My video making process is pretty straight forward, and there are 2 styles when it comes to my art videos- talk while I art and voice over. I prefer the talk while I art despite it being a little more garbled and often make a little less sense. The voice over is a lot more work.
The videos are both shot in the same way. I have an overhead rig that I created out of mini lightweight light stands for creators or influencers (ugh). I then have a pole that goes across and over my art making area that is made up of a leg from an old broken tripod. I have a lot of lights mounted because the office where i work is so dark. This is the one downside of this house- the light in the rooms where i have had my workspaces has terrible light. It’s always been this way. I miss our old apartment and its’ amazing light filled rooms.
The camera lives on a mount above the space. It is always ready to go. I make sure that the batteries in the mic and the camera are always charged and that there is a card in the cam.
I make it so I have no excuses to not turn on the camera when I sit down to make art. I don’t record everything, but I am now recording A LOT.
I do have to remind myself to turn the mic on. It is the one thing I really do struggle with.
It doesn’t take long to fill up a terabyte drive when you shoot high quality video.
Basically I record in the morning before work, or occasionally after work. On Saturdays I transfer a week’s worth of video to my laptop and also move already completed videos to an external hard drive. Currently I’m saving the videos I used to make the videos but I think I’m going to only keep the finished videos, though part of me wonders if that is a mistake. Especially considering how cheap SSD and SD cards are.
Once the files are on my laptop I open up CapCut. Yes, I taught myself Davinci Resolve and used Adobe Rush and use a cheap online editor. Why? I can auto make YouTube thumbnails with it and once i figured out how to edit the audio it works fine.*
It’s robust enough to do what i need since I shoot everything consecutively or in chunks that make sense.
Anyway, I pull the video into CapCut and process the audio first. I level the audio- push a button that brings the lows up and squashes down the peaks where I speak too loudly. Then I push another button that separates the speaking from the background noise. This is helpful when I have a lot of trucks tearing up the road in front of my house. It does leave a bit of a hollow artifact that I think I could fix in Davinci or Rush. sadly my new laptop can’t run Rush.
I then go through my video and remove the spots where I use a heat gun, fart or make other unpleasant noises.
I decide if there are areas where I want to speed up the video. I have found that most people want to watch the video at close to or at real time speed. I have decided that the most I’ll speed up my video is 2x for instructional videos and if I’m doing a voiceover of an art making, then I’ll use whatever speed make sense for the video.
If there are areas where I don’t talk, I add in cuts, full silence then and add music over those areas.
I then add in titles, text and end credits.
After all that I click another button and create the YouTube thumbnail. This involves finding a still in the video and adding text to it. this is where i think about the title to the video and the almighty algorithm and how search might find my video. I try to make something catchy but I fail at things people click on.
I am currently testing out “Getting Loose in Your Sketchbook” and “Fill Your Sketchbook” which seem to be the god awful click bait titles that are working. UGH I hate it.
This has been a bit of extra work as I play around with a glitch effect on the title. It’s fun but I think makes the title hard to read. I’ll probably quit using it for some of the stuff CapCut suggests in a colorway I like.
After all this I do a final check to make sure the title in the video and episode number is correct.
The episode number is really only there so I know what order I intend them for upload. I have and frequently upload them in a different order if the chosen order makes them fall on the wrong day of the week.
For instance, I don’t schedule review videos for Saturdays, those are for Tuesdays or Thursdays. I try to load a longer art making video on Saturdays because they seem to do better on those days. as for reviews, it doesn’t matter what day i load those, they always seem to get the same number of views no matter than day I post them.
Anyway, i’m writing this to avoid watching the election results roll in and it’s worked kind of.
* Though there are times when there is an echo that comes from the noise cancellation on the mic. It only happens when there is a lot of really loud ambient sound- like the construction happening on my street. Those are times when I record a voice over because the audio is trash.
