How To: Use Zoom Webinar as Theatre

Welcome everyone. Today we're going to be talking about how to use Zoom as a theater. Now we know that live theater is not something we're all rushing to right now, but Zoom theater is slowly taking over the world, and there are a number of features that we're going to highlight today that get you ready to use Zoom as a theater. Many of you are familiar with the standard account. We're going to spend most of our time talking about the webinar account. However, there are a couple universal factors and features that we should take a look at whether you are on a regular Zoom meeting or you are on a webinar. The first is you as the leader of this session. How are you going to bring this into the world and how are you going to manage the entire process? We have a checklist for you because production is about pre-production. Therefore, the first thing I recommend is that you thoroughly pre-produce and create a run of show document that details the timing as well as the assets and the people in your production. The ones that we have, the big events that we have done where we use this, it makes all the difference in the world because you can assign tasks. And for this to feel theatrical, you want it to feel smooth. And the best way on Zoom to make it feel smooth is to rehearse. And that document in the rehearsal process will uncover any hidden problems that you might have when you are about to run your live theatrical event. Once you have this document, you now want to take your assets and you want to break them down. And those assets will include sound assets, video assets, PowerPoints, Keynotes, Excel spreadsheets, whatever they might be that you are going to be using as part of the overall presentation. You want to rehearse with those. As you rehearse with them, you want to have somebody on the other end who is watching to see how it is being presented to you. Because sometimes what you are seeing at the host is not what they are seeing. In a traditional Zoom meeting, you have a choice between a gallery view and a speaker view. And the speaker view will follow the active speaker. Now you can highlight that by using a pin command, or you might also use the spotlight command. But in a regular meeting, you have less control than you do over a webinar. That also has to do with how you are screen sharing and what the experience is being felt by the person on the other end of the screen share. Therefore, mitigating as many problems ahead of time will make that process as smooth as possible. The first thing that I do is have a very simple background. That way, if I mistakenly do a share my complete computer screen, nothing embarrassing shows up. Now, normally you are just sharing one asset, but sometimes when you're in the heat of the moment, you might click something, quickly share something, and you realize that, whoa, you've shared a lot more than you want. This protects you. I also take any assets that I'm going to be using, and I have a local copy of them on my desktop. I've got 3 quick assets that I have right here for us to test a few different things throughout today. Another thing that we do with the assets is we always have somebody that has a backup of the assets. I use a second computer sitting next to my main computer as my backup computer. And I have the assets and the desktop, everything set up in the same way. If you don't have the luxury of having a second computer, definitely make sure you have those assets with somebody else that can take over if you go down. And that could be because of a computer crash, or it could simply be the internet goes out in your location. Therefore, the more you are prepared for contingency problems, the better chance you have of the event running smooth if you do run into a problem. Let's look first at— you want to do a very simple type of PowerPoint presentation. More common than not, I usually see it look something like this. Somebody goes share screen and the first mistake they usually say is share the desktop. And they click desktop and you get this kind of ugly looking sort of PowerPoint sort of Zoom thing going on. And you go, okay, let me see. Now I want to come here and click it and let's go in and okay, I'm on a slide I want. And now you go full screen and Now you're in your presentation. The easiest thing to do in that situation is to go into your PowerPoint deck before you are in your share screen and pick the slide that you want and go into full screen. Now you see it in full screen and that gives you the ability to move around or do whatever you want to do. And you come back into Zoom. Now when you go into the Zoom side of things and you click Share Screen, you pick that actual slide or you pick that actual presentation which is in full screen. And now once you click Share, you're right in the screen you want to be. It looks good on the other end. And now you can play through by using your hotkeys. You can still click down here on the left-hand corner. What I usually do is click my arrow keys instead to move forward and backwards. When you're done, rather than hitting Escape in PowerPoint and going back out that way, you'll see that it just immediately kicked me out of sharing, which does work. I find it a little bit more graceful to click out of sharing on Zoom, and then the PowerPoint itself is ended. One of the most common mistakes is share computer sound, meaning