863 – Preparation is KEY: Tom talks How to Fail at a Video Shoot

Episode 863 – How to Fail at a Video Shoot
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody! It's Tom here with episode 863 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, I'm going to tell you exactly how to fail at a video shoot. Okay, you don't want to do that. It can be very expensive. So that's what we're going to talk about today. I like to talk about stuff. I'm like in the mid stuff right right now. So let me tell you about that in a minute. Hope you didn't forget the pick up a copy of my automation book. You will thank me for it because you will save hundreds of hours of fighting with your computer where you could be spent spend making money. So pick up a copy of that at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com.

[00:01:11] All right. Let's talk about how to fail at a video shoot. So I had a one of my mentees coming into our TV studio, and he had prepared for a while, and I kept telling him what to do to prepare. And he says, yeah, I've practiced, I've done this and that. And I said, are you sure? You know, make sure you do this because we'll stop the shoot if if it's not going well, because he was creating a product and a course that's going to live on and on and on. So I said, you know, I'm going to be the director and Marc the video guy will be the director. And we've been through hundreds of students and we can tell if things are going good.

[00:01:48] And I said, get a good breakfast. Make sure your energy's up. If we see your energy starting to wane, we're stopping the shoot. You'll have to come back another time. So he shows up and everything's going well. Except he's carrying. A big stack of poster boards. Real big ones like the two by three feet one things and and that's cool. We're going to see a method that we use to shoot videos like that, but they're full of text from the top edge to the bottom edge. Even though the text is about two inches high, each line of text, it's just plastered full of text. And that's as soon as I see that it's like it's red flags. To me, this is not this is already in the in the parking lot going to iffy going to be iffy. And he says no, I practiced I'm good, I'm good. It's just to remind me. So we get in there, get all set up. And I say, well, let's do some practice before we get Marc here to do the recording. And so I'm giving him tips on how to pause before you start to give the editor room to edit things. And if you mess up, you know, click your fingers into your microphone and, and pause and then go back to the first thought again. You know, you can't fix a screw up. Like if you screw one word up in the middle of a sentence, it's just way too difficult to fix that, especially on video.

[00:03:23] So I said, go back to the thought pause. You know, you got a pause that gives the editor time to fix things that they can do a transition or a page flip or a slide or something that can fix that mess up, which doesn't ruin the whole production. So anyway, I'm doing this and I had pasted his poster board up under the lens of the camera because you have to look into the lens of the camera, or you look beady eyed, you look like you're, you know, your eyes aren't looking directly into the camera. And and I see a lot of you folks on zoom doing this, too. And I have to fight myself as much zoom as I do to force myself to look into the camera, not to the face of the person on the screen. And it just looks terrible. It looks, you know, it's just off center enough that it makes you look uncredible and sneaky and beady eye. I mean, it's terrible. So. So anyway, I start practicing with him and he knows his material like the back of his hand, but the all that text on the poster boards was is like a magnet to your eyeballs. He just couldn't. Look into the lens and I'm saying this is no good. We can't do this. You have to look into the lens and just glance at your your notes.

[00:04:55] But it shouldn't even be notes. And I'm going to tell you how to do your poster board technique. There's see there's multiple ways to do video shoots. And one would be with a teleprompter and there's pluses and minuses to teleprompters. Another is poster boards which is what he was using. And another would be handheld notes. Now when you're using handheld notes you usually want to. If you've seen some of my master classes, you want to tell people, hey, I'm working from notes because I want to make sure that I don't miss anything for you. I do the same thing on stage. I work from a handout, and I even get the audience involved in telling me what's next for me to talk about. So that's a cool technique. But anyway, um, he was with poster boards full of text clear to the bottom, and this was just not working out. And, and, uh, I, you know, and he was disappointed. And I said, you know, it's better to be disappointed now than to shoot all day long and have unusable footage. All right. So we stopped the the shoot immediately. We didn't even start the shoot. Uh, we sent him home. He's going to redo the poster boards and I'll give you tips on on that, on what to do with if you're going to use poster boards and how to practice so that you look smooth and you look like you know what you're talking about, and he did know what he was talking about.

[00:06:23] But here's the thing, folks. In that setting, it didn't look like it. That's the problem because this video is looking at everything. And now with 4K and HD, uh, you know, it sees everything and so sees your eyes aren't making a connection with people. And I'll make I'm harping on this because that's critical that you connect with the watcher. If the watcher feels like something's wrong, even if they don't connect, the fact that your eyeballs are just a little off. Their their mind is going to say something is off here and they may quit watching. They may return the product or whatever you're trying to do on video. Okay. So let's go into these three ways real quick and I'll give you some tips. And and the teleprompter stuff I learned this I've been in Sag-Aftra actors union for I don't know how many 30. 40 years, I don't remember how long, and we had teleprompter training, teleprompter training and it is not easy. Now it's easy to get them nowadays. In fact, if you do want to do teleprompter and I do teleprompter sometimes, if I have to knock out an exact script, if the wording is all important, you know, and also if you're doing anything legal and you have to use the words properly, teleprompter is great. But what most people do, if they just get a teleprompter app for their iPad and they get it, and you can Google iPad teleprompters and they're not that expensive to hook on top of your tripod.

