How NOT to Make Your First Video

When I responded to Darren Rowse’s call for videos on his Problogger site, my experience in making videos amounted to a three-second pan of thread spools in my sister’s sewing room in Duluth, Minnesota, shot on my cellphone. I had never even held a camcorder. At least not while it was running. So Darren asked his readers to do a video on “Why I Blog,” and post it online for him. Well, I could not miss out on the opportunity to be part of this project. So what if I had less than a week to do it? How long could it possibly take? Yeah, some of you are chuckling already. Well, buck up. I did it. It wasn’t easy, but I did it. So here is my mini-manual for all you newbies out there who have no idea where to begin. Ready?

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1. As soon as you see the project announced, recognize that there are only six days left before the deadline, and know that it’s not enough time. Conclude that you are doing it no matter what.
2. Continue with whatever you normally do for two days. Let your idea gestate. Make some notes about the story you want to tell. Take all the time you want to let your imagination run. Look at a few random videos on Youtube.
3. Decide your video has to be a tour-de-force. Note that some have already posted their short, neat videos, filmed in their office or living room, just relaxing and answering Darren’s question. Decide this is nowhere near good enough for you.
4. Spend a couple of hours watching funny dog videos.
5. Now that you’re totally inspired, start looking at old National Geographics for the elements of your visuals. Tear out a few dozen great pages and stack them on the kitchen table.
6. Go to the thrift store and find a book on animation. Clay animation. Read the entire book.
7. Start creating your visual background before you’ve finished your script. What the heck. It’ll look good anyway.
8. Cut a bunch of images from old maps. Spread little paper corners and wedges all over the house.
9. When your partner comments, “That looks interesting,” frown and nod without speaking, giving off the impression of confidence and intense focus. No one will bother you after that.
10. Take one whole day to cut out and assemble your set. Make stick puppets using wire and wooden shish-ka-bob skewers to create handles for them. They won’t be quite long enough, but that will add to the excitement when you film.
11. Over the weekend, when you have a whole day you could be completing the video, go flying instead. While you’re at a distant airport, leave your only good pair of glasses in the ladies’ room.
12. Be sure and borrow a camera from someone else. It’s best if they also do not know how it works. (The creative process loathes certainty.) You’ll need the manual. Read it before bed so you can wake up knowing what to do next.
13. Don’t bother to find out if you have the cables and plugs to load the video from the camera to your computer. You can deal with that later.
14. Scribble out another outline of your script. Try to match it to the collage pieces you’ve arbitrarily created. The decision making process is streamlined by your blurry vision.
15. Set up your filming area in the stairwell. Put the camera on the tripod above the top stair, so people coming upstairs get the message. You can balance a hot light on the upper railing. If you live in earthquake country, like I do, this just adds to the joie de vivre of the whole thing.
16. Filming! Do a couple of run-throughs so you can see where your arms and head will show while you’re moving the puppetry. Promptly forget this information. Have your partner stand on the stair below and try to reach across the artwork without getting in the picture. Be sure you have to reach from the floor and twist awkwardly to do any zooming or help with the puppetry. This creates a lot of extra muscle strain which helps justify any drinking you might want to do at this point.
17. Realize that editing will take way too long, so you’ll have to go for one perfect take, sound and all.
18. Continue doing takes until at least 2 a.m. The really good stuff happens in the madrugada.
19. Re-confirm that it’s a good idea to film in one take. Knowing how to edit just takes away from the spontaneity of the final product.
20. Now that you have one usable take, get some sleep. It will look even better in the morning.
21. It’s time to start getting your great video off the camcorder and into your computer so you can show it to the world. Realize that the manual is for a different model. Figure out how to do it anyway, and then realize that the computer needs a completely different connection. Firewire or something.
22. It’s never too late to switch to the other camcorder. Get your partner to quit what he’s doing and help you reshoot in the middle of the day. Decide that the mid day glare is actually a good thing.
23. Take two shots and realize that you have less than an hour to get it loaded before the deadline. Call your film making friend and beg for instructions.
24. Load your video onto YouTube. Ignore the various warnings about compression and all that stuff.
25. Watch the loading bar like a hawk. After half an hour, when nothing has happened, panic. Stop the loading and start scrambling to figure out how to compress the video.
26. Go online and find all the free video compression programs available. Load four of them onto your system.
27. While they’re loading, it’s time for a snack. Get really tense with your partner in the kitchen, and drop the cutting board on your toe. This will clarify everything you’re doing. Now you are ready to upload to YouTube.
28. Talk to your film maker friend who decides you can probably just upload the video. Maybe YouTube is doing maintenance or is busy right now, she says. Decide this makes sense, and upload to YouTube without changing anything on your video.
29. Be amazed when it uploads easily and appears on your YouTube account.
30. Breathlessly following the instructions, go to the website that is running the project and add your video to the comments list.
31. Discover that the project is already closed.
32. Double check your timezone calculations. Realize that Australia is actually 17 hours ahead, not eight. Notice that you knew this, but ignored it somehow when you were starting this project.
33. Attach your video to a different blog post, and beg to have it included in the group project.
34. By some miracle, your video is accepted. You’re a success.

Break out the champagne!! No one will want to talk to you now, so you can have the whole bottle to yourself.What are you waiting for? Get your video done! And share your story: Tell me about your worst video-filming experience. But first, go see the result of my efforts here: Because They Blog. Suzanna

The Two Kinds of Bloggers

Internal versus External Bloggers

Blogger in a Cave

Internal bloggers love blogging because they get to talk about their lives, stay focused on what they are doing, and pretend that someone out there cares one whit about their daily challenges. A diary with an audience… maybe.

