Michael W. Dean
I know a lot about filmmaking on an indie, short-form, YouTube level and even a lot about more complicated, long-form, pro filmmaking that approaches a Hollywood level. You don't need to know all that I know to make great YouTube videos, because all of it would fill many books. (In fact, I've written, edited, or contributed to several books.)
| www.cubbymovie.com (URL 2.1) |
I'm going to take the more basic and YouTube-specific of that info and distill it down into the two chapters of information you'll really need to be a contender on YouTube. A lot will be covered quickly, but not in a way that misses anything you need to know to make videos that look and sound better than most of the fare on YouTube.
The basics of writing, lighting, sound, camera placement, and editing are the same, whether you're shooting with a webcam in your bedroom, making a $100,000,000 Hollywood blockbuster with a huge crew and movie stars, or shooting scrappy little documentaries that change the world with good mini-DV cameras, with a small volunteer crew mostly made up of film school students, and with a professional editor, like I did with my two feature films.
Most people when they get a video camera just start shooting. I know I did. But you really should do some exploration into storytelling so you have something worthwhile to shoot.
I cannot overstress the importance of storytelling. Storytelling at its most basic is just one person talking to another person. It predates spoken language, probably originating with the Neanderthals 500,000 years ago, grunting and emoting with their hands around a fire in a cave to describe the day's hunt.
Today, storytelling at its most basic is two people sitting on a couch talking—see Figure 2-1—not much different from the cave stuff when you really think about it.
Figure 2-1. Storytelling at its most basic, but with some recording gear added. Photo of Michael W. Dean and Mike Kelley podcasting, taken by Debra Jean Dean.
On YouTube, as with any motion art, the "story" is the video. Your goal on YouTube is to have you sitting on the "virtual couch" of the Internet telling your story, whether it's a story from your life or one from your imagination. The story is what grabs people.
Sure, if you're young and cute and female, people will probably be more likely to pay attention to you for a minute on YouTube. But that's not the story. And it's not really positive attention, and it isn't something that lasts. And it's not going to make you a lot of money. Storytelling is what grabs attention, keeps attention, and makes money (again, if that is your goal). Alan is making money on YouTube, but he didn't set out with profit as his goal. He set out to make good art and share it with lots of people. I don't make money on YouTube; I only want to spread art and am satisfied with that. We're speaking to both camps here. We're making the assumption that you want to make good videos and have people pay attention to them. Storytelling is the most important thing. People remember a lot of things about any piece of motion art (the term I'm going to use for anything from webcam YouTube videos to Hollywood blockbusters). People remember the stars; they remember the great lines of dialogue, the look and feel, the music, and more. But the main thing they remember is the story. Think about movies you love. You love them because the story spoke to something inside you in some important way. Think about YouTube videos you love. They have a great story, even if the film is only 30 seconds long. The story is what happens in a piece of motion art. It's the thing that speaks to some common thread of the human condition.
Note
The best way to learn a new skill is to read up, ask questions, do real-life experiments, take notes, review your notes, and then try some more experiments. If this sounds like school to you, it's not. School tells you what to learn and when to learn it. This is combining action with thought and experience and doing it at your own pace. It's learning what you need to learn and ignoring the rest. School would never put up with this. This is the most important thing I'll contribute in this book, and this piece of advice is worth the price of the book by itself. And it comes from a guy who got in trouble for skipping school to go to the library to actually learn things. I'm now in demand in a bunch of cool worlds, and most of the kids I went to school with have nowhere jobs. A guy who used to beat me up writes for the local paper, which is cool, but the last thing I read by him was a story about how evil rock music is and why Nirvana should be banned and all their records burned. Steve Albini, who engineered the Nirvana record In Utero, also uses this "self-teaching with study, experiments, and notes" idea. Check out my video interview with him where he talks about it:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw62MYwe5pQ (URL 2.2)
I've often said that a well-told story interests me even if I have no interest in the subject matter, because it speaks to something common in all people. Of all the documentaries I've ever seen, one that really stood out, Spellbound, was one about spelling bees, even though I have no interest in spelling bees. One of my favorite popcorn movies (big Hollywood movies that don't change your life but are fun to kill two hours and eat some popcorn) is Happy Gilmore, even though I hate golf.
Storytelling is different from writing, though they are related. You can tell a story without even using any words, and words are what writing produces. Some of the most compelling pieces of motion art (especially commercials) have little or no dialogue. But something always happens in motion art. Your first job as a video creator is to make things happen on the screen. This can be done by writing or otherwise visualizing a plan and then enacting that plan and filming and editing the result, or it can happen by filming things that happen without your intervention and presenting them in a compelling way with your editing. Both methods are types of storytelling.