The creator used to script and memorize everything, spending a full day per video. Now he reads a question, thinks aloud while walking, and records in one take with minimal retakes. He says you need roughly 800 videos to feel competent, so just start publishing and let your style develop.
Chapters
Hey, it's Technology Tuesday, and today I'm talking about YouTube videos and whether I use a script or not to make these videos happen. So I got a great question from one of my YouTube viewers— love you guys— James, who wrote in to say, "I'm listening and watching, have to start my own videos. I love the messages or rants. Do you use a script or do retakes?" So James, this is a fantastic question, and for any of you guys who are trying to get started on YouTube, I'm gonna explain my process before and what I do now. So when I first started, oh man, it took me a long time to do a video, like an entire day to do one video, and I wasn't happy with it. And it would be all scripted, it would be totally scripted, and I would try to memorize it word for word because I spent a lot of time writing great copy and I wanted to be perfect and get my points out exactly as I wanted to. The result was You could see in a lot of the videos that I'm struggling to remember what I was saying, and I was so focused on saying the right words that I wasn't using feeling when I was saying it. And so the content may be great, but there's no passion, and because there's not as much passion in it, people can't connect to it. And so I didn't have as many views, and I didn't have as many comments, and didn't have as much engagement. And I hated watching it too. Those are my first videos, and it took like an entire day to do one video because you got to script it and memorize and practice and do one sentence and come back and practice another sentence, and so it took a long time. Now my process is I get a question, I'll think about it. Some of the questions are really easy, so like this one, I'm just kind of telling what I do, so it's a little bit easier. Some of them make me think, and I want to give concrete answers, and I have to think a little bit more about it. But usually what I'll do is I will read the question on my computer and then walk outside and just walk around in a circle a couple times and do it. So I'll practice it, go through a full— however however long it takes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, whatever. Practice going through it and think about what points come up. And when I first do it, it's not as eloquent and like, "Oh, I got another idea," and that comes in and so it comes out and it's not great as I go through it. And then I come in and I mic up and I answer just like what I did when I was walking around, but usually it's a little more eloquent and thought out because I had that one practice run. So that's the process now. And so a video might be 7 minutes long plus me walking outside for 10 minutes trying to figure out what I'm going to say. So it takes me that, you know, 17-20 minutes to do each video, assuming I have to do a little bit of thinking for what the content is going to be. But, you know, I don't do scripts now. I don't do retakes. If I do a mistake, I may say in the video, Hey Christina, you know what, let's cancel that part out and I'll start over. But it doesn't really happen that much. And if I do a mistake, I usually just keep it in. And if I miss a point, whatever, we keep going on. And some of the videos have me doing some weird stuff at the end of it. You know, if I forgot what I was going to say and I start dancing or whatever, just to try to refresh my memory, Christina will pop those in at the end of the videos as kind of bloopers. I wish I had more bloopers. And I think if I had people here, it's just me filming, then I probably have more bloopers and jokes, but I don't. Anyway, rambling. What's important is that you get started, okay? And I wouldn't compare you now to where I am now because I had to go through— I don't know how many videos I have done now, maybe 1,200. A lot of them aren't published, but I've done like 1,200 videos, and so I've learned a lot and I've had years of practice doing this, and I've gotten better as I've gone along. And so it's not fair to compare where you are now, where you're just getting started, to what I'm doing now, because you may start and you may try to go with no script and say, "Ah, this is too hard, I can't do it, I'm never going to be successful, I suck, I'm going to stop." Whatever you need to get started, that's what you want to do. The most important thing is that you're starting. So if you need a script, use a script. You need retakes, do retakes. The most The most important thing is that content is getting out there because you need time to develop your own style. It took me 800 videos to get to the point where I could watch my video and say, "Man, you know what? That's not bad. I kind of like it." Obviously, you're your own worst critic and you're going to look at your first video and say, "Wow, that's so bad. Nobody's ever going to care. Nobody's ever going to watch it." Put it up and then put the next one up and put the next one up. And again, again, took me 800 videos before I got to the point where I could watch it and I just think it was half decent. So whatever helps you launch that first video, do it. What you'll find is you'll develop your style. You look at how my videos have grown and they're not the same. You know, my videos now are not the same as they were before. And you look at any popular YouTube channel, people who've blown up and become YouTube celebrities, you look at their videos now, they're not the same as when they started. The ones when they started, you look, I was like, wow, it was so there's no effects, you know, it's just that person in the field, whatever it is, their style, they're still developing. So it's still super rough, but that's part of your story, and you need to go through that journey to get comfortable, to get to the point where you're in the flow, and your style will develop, and that's okay. So you need to put in the hours, you got to put up the videos, whatever helps you get started, do it. And when you send your first one out, Shoot me a link because I want to check it out and see the first video that you put up after watching this. Thank you and believe. For everybody watching, you like the video, support me by clicking on the link in the description. Leave a comment, let me know what you think, let me know what your challenges are, and click on my face, subscribe to the channel. I will see you soon.