you have a video that has sound in it and you want to share it to your participants, and you click share, you start playing the video, and you don't get sound. But when you click the share screen button, just as we talked about before, you want to go into the actual video itself, and you will see down here in this bottom area you have the choice to share computer sound And depending on what account you're logged in on, you might also be able to optimize screen share for the video clip right there. But the one we're talking about at the moment is Share Computer Sound. And when you don't click that and click Share, you start playing. And for now I'm just going to simply play it. And the video is playing. Now I'm hearing it and it sounds beautiful, but on the other end they're not. So the challenge is you don't really know what they're hearing. So usually what happens is you panic and go, "Uh, okay, wait, hold on a second. Let's stop sharing. Let's go back to the video. Let's click the video. Let's click Share Computer Sound and let's click play." But there is an easier way to do this should you make that mistake. So again, don't make the mistake. Click this up front. But if you don't click it, I'm going to take us back into the video. Start back at the top. And I'm going to start playing it. And then usually somebody will say to me, "Hey, I'm not hearing it well." Or not to me because I do it right. What, what do you do? So rather than going and stopping share, you can go back to your bar upside and you actually just say "New Share." And when you click on "New Share," You go to the video and you just pick the same video and now you say share computer sound and it will in video reshare the video. And there you go. The most cringeworthy things that I see when people are playing videos is not understanding how to make the transition smooth. Think of it as if it is a live TV show and you're cutting to a camera or cutting to a clip. You want it to feel like a smooth transition between what was step 1 and what is step 2. Normally what happens is I'm talking and I say, "And now I want to share you something really exciting about what we've created." And then I pause and I click share screen and I will pick the video properly. And I did click share computer sound. And now I'm at the video. And you'll see that The green bar is lighting it up, so I am sharing it, but you'll also see this play bar going. So now I come and I hover my mouse over and I click play, and now the video itself starts playing. Now if I do move my mouse away, it will move the play bar, which is good. But then if I mistakenly come over, you'll see that the play bar is back, and it immediately throws people out once they see the play bar. So how do you get around that? Well, a couple things to think about is how you arrange your screens. The first thing that I do is I go to the underlying video and I size it in whatever screen I'm on so that I know that it's not near where my play bar— so that I know it's not near my toolbar for Zoom when I'm running it. That way I won't mistakenly hover over and click it. The next thing that I do is Make sure that I am at the top of the clip. I also make sure that the volume is up on the clip. So that one common mistake is people say there's no volume. Make sure that the volume is up on the clip. And then I go to Share Screen and I get it set up a few seconds before we're actually going to be playing the clip. Usually it's about 30 seconds, in fact. And then I move this window over here and I make QuickTime the active window again. And you'll see that the play bar is showing up there, but I move my mouse away. And now that QuickBar is the active window, I can hit my spacebar to play it. And I put about 2 seconds on the front end of a fade up so that I actually start playing the video. And then as the video is playing, then I click over here on the share screen button. Like following: hit Spacebar, hit Share. And now what the end user is seeing is a very smooth transition into a video. And then if I need to stop it, I move my mouse around and click Stop Share without ever hovering over the window itself. That way they don't see all of the other things that are playing on the window. Now I can stop with the spacebar on my QuickTime too. So I get very used to my hotkeys. Another thing you can do on Zoom is rather than clicking share is Command+Shift+S pulls up the share screen for you too. And I'm always on Command+Shift+A for muting and unmuting. Or another thing you can do very simply is stay muted and hold your spacebar and you'll see that little icon that says temporarily unmuted. That's because I'm holding my spacebar down. That's that way you don't mistakenly say something when you think you're muted. And the more you practice, just like you would rehearse any particular show, the more seamless it feels. So in summary, whether you're on a webinar, regular, on a Zoom meeting, you want to make sure that you have a run of show or script. You want to have detailed timings in there, and you want to break out the individual assets by the type of asset that they are, and you want to assign who who is doing what for each asset. When we're doing an event, we have a very detailed checklist so that we don't walk in and make a mistake. Think of it as your pre-flight checklist. And one of the first things we do is look at each station to make sure that we have our