you are you’re going to get a master shot and then you’re going to go in with coverage and you’re going to take smaller B cameras, so to speak. -You’re going to get b-roll. -And you’re going to get all kinds of people and the sleeping in the crowd. Meanwhile, you have the whole performance that you cut back to and… You’re going to have separate external audio that’s actually good quality. -Right, right. yeah. -You’re going to have a camera you know, inside the band perhaps, inside the orchestra, you know, you’re going to… It’s going to take a lot of work. And so, you know, that’s kind of the takeaway I got from this is if you’re going to get a shoot video that doesn’t suck, here’s how you make… -And right now, obviously, we’re just shooting an instructional video. And there’s not a whole lot cut aways. -So, what do I do? We’re only filming on one camera. Sometimes we filmed with 3. -Sometimes we do 3, yeah. –But my team intentionally will do crop edits. And we do edit out. You know, where this is a talking head video which it’s not as entertaining. -No. -You know, some people have already stopped watching this video. We thank you for not leaving us. -Thanks for staying. -You know, thanks for staying because we’ve got some more points. -And we’ll be taking off our shirts as a reward. -I actually not planning on doing that but I’m excited to… Alright. Okay, he says no zooming during shots. If you’re going to be worrying about zooming in and zooming out, especially when you’re using your phone and you’re using your fingers to zoom in. -Yeah, yeah. -It’s not stable. I mean, if you if you know what you’re doing, there are professionals ways of zooming that is like cinematic. -Yeah. But in most cases it looks terrible. And you should just crop it afterwards. Just film it in full resolution. -Right. -Crop it or zoom in afterwards. Because it’s real easy to do in the editing software. So that’s his advice. -Or if… Style… Again, it depending on what camera you’re using. But if it is just an iPhone, ya the zoom does look terrible. Especially… Because it gets digitized… -Optical. -Yeah, exactly. And and the other thing too is… But if you do happen to have an SLR camera and you know you have the ability to do snap zooms and things like that, I mean stylistically sometimes those look pretty cool. They go out of focus a little bit. You pull the focus on it. I mean that’s kind of fun. But I think, yeah he’s probably just generally talking. – These are kind of like default rules to follow. And if you’re going to… If you’re going to break the rule, you’ll obviously have a reason for doing that and you’re probably know what you’re doing at that point.
So, the next one is he recommends just turn off the cameras digital effects. You don’t want any color enhancement or you know, it’s just… It’s a… -The comic book look. -If you want if you want your video to do well and be more professional, just turn those things off. We talked about focus on what really interests you. Don’t use amateur titles. Honestly like you think, “Oh, I’m going to put this cool text effect in there.” -Right. -A lot of times it just makes a little cheesy. -The spinning door… -Yeah. -coming off like whatever. -I’ve made a couple videos where I’ve used that. But I was… It was kind of because I wanted it to be cheesy. Like, one of them we did a an American Ninja Warrior video with my kids pretending that their American ninja warriors. And I put in some of the flashy stuff that they have just because I was kind of like… And we’re pretending to make. But I didn’t expect it to go viral on YouTube or anything like that or… It was just… It was fun. Okay, keep your video short. We should… This videos going little too long. We should… -Well, we’ve broken all the rules. -We break, yeah. -We’re explaining the rules. We have plenty of… -So, when I make a promo video, I’ll interview somebody. I don’t… I haven’t made one of these videos for a couple years. Because I do better stuff. Understand. But what I used to make speaker videos. We’d interview them for 15 minutes. We’re up to 12 minutes 49 seconds. -Okay. -When me film a speaker video… -Mmm. -…we’d we’d get the b-roll of them on stage and all the stuff. We’d interview them for 15 minutes. -Okay. -But we willed it down to like two and a half minutes. -Oh. yeah. -Or 3 minutes. You know? We always will it down. Think about like Hollywood videos and how there’s the deleted scenes. That’s got to be painful to remove. Why do they do that? Let’s take your take? Why do they have to delete scenes? Again, length. And you know, sometimes they just seem extraneous. You know, it takes a critical eye to actually remove a scene because people look at it and they go, it just… It isn’t helping. It doesn’t lend to the overall story. It doesn’t move along a plot point. It’s extraneous. Even though it’s really funny or well acted, let’s take it out. And it’s the same thing with interview videos and bulk footage. Where you go, “Really, what is the message here?” We got 15 minutes worth of footage. We’re going to use 97 seconds of it because that gets us to the point. -And a video that I recently filmed and had my team edit. It was, I went down to Moab and biked the slick rock bike trail. And I tried to film in shots or thinking shots and film short segments. But for a lot of the time, it’s like, you know, I’m going to hit record on my camera here, my camera up here. And I’m expecting my team to really just find some good moments in here. -Right. And my editor did whittle it down from like the hour and a half of footage down to like 20 minutes. But as I watch I’m like, “This is a 20 minute video. We need it to be… We need it only the longest to be 10.” And you know, so it’s like… You just… You got a keep it short because, yeah. I mean… -Especially you know for they… Just for the editors own sanity. You know? How are you…? When you scroll through… -I knew that would be a big project. Because it’s like, you give them, you know, an hour, two hours of footage. It’s like, “This is going to be a…” “Whittle it down for me, thank you.” Thank you team. -Whittle away. -External mic. I’m going to tap this. I assume that you heard that. This is a really good mic so maybe you didn’t even hear that. But I assume you did. This is a… This is a… Let me… -They heard that. -Angle it. Can you see it? There, you can see it. It’s a zoom h2n. I’ll link to it in the… Oh, I’ve got another one in the box. Is there box? I can show you. I just ordered another one because I love it so much. Where did I put my box of the… -Your box of h2n’s? -I got another one. H2N and I didn’t even know that N stands for next. So, N stands for next. Focus on this. -Maybe just on this particular… -No, it’s the same. So, I got a… This is an unboxing video. You didn’t know we’re going to… -Oh, boy. -Unboxing. -We’re crossing genres here. We’re talking head to box opening. Protective… It is now not a virgin mic. It has now been touched. It’s like… -Exactly the same. -There’s no better isn’t it? -Yeah. -I got a second one. So, that we can do wider stages for different things that I’m doing and this can… Anyway, this is a… This is a very good mic. Now, how this works? An SD card, it’s right in here. So, on your camera or if you’re filming here, there’s a camera here, right? It’s going to film audio that if it’s far away, it’s going to be really lousy. Audio. So, have another mic. You know, if I just put this mic right up out of the shot, it’s close enough that it’s… I mean there’s a mic right there that’s the same mic. That it picks up really good audio. This one’s directional. So, it kind of focuses on us right here and blocks out everything behind it. Kind of mutes that down a little bit. So then, in the edit, you take your video that has the audio. And you’ll see the audio wave files with the video. And then you’ll you take out the SD card. You have a separate file that you bring in and you see the and it just sinks it automatically or you can do it manually and visually. Moral the story, Steve Stockman here says, “Use an external microphone so you have good audio in your videos.” That’s a rule that we did not break. -Hopefully it was working. You be the judge. -Works every time. This is the zoom mic, I’ll put a link in the description below. -Highly consistent. Oh, and I will also include the link to the book. Because even though, I just kind of Despoiler alert. Just ruined the book for you. It’s actually… It’s one that… Even after I’ve listened to it the first time, it was valuable enough that I’ve listened to it at least one other time. Just because he’s… It’s a good book. So, if you want to make videos that don’t suck, go get this book. And then subscribe to this channel and comment. You know? -And then make your own videos that don’t suck. And still come back and watch ours.