First WA Video LoL

Kia Ora

Good Evening, from New Zealand, friends and colleagues.

Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway!

Well, I have done some acting, and even some musical theatre, in my time. I suffer no fear in standing in front of hundreds of complete strangers, to talk about things that I am confident I know enough about, I have done that for decades, but this was another thing altogether!

Production Crew

My 21 year old daughter Flora, a 3rd year musical theatre student, and I, spent Sunday making my first foray into the world of YouTube video presentations.

This was for publishing on my YouTube channel, to be linked to my two WA promotional sites, which have quite different niche subjects and which promote WA in quite different ways.

Flora was director, camera, operator, sound engineer, lighting consultant, editor and musical director, while I of course did all the hard work, script writer and performance LoL.

That Little Lens!

Its only a little, but quite efffective camera. It was recommended by my son, George, who is a

professional musician and sound engineer ( you getting the family musical talent thing here?).
I was fine when we set everything up in my study ready to begin filming, I was feeling quite excited and confident, but when Flora did the 5-1 countdown and red light went on that wee lens became the biggest thing in the room!

I tensed up, my mouth went dry, I stumbled over my words, and we did several takes of the key messages I was trying to convey.

We got through it and then we edited it learning about the software as we went. It was a first

attempt, but on balance we decided having done our test run, that we will redo this Sunday. I will be sure to report to you the results.

Some Tips

In discussion with my Director Flora, we decided that there were some things we could do better, and I just thought it might be useful for some, who might be contemplating this direction, for us to play back our lessons learned to you so that you might benefit at outset:

• Do look at others' videos to see how they present themselves and what their production quality is like and whether it makes you feel comfortable, confident or the opposite.
• Write down the things that you want to emulate in your own production.
• Think about what your point of difference will be in contrast to the way that everyone else does it.
• Keep your script simple and limited to the key points, don't make it a lecture.
• Do a test run to check your lighting, sound levels, speed of delivery, inflection and tone.
• Learn your script, don't if you can possibly avoid it, read it.
• Be authentic, if you believe you, there is a chance your audience will believe you.
• Vary your tone, be enthusiastic without overdoing it and be expressive with your face.
• You don't have to do it all in one take, there is good, readily available software which will allow you to edit.
• Do consider adding music and titles, which is easy to do with the free software, it makes for a more professional and credible product.

Have Fun

The list above is certainly not exhaustive, but we learned most of that just by playing around and having a bit of fun together, with our new camera bought specially for the purpose, on a wet Sunday afternoon. I am looking forward to the next session, when I am confident that we will, as we movie producers say (LoL) get our production in the can!

I hope this will have been interesting possibly even useful for anyone contemplating the same.

Good evening, from New Zealand, friends and colleagues

KIA KOA

KIA KAHA

Hamish🧐 and Flora🎭 oh and George🎸

Photo Credits:

Flora Dryburgh as Wednesday Addams in The Addams Family - courtesy Roc Photography

George Dryburgh - courtesy Vison College