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Your "Shoestring Set"

make sure the top your list, your priority is having a good audio source. When we filmed Krista the break, she went and grabbed a USB microphone and she actually had it right underneath her so she could capture great audio. She has an extra step. We're gonna have to sink that in. But that shouldn't be too too challenging, but totally worth it because you're gonna your we're gonna see the difference. You're gonna be really loud and clear on. And that's pretty important. Some sort of lighting. Obviously, that's what I like to say is the second most important thing. The real secret is you can get away with a lower quality camera if you have better lighting and you can get actually a place like amazon dot com, you get lighting rather cheap for all our this is remember, this is for our non photography amazing, talented creatives out there. These are the people that have never really held a camera. These the people that are scared of all that stuff I'm gonna give resource is for all the simp...

le and inexpensive stuff, if you know photography, lighting, making videos, you need to ignore this stuff. You're actually think a lot of my advice is blasphemous because I wanted to be easy for people. If it's not easy, they don't do it. Okay, so you can get a lighting kit on amazon dot com. It's called the the three point Cowboy Lighting Video Kit, and it's three lights, um, that come in a box, they unfold in a couple of fluorescent bulbs for each one, and bada bing bada boom. For 200 bucks, you have your own home studio set up, and it works great. It would be way better than trying to sit there with duct tape and your old lamp. Try to, you know, with all the glares and the harsh shadows. Um, obviously, if we want to do a video outdoors, we got a free lighting source all day long, called the Sun. And, um, the great advice like to share with that? It's be careful when you're filming outdoors because we want to avoid the peak hours of the day. Why? Because the sun is directly overhead. We get harsh shadows, and a lot of times I see that where it's just like the eyes or dark or just like lie like black line just crossed their someone's face and you can barely see him. You know, um, so in the morning, hours, the afternoon or when it's a cloudy day, because when you got this big filter that they don't give you nice light when you are outside. Going back to this is something that took me a while to figure out, especially when you're outside. Audio to me has been such an important component to making a better video. You want to always be listening for those external noises we kind of take for granted that there's like a plane flying overhead because our mind blocks it out because we're talking on her phone. We don't hear the plane, but it's there and the camera will pick it up. If there's too much wind, the microphone gets all we can't hear you. Those type of things, if you're filming outdoors, are factors you have to deal with, and you need to be cognizant or aware of it. So I always like to control my environment as much as possible. So I have ah, room that I can film in spare spare bedroom or the office or a garage, even garage is gonna be a little echoey, but at the end of the day, if if we have something that's indoors and the lighting is set up, it's one of those things where we can just, like, leave it in a corner. And when we're ready to go, we just stand, press the record button, do our videos and we go back about our day. Saves a lot of time, and we really are about to saving saving time, not making this this huge ordeal, which was a lot of people's objection and limiting. Believe about this. Taking a lot of time. There are so many ways that we can make this much more efficient and systematized. Chungking, our videos, having the set already there, we'll get our mill amount Tripod and Tripod mount all set up. So if we're using our smartphone about it being about a boom, we got a tripod. Um, and that's always nice. Instead of trying to film the video yourself, we can do that. You get tripods really inexpensive, but I'm not even gonna recommend a brand name. You go to Amazon and type in Tripod and you're gonna find something. Ah, backdrop. I'll show you two examples today we use just a simple plain white backdrop and that's that should be a good question. People are asking you, should I have a backdrop like like a solid plain color back drop? Or should I do like a natural setting? And I don't have preference over one of the other. I have pros and cons for each. If we choose to do a solid color back drop like a white backdrop, we want to look like a Mack commercial. Um, the lighting is gonna be a little bit more challenging. You'll have to get more lights. Um, and it will be nothing but blank white. You know, it's just gonna be just you. What's great about that is you can have texts and images. Chris is gonna have some stuff coming on her screen with some tax and every single one of you guys. When you film here, you can add a little bit of text. It looks really good. I can't really do that as well. If we just had, like, you're just filming with your office or your desk behind you or a natural setting, it looks a little weird with all that like adding bullet points and text. So let me show you some examples. Here is Ah, dear friend of mine. This is Amy Porterfield. She teaches business owners how to use Facebook. How do you how to build fans on their Facebook fan pages? She's totally awesome. She's amazing. She's a close neighbour mind in Southern California, so make sure to go check her out of amy Porterfield dot com. And her YouTube channel is a YouTube dot com fourth flesh Any Porterfield she she does great great videos. Here's an example of how she does both. Here's what the natural backdrop behind her. Now she's got people always ask this question to write. How do you get the fuzzy background? How to get blurry? Background? Um, you know, it's called depth of field, and she's using a DSLR camera, and she actually got the camera I recommended before the break. The rebel t three I and so she just does. These herself puts the camera on the tripod and about it being bada boom. She's ready to go, and it