So how’s your website doing? Did you set it up, and then leave it alone? It’s not that I’m trying to shame you, but we should all be thinking regularly about how to stay at the top of our game. You know, be agile. I was updating one of our websites last month, and we…
Read MorePerhaps your first question is, “What is B-Roll”? Great question. After reading the next paragraph, feel free to throw around the term at your next cocktail party. No need to cite me. The easy definition is that it’s any video, animation, or dynamic graphic that doesn’t count as A-Roll. Yes, I love these kinds of…
Read MoreHave you (like me) been spending too much time memorizing a script so in the final video you look as natural as possible? Maybe it’s because the ideas behind each video keep becoming more and more complicated, but I’m sure my scripts are longer than they used to be. And for me, there’s a point…
Read MoreRather than the type of advice in my series on how to create a tutorial video, today let’s talk about the specifics on how to create a “porthole video”, which is an inset video overlay used during a screencast that doesn’t have the standard square shape (if it were square, we wouldn’t need any special…
Read MoreI’m not one to follow a lot of the latest YouTube trends. Maybe it’s an age thing, though it could also just be a stubborn streak. But after you make enough videos, you start to recognize a good thing when you see it. And one thing that struck me recently were a number of great…
Read MoreYou’ve probably watched a number of YouTube tutorials over the last 10 years, whether to help you with a specific task at work, to keep your IT skills refreshed, or even just to learn something new about one of your personal hobbies (no, we don’t want to hear about your favorite cat videos). So I’m…
Read MoreOkay, this is Part 12, so we’re all experts now. Still, there are a number of things you can do to up your game. Today let’s talk about one of them: planning your video with an organizational tool called storyboarding. Briefly, a storyboard is a visual tool, a series of drawn frames with written dialog…
Read MoreSo you read the advice I wrote in parts 1-9, you think to yourself “Oh why not, I’ll try to make a video”, and you then plan everything out: where to film, what to say, how to dress, the equipment you need, etc. You’ll pick or reserve a room somewhere in your office building (we’re…
Read MoreAfter my last post on the advantages and disadvantages of the animation style of video, I hope you did your homework! I certainly did, and you can see the results of my first animated video that conveys some basic information on the need for cybersecurity both in English and in Italian. Probably like you, I…
Read MoreSince one apparently just can’t have enough parts of a multi-part blog post, why not one more? Let’s depart slightly from the usual themes, because I want to talk about something that’s applicable to videos that are slightly more marketing oriented than your typical tutorial videos. Of course you could always make full-blown marketing videos…
Read MoreWelcome back to our ongoing series of how to improve the video tutorials you make, especially when you’re on a tight budget, and by that I mean both money and time. Today let’s look at conducting a live, one-on-one in-person interview. Note that online interviews and documentary-style off-screen interviews are their own full, separate topics)….
Read MoreSo your video shooting and editing skills are at a high level now, and you’re comfortable and even confident appearing in your videos. You’ve acquired a good quality microphone, greatly improving the resulting audio. But down deep you know there are still some things about the sound you could improve. I’ve already written a bit…
Read MoreYou might remember from the last post in my series on creating video tutorials that we talked about improving the quality of picture-in-picture video tutorials. I broke it down into two parts, the background and the presenter, with this summary for the latter: What’s realistically the most natural way you can present yourself in the…
Read MoreWelcome to the next installment in my series on creating video tutorials on technical topics that you can upload to YouTube, and in particular in this article, on continuously improving the quality as you create more and more tutorials over time. There’s a method in the art/design community called iteration, where creative groups improve on…
Read MoreIn my last post I described an easy, developer-oriented setup for a website based on the Grav file-based content management system, along with the EasyDev PHP development suite that contributes PHP, Apache and MySQL (although the latter isn’t necessary for Grav to operate). Used together, you can build quite sophisticated user-facing sites. Today I’m going…
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