configuration matching the event that we want to use on that event. So number one I do is I go to my computer up here under my Notifications tab, scroll down, and I choose Do Not Disturb. That way I don't get any notifications about something taking place that I do not want to have. I also make sure that I take my handy-dandy phone right here and silence it, or in some cases, if you want to set up a separate channel, we will use a FaceTime, WhatsApp on our phones, and then we'll have earbuds in so that we can be communicating if we are doing backstage pieces. Now let's talk specifically about you want to do a webinar. First of all, you have to have a webinar account. It is something through Zoom that you will pay an additional fee to be able to do a webinar, and then you will also pay by the number of participants on the webinar. And you can look that up on the website to find out how much that aspect will cost you. Once you have created your webinar account, when you go in to look at the webinar settings that you're doing. You create your webinar based on what you need. Right now you will see I do not have any upcoming webinars, so I will go ahead and create a brand new one. Looks very similar to a traditional meeting up top. My topic is my webinar training video from Apples and Oranges, and you can go ahead and put in whatever description you want right here. When is this going to play? That's up to you, and that does not force it to actually happen at that certain amount of time. So I'm going to go ahead and just leave this as the default. And the same with the duration, you can go longer, you can go shorter. Whether you want to make this recurring or not is something that you can set up. Let's say you're going to do a weekly webinar and you want to have these settings follow along, great, go for that. Registration. This is if you want people to sign up ahead of time to register so that you are capturing their information. And that again is totally up to you. I always require a webinar password for security. And I go in on my video settings. I always turn off for panelists and video. I always start with everything off. For audio, I allow them to use both. The Q&A panel is a big it depends. If you want people to ask questions specifically through the Q&A panel, then you put that on. Some people do it all through the chat. And if it's a type of a seminar where you're working with a lot of people that love to chat, then the Q&A is beneficial because your panelists can't read the chat fast enough because everything's flying up really quickly. And the Q&A is very specific to questions and answers. So I'm going to leave that one on there. I always choose Enable Practice Session because that gives me the ability to practice whether I want to or not. And you'll see in a moment how useful that can be for you. I do enable HD video for screen-shared videos because I'm always playing a lot of videos. It does take— if you click over the little question mark right here, you'll see that it does take increased bandwidth to make sure that the people that are receiving it hopefully have enough bandwidth. But I just, I go for it. These are two. This first one right here, the only authenticated users can join, is a security setting that says that they have to be logged into Zoom and authenticated to be able to join. That's something that you want to choose. And then record the webinar automatically. If you know exactly how you're going to be recording it, I might choose this. But most of the time I leave that unchecked and then during the session I record it because most of our recordings we're recording on multiple computers that we'll talk about so that we can get different views. But if you know you're the only host and you want this thing to live in the cloud, the benefit of saying recording webinar automatically is you don't forget. And I use old-fashioned stickies on my computer so I don't forget certain things. Okay. Now, if you want to assign an alternative host right now, you can do that. I'm not going to take that right at the moment. I'm going to go ahead and schedule this webinar. Now, once it's scheduled, you're going to see that you get a lot more choices. The first down here is this listing that's talking about a few different things that you can set. And the invitation, you'll notice that there are panelists versus attendees. Attendees are the bulk of the people that will be attending this webinar. They will have a different view than what you normally see on Zoom. For a Zoom attendee, it's going to be curated by you that we'll talk about as soon as we go into the webinar. Panelists, you have two choices. One, you invite them now, and if you pre-invite them, they are going to get their own unique link. If I go back into the edits, you're going to see that they were automatically sent their own individual link. But I can, and we do this a lot. Let's say that we're working with somebody who has a sensitive email. We'll send it to their assistant and then we can go ahead and actually put whatever name we want on here. And then we will copy that and send this information that we have very specific to this webinar in an email. And part of why we do that too is so they don't just get a generic Zoom email. They actually get something that is a very curated step-by-step email that has them check their settings. All right, so now you've invited people to this. You can also go in and there's a lot of different information here that you can set up about registrations if you are doing registrations to attendees. You can brand this information with your own logos. If you want to be using polls during a webinar, which are also unique to a webinar, you set them up here and you will go in and you will decide which poll you want to say. I could do something with the title on it is, do you like this? And then that's just the title. So it is, how are you enjoying the session? And you can allow people to click into it anonymously if you want to. And you can make it either single choice or multiple choice. And under a title, you can add a second question under that, or you can add additional polls. