Whether it be a Facebook timeline or Instagram feed, video is the way to get eyeballs. Eyeballs lead to subscribers, subscribers lead to super fans, and super fans lead to getting your own television show where you pull pranks on celebrities in Japan. It turns out that you don’t need James Cameron money to make your video look great. 90% of the video tools are right in front of you.
Smooth Footage With Your Phone
Some television studios use $50K cameras and $10K rigs to get their video to look good. It’s a bit overkill. With cell phone cameras getting better and better each year, you don’t really need anything else to get impressive footage.. You’d be surprised how many times I was a production assistant on a big shoot, and we ended up using our iphone cameras for the final shot.You have a phone, right? Great. You’re set.
The biggest problem with phones is how light they are. Newton’s second law states that lightweight phones produce jittery footage.
This is where Stayblcam comes in. It makes your footage look silky smooth and eliminates all shaking. The actual camera quality is already up to par, so eliminating the jitters is all you need to attain professional polish. It has a telescoping pole, which means these smooth shots can be flyovers or low-to-ground shots that even the big cameras can’t pull off. What would THAT do for your vine?
Collaborate With Your Team
Video creation is a group activity. There’s the people who write it, light it, act it, shoot it, edit it, and the people managing all the other people. Have you seen how long movie credits are? Even if you’re on your own, at the very least you’ve got a group of friends to give you feedback. It’s a lot to keep track of.
Communicating with this big web of people is a job in itself. You got files being shot left and right, email chains from different people and different chains of feedback. You’re using YouTube and Dropbox and Skype. It’s a mess.
That’s why Framez was invented. These guys are the google docs of video. They offer a central location to show footage, share assets, and send feedback. You can upload something and post a link to Facebook to get the immediate feedback of your friends. You can password protect it and share it with collaborators.
Inject Amazing Graphics
There’s just something about a well-polished video that gets more views than a video that looks like it was done by a 9-year old. Well… depending on the 9 year old. In the days of old, you used to have the talent to give your videos slick graphics, and now you only need a credit card and an adobe suite.
Videohive has thousands of slick video templates, and animations that will make your videos visually compelling. Instead of your “top 10 Pokemon” YouTube video being some boring slideshow, you can get some animations to spice it up. This resource has animated openers and closers, and even some cool character driven stuff. If you can think of it, chances are it’s here.
Include Professional Aerials
Did you know that Netflix is airing Video Game High school, a project originally intended for YouTube? If Netflix picked up the videos you’re making with your buddies, you’d finally be able to quit your job as a garbage collector! So how do you get Netflix interested in your videos? Kick it up a notch, starting with the one thing every professional production has: epic establishing shots. Next time you watch TV, pay attention to how every scene in a new location starts with an aerial shot filmed from a helicopter or drone.
I’m guessing you don’t have a spare helicopter in your garage, so you’ll want to check out FocusFootage, which has epic stock-footage at ridiculously cheap flat-rate pricing. You’ll want to sign up to their mailing list for their royalty-free clips-of-the-week to get you started.
Personality With Music
Videos without music are boring. You probably wouldn’t have made it through the featured video on this page if not for the amazing music. Well every single piece of music you heard was obtained for free, legally, from the same place.
Check out FreeMusicArchive for royalty free music you can use in any project, so long as you appropriately credit the creators. There are some REALLY amazing musicians on this website, I’ve used them for television commercials and radio stations alike. Best of all, YouTube won’t be on your back for copyright infringement.
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