Internal blogging is a growth tool, a catharsis, a place to experiment, and somehow feel connected, even if not one person is actually reading your stuff. most writers are much more natural at this kind of blogging. It is set up like the writer’s brain, endless inner routes traveling around the mental terrain of experience, matching strings of words to the sensation of self.

Beautiful but Limited

A beautiful world, but internal blogging has limited flows, that is, by definition it resists the intrusion of the outside world. Limits on the flows are all-inclusive. Limiting any flow on communication will limit the possibilities, opportunities, and the potential for money. Money is just another energy flow, and it is magnetized by other flows. Money loves to go where things are happening. It weaves itself into interactions. The potential for money flow is just about equal to the extent of engagement.

The Outer Orbits

External blogging is pretty much the opposite, and here’s where writers have trouble. Our brain wiring has to do much more than expand into the new technical territories of the blogosphere. We actually have to retrain some mental habits. In the midst of all the usual Blogger‘s Everests of learning curves, we writers also have to grapple with the uncomfortable sensation of a very different medium for our craft.

Knowing Marketing Helps

I was lucky when I started blogging. I had an edge that had been sharpened during many months of market research for my book, “Little Shifts.” I had already developed some success skills like precisely defining my readership, listening closely to their collective conversation, and ruthlessly lopping off the fat in my writing. But external blogging is an extreme version of that listening and lopping. Online readers scan the screen impatiently, looking for the first reason to grasshopper-hop to another virtual playground.

The Beast That Is

External blogging is a weird animal. The reader’s experience must be that of an irresistibly friendly conversation they eagerly respond to. The writer must authoritatively convey essential information while keeping the door wide open to discussion. The reader must always feel they are part of an important social group that makes a mark on the whole. This is engagement at its best. It moves the reader to draw deep from her well and share creatively in the process.

Sailing the Seas of Blogging

The writer who ventures into External Blogging will cope with tremendous distractions of technology while maintaining that sense of authority within his chosen field. For starters, the blogosphere demands honesty to the point of radical transparency. One might think you’re either honest or you’re not, but becoming transparent is really a skill. When a blogger can entertainingly reveal her daily challenges while keeping the reader fed with valuable streams of information, she is on the yellow brick road that leads to success.

Unlimited Flow

The flows available to an External Blogger are darn near unlimited. This in itself is a problem. With all that great content in the outbasket, you now have to engage the most productive technological interfaces to feed your own goals. It’s time to get familiar with those options.

The Writer in the Blog

In my class designed for writers and beginning bloggers, I use a variety of tools to help you gain a big-picture view of the world of successful blogging. You’ll see a mind map that will show you the world of connectivity from about a thousand feet in the air. You can take it in, and decide which pretty pattern you want to learn about next. To get your feet wet, subscribe to the site, and you will receive my e-series called “Before You Begin.” Just put your email into the box over there in the right column, and click “subscribe.”

Meanwhile, which kind of blogger are you? An innie or an outie? Or a little of both?

Suzanna

Knockin' on Heaven's Door

Where’s your entry point?

The blogosphere invites you, but how do you get there?

(I hear you knockin’, but you can’t come in!)

What is this place, anyway?

The blogosphere is the great creative force through which you can organize anything. It’s talk-friendly / art-friendly / idea-friendly / money-friendly / community-friendly / and friend-friendly.

So you go forth and try to find your way through the first learning curves. Once you’ve done that, you’ll get to climb up onto that first plateau where you, personally, can communicate. You can also make money. The options and choices on this plateau are staggering in number. It’s exciting, totally creative, and open to anyone.

Where’s your entry point? That’s the big question.

Remember that kid’s game Chutes and Ladders? Well, that’s what it seemed like to me a while back when I was trying to get the most basic understanding of what people are doing online and in the evolving blogosphere. I could see a lot of excitement, sure, and it really did look like there was a way to make a decent living, but what a morass! And which direction to take?

Watch out for that morass.

It held me up for years, keeping me from finding my own community online. I couldn’t even begin the experiment. Maybe I’m easily “confoundable,” but I don’t think I’m alone in being totally confused by the whole online world.

Just think about finding your own entry point. I can tell you that this is a tremendous time to be entering the learning curves of online income. It’s changed drastically, but you can still apply what you already know. It’s changed in all the best ways, in my honest opinion. And we have some very friendly people working hard to explain the whole machine.

Where’s your entry point?

How do you find it? The answer depends on some personal issues, actually. If you are ready to take on the whole machine so you can start making a decent living as soon as possible, you want to enter at what I call the Fast Track and learn quickly and efficiently. If you’re still just looking around, happy with your day job, just exploring, you have time to peruse more of the philosophy of this socio-cultural-impact-beast.

Still groping?

If you are groping in the dark like I was in 2004, then you’d benefit from my series called “Before You Begin.” This e-mail series takes you from the ground floor of the Internet, through a solid look at all the aspects involved in being successful at online communicating. From there you have several good choices to continue your learning journey. All you need to do is go up to the top of the column on the right, and subscribe. I send the series to my subscribers by e-mail.

Are you The Writer in The Blog?

I’ m betting you are, and all you need is a foothold on how the whole industry works. It’s changed dramatically in the last few months, finally emerging from what was a confusing jumble of different worlds, into its own valid industry of communication. Now that it is a bit more grown up, it’s easier to talk about, and much more relevant to a lot more people. All that’s needed is adventurous souls willing to take on some learning curves, and ready to share it with each other. Are you game?

Where’s your entry point? Can you already answer that question?

To your outrageous success,

Suzanna

To read more about entering the blog world, click on this link.