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on polls. That's something that you can work on, on your own. But you do set them up under here. On the Q&A, this is where you can get specific about the type of Q&A choices that you have in the Q&A panel. On the integration, this is if you're using some third-party marketplace events, which will be another webinar. Live streaming. There are two different ways for you to live stream. One is directly out of that meeting. So if you're going to go, say, directly to your YouTube channel, you can do it on the fly. But you can also pre-create the live stream, which is what we do, where we will go into YouTube and we will create the event ahead of time so that we can promote it. And then we will go under here and we will add the information that you pull back from that YouTube video so that when you are actually in the webinar and you want to go live, you have the ability to do so all at the same time. Now my webinar is set up and now we're going to switch into webinar mode. And now welcome to the webinar screen. The first thing that you will notice on the webinar screen is this orange bar right up top that says "Practice mode only. Attendees cannot see what's going on." And that's because the webinar has not started. And you have this big broadcast button that's set up right here. You'll also see this total non-video participants. That cleans up the screen for me. And one of the Suggestions that we make to anybody that's in a webinar is to turn that on. And the easiest way to get to that is to click on your video setting and to look at this checkbox right here that says "Hide non-video participants." And also while you're in here, you can see that this is where you can pick your camera if you have multiple cameras. Sometimes I use a DSLR connected to it. I do enable my HD video. And why not touch up your appearance if you can? Now you're ready and you've got your assets all set up and you manage your panel over here of the people that are in your meeting. Now we have 3 current panelists in our meeting. These were people that were sent the links, one being myself and the other being Ali and Ido. You'll also notice that currently I am recording and Ali is recording this video simultaneously. And if I were to now share screen and pick something that I want to share, like the webinar information, you will notice that on my screen right now, what I'm seeing is the webinar setup that we had. And I've got my view over here, and it's only showing me because I'm the only one that is that video participant. However, if I did this show non-video participants, you're gonna see these banners, which is why I don't do it, because it does not look great on a video that we're sharing. And so I will go back into my settings and I will hide the non-video participants, and I will go back into a gallery view and I will only see myself. When you have multiple people on screen, you want to determine how this is being shared down to your viewers. I look at this participant panel back here as a way how I manage backstage. Because we don't have a traditional backstage/front of house, we have to create that. One thing that you can do is you can take somebody and you can put them on hold. Putting them on hold is like putting them in their own little tank. The downside to this is unlike some other streaming platforms, they can't see what's going on unless they have a second computer that's logged in as an attendee. But there's also no chance of them quickly turning on their video or doing something. This is also nice if you want to have somebody queued up and they can be doing something and not worry about mistakenly coming on. They are put in that holding pattern. Once they're back here, you can decide what audio and video people have the right to do. The first thing you want to get used to is me as the host. I've got these choices right here as to who can do what. Do I always mute the participants upon entry? It's just a safety feature for me. And depending on how many people I'm doing, I may not allow the panelists to start their own video when they first come in. And that's because I might want to control when they start their video, which might be halfway through, and then I will allow it. And then I will go in and ask them to start their video. And now once I've asked Ali to start her video, she will go ahead and turn on her video. And then I will, once I see Ali, then I will ask her to unmute. So my choice is to always do video first, then audio. And the reason for that is because sometimes when you do audio and the video is not working, they might say something like, "This bleep in video is not