Are you afraid that you will look unprofessional on camera? Do you get nervous when talking about video for your company? You can conquer that fear quickly and easily with the 7 things we share with you today that will help you present more confidently on camera.
1. Plan Your Shoot
Confidence in your content comes across clearly on camera. You need to have a clearly written down shooting plan to organize your shooting objectives for that session. Oftentimes with business owners, we see they have” I know my content so well, I don’t need to write it down” syndrome. However, when the lights go on and the camera starts recording, you’ll find that your memory works about as well as the Canva mobile app.
Take the time to document your shooting plan. This will help you transition from video to video faster and shoot more videos in a day.
Diet Coffee, belly and gerbil guts are embarrassing. Limit your coffee intake and avoid sugary creamers. The day that you’re shooting video, a jittery mouth full of sugar generates a lot of gummy saliva. Think about when you were eating skittles as a kid, saliva gathers in your throat and in the corners of your mouth causing massive spittle and irregular speaking, rhythm drink tea that day have snacky carbs and fruit on hand shooting for a full day or a half day takes a lot of energy and it’s important to recharge. I like to pack granola bars, fig bars, and bananas too.
2. What to Wear on Camera
People who look good on camera often stand out from the background where clothes you feel comfortable wearing. Now this will vary depending on your business and your location, but here are a few things to consider office space or walls. When shooting in an office, we often see Browns, Blas and blank walls wear brighter colors to liven up the scene. And definitely don’t wear colors that match the office space walls. Even if you love the outfit, outdoor shooting, shooting outside can cause a variety of issues for audio lights and distractions. I’ve actually had people walk right through my set. Other than that, wear what you feel confident in because that confidence will exude from you as you film.
3. Shooting Outside
If you find yourself shooting video outside, you want to be aware of brightness, darkness, and busy streets. Make sure to wear clothes that contrast with the environment. A busy shirt against the busy street will look just like noise stripes, avoid stripes. If you can’t stripes cause spatial aliasing and effect that can cause different signals to become indistinguishable or aliases. A one another. When sampled, you might be okay if you wear a jacket or a vest over the stripes, but in general, go light or nix the stripes in general.
4. Voice Warmups
Warm up your voice and lips with vowel exercises —really use your lips, teeth, and tongue to pronounce all the vowel sounds– AEIOU.
This might seem silly at first, but shooting videos without lip warmups is like trying to crane kick a Cobra, Kai, without stretching your legs.
Recite tongue twisters with the client, get their brain and mind working together in harmony. The more warmed up you are before the beginning and the end of the shoot means less stumbling and slurring.
When you’re on video, here’s a tongue twister that I like: “ Francis Fowler’s father fried five floundering flounders for Francis Fowler’s father’s father.”
5. Over Smiling
It’s important to smile the whole time today’s video quality is high definition. And in some cases, 4k, that means that even a non smile looks like a frown. If you watch TV commercials, you’ll notice that the onscreen talent always has a pleasant look on their face. You need to look amiable to appeal to the widest base of clients.
6. What To Do with Your Hands
Knowing where to place your hands is so important. So I prep all of my clients to have a home base. This is a natural resting place for your hands, whether you’re fine with your hands or your hands, feel like rocks on camera. A Homebase will solve any problem. A great Homebase is above the waistline with all fingers touching like a spider on a mirror it’s normal, it’s authoritative and it’s easy for some Homebase might be hands class behind the back or at the waist. This is fine. As long as it looks normal.
Here’s a mega tip:
Keep your hands away from the groineular area and never rest your hands below the BeltLine.
You want people focused on your eyes, where to look.
You should always look at the camera when you’re speaking, unless you’re doing an interview. Memorizing is so tough. So instead shoot video in bursts. This is the process of shooting small chunks together in looking away to remember your lines and then bursting again and on and on. You can edit it together. Seamlessly afterwards with bursting, you’re able to look to your notes, think about what you’re going to say. Look at the camera bursts of the content, and then do it again. In the editing room, you can put all the pieces together and the viewer will never know the difference. The key to successful bursting is to be very punctuated in your movements.
7. Bloopers
When you mess up restart from the beginning of the sentence or the thought do it quickly, don’t dwell on or laugh about mess ups for one second longer than you need to, or they could steal your whole day.
Oops and ums can steal your mind too. The more you mess up at a certain word, the more you will mess up at that word. This has to do with our neural pathways and the way that we remember things because of this, you need to push through the script. Even when you mess up, try this:
“ Hey, everybody. Welcome back to The Video Marketing School where I thing it…
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to The Video Marketing School where we’re here to talk about YouTube marketing.”
Every time you mess up, I want you to finish the whole sentence anyway. Once you get through the sentence, restart this way, you’re reinforcing the whole sentence and you’re likely to get through it faster.
8. Video Formatting
Imagine watching a sitcom where every week the theme song changed, the actors changed and the set was different.
It probably wouldn’t last too long. And the same is true of your videos. Consistency creates trust with your audience. So make sure your videos are sort of similar to each other, establish a rhythm for your show that makes the video shooting systematic. Your audience will grow faster and you’ll be able to shoot videos faster. Think of your format like a skeleton or a checklist for writing content follow the same basic checklist. Every time you’ll notice all my videos, follow a format where I asked for subscribers after the first joke.
You can download our RoS format here.