[00:07:56] You put your iPad there and you put the teleprompter app, and you put your script in and it plays it and for you, and you can even use remote from your phone to slow it up or speed it up or whatever. The problem is, people are total deer in the headlights. When they first do this, they're glued to it and they look like they just saw a ghost, you know? So you have to practice teleprompter. You have to do it enough times where your your head's on a minor swivel, not too big. Because remember, you're on a TV screen, you're not on stage where you can make big gestures and big movements. So you have to practice enough that it looks natural. That's the thing. And then most people never get to that point. They're just deer in headlights with teleprompters. Uh, and you can, you know, you have to see what speed works well for you and you can glance away. You got to practice to glance away from it and be confident enough that when you glance back, you can pick up your train of thought. But this looks totally natural. If you practice enough with the teleprompter and you can get them for your iPhone now too. You can even get an iPad teleprompter and use an iPhone on it where it just lays there and plays the script for you.

[00:09:15] So there's all kinds of ways to do this. Now. There's loads of different teleprompters. You can put them. There's ones that hang on your computer almost like like uh, the webcam that hangs on the front of your computer. I mean, there's all kinds of them now. But anyway, if you don't practice, it doesn't matter how cool of a teleprompter you have. Okay, so that's teleprompter. Now the poster board thing. Now, here's the thing about poster boards. I'm okay with it. They're like two feet by three feet. These are big poster boards, and you could use, um, flipchart paper. The poster boards are a little more stiff, but the thing is, is here's the tip. You want to have maximum of three bullet points on the poster board. I would say 2 or 3 words next to the bullet, just to remind you what you're supposed to say next. And you don't want anything under two thirds of the way down the paper. That's too far down to look at, even if you're just glancing. So you have very few words on this thing, and then you tape it up as high as possible under the lens of your camera. And then here's the kicker. And this is what kind of made him almost fall off his chair. And this is what I teach professional speakers in a in my wake him up book. It's a technique called bits, chunks and series. This is where you take a piece of material and you practice it out loud 30 to 50 times where, and you practice when you're doing something else.

[00:11:02] Which means you could be taking a shower, doing your hair, brushing your teeth. And it's harder when you're brushing your teeth to do it out loud. All right. But driving things like that. Because I want you to be able to to knock out this thing out loud, this piece, this little chunk of material. If there's a nuclear attack, your lips will still do it. And you have to do it out loud because your lips don't always go where your mind is telling it. If you just do it in your head, it's got to be out loud. And so you do it 30 to 50 times. And then with just a infinitesimal, you know, millisecond glance at that bullet point, boom, you're talking and you're you're cool as a cucumber. Your head's moving and you're gesturing and it's just smooth as silk. Okay. That's what happens now. If you practice it five times or ten times, it looks rehearsed. You'll be deer in the headlights. All right. So do that 30 to 50 times each little segment. And then let's you get to the end of the poster board. But let's say you're not done. Well that's where you pause. And then that's where you switch poster boards. And the editor can do you pause before you start, and the editor can do a nice page curl or flip or, you know, slide in and make it all look beautiful, okay.

[00:12:26] Or that could be a place where a graphic fills the screen so you don't even see that there's a transition, say so. It's all kinds of cool things you can do so that you do not fail on your video shoot. And he's lucky that he's a mentee of mine. And we have our own studio because just that, that booking the studio in a small place like this, it's not a full blown TV studio that is $1,500. It would cost them. And then he blew the whole thing. They're not going to give you your money back just because you you blew it and you weren't ready. And in LA, four hours would be $6,000 probably. All right. See? So so you don't want to fail on a video shoot. Um, okay. So that's if you're using poster boards, uh, three giant bullets, couple words each and no more than two thirds of the way down the page. And still you got to practice. And always you have to force yourself to look into the camera lens. Now a teleprompter. Well, that's easy because the text is in front of this glass. That's then the lens is behind it. So you're forced to look at the camera. But when it's a poster board or when you're doing these zoom things, you've got to force yourself to look into the camera and just glance away. Now, when you're doing zoom, I all the time, I say, oh, let me check my notes here.

[00:13:53] And I look at them and I go back and I look at the camera again. That's cool. But if you're doing something, uh, uh, product like this guy was doing, you know, you can't, um, I mean, you could use the handheld notes thing, but it was much better. The poster board idea, if he did it correctly. All right. So force yourself. Look at the camera. All right, so that's my tips on how to fail at, um, a video shoot. Have too much text, don't look in the camera lens and haven't practiced 30 to 50 times each bullet point and you will fail at your video shoot, I can assure you. Okeydoke. So there you go. So just a recap. Uh, you can do teleprompters, but a lot of practice involved. And it's it's not good for really long shoots because there's no room for ad libbing or something. You just thought of that you can throw in that kind of thing. Poster boards. Great, as long as you do it correctly. And handheld notes are fine, mostly for zoom kind of things where you're doing a training session. All right, that's my story. I'm sticking to it. If you want this kind of training and plus a billion things more, you need to be successful online. Check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com and go out and don't fail at your video shoot. All right, catch you later.