working," and now that's being broadcast to everybody. And now you can change the views if you want to. So if I go back to speaker view, you see I'm on Ali. And if I go back to gallery view, you have both of us that are being shown now on my computer. But let's say I want to highlight Ali even though I'm Setting in a gallery view right now, I can quickly toggle back and forth by clicking on the ellipses right here, and I can say Spotlight Video. Now the reason I pick Spotlight over Pin is because Spotlight works across the entire platform, where Pin is individual. Pin will be if I want to just pin myself. Let's make this a little bit more interesting and bring Ito up as well. So that we can get 3 videos on here. And now we have on stage Ali, and we have Ido and myself. The panelists are us. Always think about us as panelists. So the thing you want to get used to is the terminology. The attendees are the ones that will be seen when I hit broadcast. I have the ability to curate what the attendees will be seeing by clicking my More tab, and you will see a 10D video layout down at the bottom. I personally always use Follow Host's View. That's because I think of myself as a live switcher at a TV or sporting event where I am curating the view that I want people to see. You can choose Active Speaker View. Now, if you do that, you'll notice that I'm still seeing gallery. But the attendee would be seeing speakers switching back and forth. Or I can force them to always see a gallery view if I want to. But I'm going to go back to follow host's view. And when I go back to follow host view, I'm now going to broadcast this meeting by clicking this button. And I am now live. Ali has a second computer set up. That's got an attendee that is waiting to come in on that one. So at any moment, we're going to see the attendee show up here on that second computer. And there is Allie Rice 2. Now, first thing I can do right here is, for sake, if I'm running this, I'll say AR 2. And I can rename the attendees. Now, another thing that I can do with an attendee is I can allow them to talk. This will give me the ability to have somebody speak if they want to without bringing them up into the Zoom meeting. So we use that— think of a theatrical talkback where you want to get questions from the group. You can use the Q&A if you want to and have them post it, but if you actually want to hear their voice, you can click Allow to Talk. Now another thing you can do is bring them up on stage. So let's say, for example, you're a magician or you're Penn Teller and you want to bring somebody up on stage. You have the ability to promote them to a panelist, and that is going to bring them into your backstage room. I'm going to bring that AR2 account, and you now see what AR2 is seeing, and now it's listed as a panelist. And you'll notice it came in without the video and without the audio. And I can go ahead and never allow them to remind you to turn on their video. If I don't want to. But I do want them to do that, and so we're gonna get now into a weird time zone warp where I'm going to ask her to start the video, not the audio, because then we'll get into feedback galore. And now we get to see the other side of Ali. And when you're managing, we do events with thousands of people, so be careful about how you do this. Once they are done being up on stage, you can go ahead and change their role back to an attendee. Thinking about this again theatrically, I am the host, I have control, but I might want to have second people. So let's say I'm the PSM, the main stage manager, and I want a second stage manager. I'm gonna take Ido and I'm gonna promote him to being a co-host. Now that Ido's a co-host, he can go ahead and do certain, he has more capabilities now than he did before. Now we have Ali as a co-host, and you'll see she's got different choices than she did before. And I can withdraw that co-host. This all goes back to that document we created in the beginning about assigning who is doing what. And what we break down in a large event is who is responsible for managing the view, which I talked to you about, where I can come in and I can curate. And let's say that we want to highlight to the audience what Ali is doing, I will spotlight her video. Now again, the difference between spotlight and speaker view is— go ahead and say something to us, Ido. Hey, how's it going? It did not switch his view on here. Whereas if I would have simply just gone into a speaker view, in fact, I'll take Ali's— cancel her spotlight view and Ido, go ahead and say something. And now you'll see Zoom is now grabbing what Ido is doing. And by controlling this where I can use different spotlights, and I might spotlight myself, I now have the ability to decide who is seeing what in this Zoom meeting. Another thing that we do with spotlight video sometimes is you have somebody that is screen sharing that wants to be communicating at the same time. We will spotlight their video while they're screen sharing so that their window will show up. Or we might have somebody singing to somebody else. We'll actually spotlight the video of the person that's being sung to so we can get their reactions. There's a number of different ways for us to, to control all of this. Looking at the virtual landscape as a way to tell stories, we're all figuring this out. So thank you for taking the time to look at this video, and we'll have more soon.