looks cool because we have something kind of look at, but it's not distracting. It's that blurred background. If your photographer. You know how to do all this stuff. But she also does videos with the with either the green screen or a plane solid backdrop and at the end of day just becomes a personal preference. I've done both. I enjoy both. I like to switch it up and, um, I don't think one is necessarily right or wrong. It's for you guys to decide, but you can see same person using totally different style. Some people are gonna like the left more, and some people like to clean and simplified. Look on the right. Okay. Eso shoestring budget set. You can get all this stuff very inexpensively. I forget the name at the moment, but you can get a collapsible white bat. You just would Google that are searching on Amazon for collapsible white backdrop. You can get one that's huge. It's like 16 feet wide for about $100 it folds up into this little circle when you're not using it, which is really cool. And that's what I use in my videos. Like I said, you could get a lighting kit For 200 bucks, you can get a microphone for $30 on Amazon and you get a tripod for 30 bucks, and you only need to get it once, then never again. And you could have a little set. One of things I like to do is exactly the creative live team is done, is we Mark tape, You know, so that you can frame yourself up. Wants to know where to position the camera, where to pushing position your lights. And so you just compress the record button and you're good to go. You could start, start rolling. Okay. I do want this to be easy and efficient for you guys. So at the end of the day, if someone is doing this on their own without going to this workshop, are out learning without learning this content, if they haven't had any any type of video experience and they just do it on their own here, the three most common mistakes that I see And now that you're aware of them, they'll never happen to you guys 1st 1 obviously couldn't say this. Enough is the bad audio. They don't take a moment to just be aware and just listen. Other refrigerator air conditioning on humming in the background is the neighbor's dog barking too loud? Is the phone ringing? Well, I'm making my video is my is my audio sound really distant? Does it sound like I'm in a hallway 100 yards away? Those are all gonna cause a disconnect between you and your audience. You wanna literally make it sound like they're in the same room as you or you're in the same room as your as your viewer. Anything we can do to improve the audio is gonna be great. It starts with getting a little lapel microphone like you wouldn't have got ready to do here. So you guys can probably hear me pretty well. That's all intentional. And then obviously poor lighting your face. If you're doing a talking head video, as we call it, you need to be well lit. So here's I'll show you an example of Here's Here's a video behind the wrong way. And this is how I see a lot of people doing their videos. It looks not that bad. You could see that's me. But then if you just put some lights on, you see the difference. Who isn't a nice thing that cool. Let's do it good. Turn the light on and go. And those air with three lights I actually got when I was living in New York and had a shoebox Teoh film in my studio is small, so but I still was able to get three lights on me, paid 200 bucks for him, and you can see the difference. Just this is this is with just like a natural light bulb on somewhere in the house. And this is with our lights on. Such a difference, right? Without having to know everything about lighting and and all the magical stuff that we could have a whole workshop on herself. Obviously, the basics the fundamental stuff that's easy for our in studio are in Internet, world, Internet, world, Internet, land person. You ask the question about framing. That's how I like to do what I like to be eye level with my camera. Um, and I like to put my head in either one of those three red circles so to the left, so I look at it is in thirds. There's all kinds of fun, creative angles you can do, but, you know this is the simple way to do it. upper left hand. Third, the middle or the right third, Um, so you're not necessarily like looking up at the person you're not looking down just straight on, but there are people to do it, and it's It's like creative. It's fun. It's different. It's unique. So you're at your own discretion to do that. But there are. If you don't know what you're doing creatively, I would stick with the basics. Let's stick with the fundamentals and say, Am I I level with the camera? Is my head in those top third squares? Okay, even in this video, it's still like It's kind of centered, and I'm kind of in that top third. Good enough, right? Good enough, Vs, Like, my head's not all the way down here in the corner. And I'm like, looking up. Okay, so it is even as we can with that. Um, so those Those are the basics. The three things that people will mess up on Not you guys, not you guys. Bad audio, bad lighting and bad framing. So if we're aware of them, if we're cognizant of, um, um, we're not gonna have any issues with that questions on that before I show a quick case study. We have a few questions about Backdrop, and so everyone's wondering what color would be best green or white. Or does it matter? So I actually people ask me all the time. James, why don't you do any tutorials on green screen? And ah, I don't and I don't ever recommend green screen or anything like that. Why? Because it's one more thing you have to do and learn. It's a complete, different step. You have to have to be way better lighting your set. You have to have more lights, and then you got to do that whole step. We have to bring the video in and chroma key it and learn how to do it. And if you don't know what you're doing, you have this ugly green halo around you and you've seen those videos or it's like, Oh, this person tried, but it looks really bad. Why go through that? I've never seen a business video that looked like that got better results because they were standing in front of like a beach in Costa Rica, even though they're in their studio, you know, we're like all of a sudden there in Hawaii. I've never seen that