This week I wanted to talk about writing, which might seem a little bit out of
place as most of my videos are usually about filming and editing. But your
filming and your editing really rely on your writing. If you don't plan properly
you probably won't be able to execute properly. So this video is just going to
be my best advice for writing a concise video with good structure and flow.
Before you even begin writing you need to have a place to keep track of all of
your ideas. For me this is in the form of a Google Doc that includes quick lists
that I can add to of video ideas as well as brands and creators that I'd like to
collaborate with in the future. Just have some sort of list that you can easily
access anytime that you get a new idea. I like to write my videos on paper for a
couple of reasons. The first is that it's a really good way to visualize your ideas.
If you're someone who's into drawing arrows to connect different ideas this
is definitely for you. Writing also just makes you more engaged than typing does.
Instead of pressing a variety of different buttons you're drawing
different shapes and performing a physical action, and that interaction
with what you're writing makes you more engaged and results in a better product
later. Once I've picked out an idea I can start writing and before I even begin
writing the actual video I'll just write down any ideas that I may have for that
topic as just bullet points. Just get every single idea that you have spilled
out onto that paper and then start organizing. When I'm writing I like to
use an outline format, and that's a format where you indent to elaborate on
certain details and topics. So say the first part of this video is about
filming, and I want to go on to the first tip about filming, so I indent. And then I
want to elaborate a bit on that subtopic that is that first tip, so then I indent
again and I can list details about that. Writing in this format is a pretty nice
balance between straight-up bullet points and a proper paragraph and it's a
really great way to visualize what you're writing. You can really look at it
and see the structure of the video. It's really important that you
don't write for length but instead write for quality and efficiency. The video
should be as long as it needs to be and no longer. You do that by being as
concise as you possibly can be when planning and really thinking about what
details are important to include and what you can get rid of. Even though some
details might be cool or interesting in themselves, you really want to be
thinking about the big picture and if what you're writing contributes to that.
And if it doesn't, scrap it. A good way to be concise is to make the intro and
outro of your video as short as you possibly can so that you can really
focus on the meat of the video- that information value in the middle. For a
tutorial video, that informational value would be the steps in the process. And
for something like a quick tip video that would be the actual list of tips.
The steps in that process or the tips in that list-
those are your subtopics, and the order that you put them in is really important
and is something that you should think about a lot when writing. For example,
when I make a tutorial I try to talk about both filming and editing, so when
I'm writing that video I make sure to talk about all of the filming tips
before I talk about editing. That way, the structure of the video follows the
process of making a film. If you look at this video, I've arranged the different
points in it in such a way that it follows my writing process. The order of
the topics that you talk about is very important for making the structure
understandable for the viewer but it's also important for keeping the viewer's
attention. It's important to grab your viewer's attention early with something
interesting at the beginning of the video but you don't want that attention
level to be dropping off throughout the video, and you also want the viewer to be
left with something interesting at the end that encourages them to check out
your work further, so it's important to work on finding a balance there. When
you're thinking about the order of your subtopics it's also important to have a
way to transition between them. For example, the last thing that I was
talking about in this video is how to order those subtopics to keep your
viewer's attention and now I'm talking about how to
transition between them to keep flow. On here those are two completely
separate topics, but it's pretty easy for me to transition between them when I'm
filming, which makes the video flow a lot better for you. A video with good flow is
one that you can watch without getting distracted, and a foolproof way to
distract your viewer is to constantly repeat words and phrases. Let's say
you're writing a video about f-stop. You want to really limit the amount of times
that you say "f-stop". another bad way to get caught up with repetition is to
start too many of your sentences the same way, and I am completely guilty of
this. If you look back at my recent videos there's one word that I start too
many sentences with. *NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW
NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW
NOWNOWNOWNOWNOW
NOW NOW* So my problem is the word now but this also applies to common words
like then or next. It seems like a minor detail and that's because it is but
eventually the viewer is going to pick up on that repetition and after a
certain point it gets distracting, it starts to disrupt the flow, and it's also
just a little bit annoying. And the final bit of advice that I have in this video
is not about what you write or how you write it but when you actually write. I
strongly strongly recommend writing a few days before you start filming. This
way before you start filming you have an opportunity to come back and read over
that with fresh eyes and that gives you a chance to edit and notice things that
you won't have the day before. I wrote the outline for this video
two days ago and I've had a chance yesterday and today to come back, look
over it, and think about what I really want to be including. So this was a
somewhat different kind of video for my channel, but I hope you learned something
from it and if you did do feel free to show your support by leaving a like
on the video or even subscribing to my channel. I upload new filmmaking
tutorials every single Saturday, keep creating, and I'll see you
in the next one.
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