improve results. So the two background colors that I recommend the most, but because they're the most simple colors or black or white not done videos of the black, they're easy to light. Um, the white, like I said, takes a few more A few more lights, but, um, those with college buddy, but you could choose any color. That's kind of like a solid or doesn't even to be a neutral color. But, um, and I think our artists would no way better. But those are the basic things. Like I said, I don't I don't spend a lot of time with, like, carrying about a background color, but black or white works. All right, question from my jobs. I t. Mike Caligula says, recently purchased a camera that doesn't have an external mike options. So what other suggestions do you have for the mic? Cool. So what do you do if you just got a camera? And now you're watching the same? James just told me I need a camera, has an external mike, and years doesn't have it. Uh, the first thing you can Dio is start filming videos without it and see how the audio is. And if you keep close enough to the camera, if my cameras here and I'm like 3 to 4 feet away, you're still gonna capture good audio. You won't be able to do a video where it's gonna be full, full body shot of you on the cameras, like 20 yards 10 yards away. Because the further the camera gets, the more the audio weakens and becomes a little shoddy. That's the first thing. The next thing weaken Dio. If besides, purchasing a new camera, um, is actually what Kristen did at the break where she recorded her audio separately. The only issue with this is if you're editing yourself, this is gonna take an extra step of sinking the audio. So what she did is she has a, um, the blue microphone. That's the company name, and it's a USB mic. She plugged it into her laptop. She pressed record on an IPhone and then had the microphone connected to her camera. Also recording. You were probably using a screen floor, right? And so she's recording the video on the camera. She's recording audio on the computer USB microphone, and she will sink them in post. It's an extra step, and I wouldn't recommend that is the The best strategy began with a rather have you, You know, for the person who doesn't want a lot of time, if you could just have it all sink coming from the camera. But Krista Yeah, it's great. But if you record audio on both tracks, So, like, if the IPhone is recording its internal audio and then you have your computer recording audio when you put him into any video editing software, it'll show you I'm not a technical person. So I'm gonna get this terminology wrong. You know those bumps that show you like That's a tactical That's the right term exit. Think I thought so. The audio bumps, Yeah, yeah, sounds about right, so But the bumps that show you like how big the audio is, you'll be able tow line up the bumps to tracks, and you don't have to, like, figure out where you were saying whatever. You just like, see the pattern in the bumps and line up, and it's really it's not too bad. So for the person who just bought the camera, if they want to try that it's it's an extra step, but it's not terrible. Step a song us, and the best way to do it is do some sort of clap. You know, that's what people have the clapper board so that you can sink the audio. When you have that smack, you can have it come right down to you visually see it So I like to put my hands inside a bank. You can see it in here it at the same time and that's we don't do we get to techie on people. Are they like, Do we lose people? Is it too nerdy at this point? Because I want to make sure we don't We don't do that. Our our audience loves tech top. Okay, cause I really don't I don't know that much. Yeah, that's great. That's all that matters, because if I could get Brooke to get it totally kidding, uh, after a shuttle and stuff like, Here's how we make our videos look more professional, getting a studio and lighting and blah blah blah. Here's an example of someone who defies all these rules. This a good friend of mine of any Tran and anyone who's ever been on YouTube and has been looking for love advice, has probably stumbled upon va. Nay And and you guys can go find her at youtube dot com Ford slash within any 12 and why I'm showing you her here is after I just build up all these things you can do to make better videos that are more professional, higher quality. We're gonna show you somebody who literally uses their web cam to film all their videos. She has no film, background, film, professionalism, all that type of stuff. She just had a message and great value and content to share. And she just started pressing record several years ago and people still watch her today. So we're gonna go ahead and just watch a small clip of her video just to show you that it is possible at any level and the reason why she has all these subscribers in these views. It's because she has great value to share and people love her content. Hey, let's declare this year as a year of you this year's year, you're gonna take the time to get to know yourself. Really be happy. Find the balance of going to work or school spending time with your family, doing all things you want in terms of your hobbies and really focusing on yourself. Because when you are comfortable with yourself and you love yourself, you're going approach people differently. You're gonna get to a point where you feel like you know what? I don't really need someone else to make me complete to make me happy. You know, you guys just got a small segment of that. But you see, that is just having a conversation with shit, something great to share. But you heard the audio is a little like, you know, it was okay. And she's just sitting on the couch. She's talking from her webcam on her honor Mac laptop. So, um, and she's got all these views. So at the end of the day, it doesn't have to be the most amazing professional thing like which some people have been worried about. Okay, So pretty cool. Uh, that's youtube dot com fort slash va nay, 12 1 to make sure to subscribe because she's been making videos for years and she's still doing it. And she's so awesome. And she has some great stuff, especially if you guys air looking for love. She's gonna help you out in that arena