 Welcome to Sewing Stories from Your Community, Video Pre-Production with Erin Bramley of Lights Camera Help. My name is Becky Wiegand. I'm an Interactive Events Producer here at TechSoup. And we are joined today by Erin Bramley, who is the Executive Director and one of the co-founders of Lights Camera Help based in Austin, Texas. You'll also be joined in the chat by Ali Bazdikian from TechSoup who will be chatting out to help you and grabbing your questions on the back end throughout the day. Today's agenda will cover an introduction of TechSoup, a little bit about the Baby Steps video competition, and then we'll launch into Erin's presentation around tips for pre-production of a video, so how to get that next generation of visual digital storytelling. And we'll cover all kinds of good stuff from what kind of equipment to use, some rules for capturing good filming before you start, and some free stuff. So stick around until the end. Then we'll have time for Q&A. But feel free to ask questions throughout the duration of the webinar in that chat window because we'll be able to raise those up and we may be able to answer some of them for you during the webinar. So to quickly go through who is TechSoup, we are a 501c3 nonprofit. We work with nonprofits, charities, public libraries, and foundations around the world to make sure that they have the resources and knowledge to make decisions about technology that helps them advance their missions. You can read a little bit about our impact here. We have been around since 1989, and I've been at TechSoup for five and a half years now. And prior to coming to TechSoup, I'd worked at three different nonprofits in Washington, D.C., and Oakland, California, and San Francisco, where I was the recipient of TechSoup's donation programs and used their community forums and resources available with a newsletter subscriber because I was often the accidental techie trying to solve those day-to-day technology problems at my small nonprofit. You can see a little bit about what's new. It's what we do. You might be familiar with some of our product donation programs, but you may not know that we also offer consulting services. Some new donation programs like Windows 8.1 and QuickBooks 2014 are now available in our donation program catalog. We serve nonprofits and libraries and charities in the hopes that technology will not be a barrier but will be an advantage to your organization. And so everything that we do, including these webinars, are to try to help ensure that you have the resources you need to work to your full potential. You can visit us at TechSoup.org to learn more about those programs. And then the Baby Steps Competition. Before I hand off to Erin, I'll just give you a little bit of background about that if you're joining us from having heard about this competition. It's a collaborative from the group Invest Early, which is made up of the Packard Foundation, the William K. Kellogg Foundation, TechSoup, Dirty Robert Production Company, a bunch of other collaborators are working on this project to help ensure that people who work with children or have children from birth to five know how to help them learn and help them engage. And so this video competition is taking place now through February 2nd and is asking that question, what do you do with your kids? What do you do with your students to help them learn and engage? And so we're asking people to submit short video clips showing what they do either in their organizational life, in your public library, at your home, at your daycare. So you can share this with anybody you'd like who fits that kind of criteria whether they're an individual or an organization and they can share video clips. I'm going to quickly show the video about the Baby Steps Competition. Remember, but there was a time you couldn't walk when just trying to was an adventure. Sometimes, with a step you can't remember, but someone helped you, picked you up, comforted you, helped you take your first step. This winter, Invest Early invites parents, families, caregivers, and educators nationwide to answer one question. This is what I do with my child, what do you do with yours? The Baby Steps Competition asks you to submit videos that capture a snapshot of how we care for children during the first five years of their lives. For parents and families, we're looking for short videos taken by iPhone or by camera, whatever you have that's able to capture the simple, everyday things you do with your child or family member. For care providers and teachers, we want to help you generate videos by capturing all the creative things you do to inspire your students, whether it's reading, singing, playing, or coloring. The Baby Steps Competition will be running from December 2nd to February 2nd and will be recognizing winners based on four criteria, their emotional value, their educational value, the creativity of the activity, and the quality of the video. Go to babystepscompetition.com to learn more about how to enter and see why we believe the first five years of a child's life are vital to invest in. So all of these things in this video that were mentioned are related to the Baby Steps Competition, but we also know that you may not be here because of the competition and that's okay because really the four series, the four webinars that we are producing today and through February are, or through the end of January, sorry, are put together with the intention that no matter whether you're an individual or an organization, you can participate in any of these events and get information about how to create that compelling story for your organization or as an individual or for your library. I just want to confirm that people can hear me okay because I've gotten a couple of people chiming in saying that they have no sound. So if you could let me know if my audio is coming through all right, that would help. Okay, good. Got confirmation. Sorry about that. If there were any cuts in the audio, I apologize for that. So you can see the dates of the upcoming webinars. Obviously today's is on video pre-production and then we'll also have one on January 9th on producing a compelling story, the actual filming and production of a video, the day of the event or the day that you're trying to shoot. And then we'll have a webinar on January 16th talking about the post-production process, editing, and how you go about promoting your content afterwards. If you missed last week's webinar, we have a link to it in this slide deck so you'll be able to look at that afterwards if you'd like. And that was really talking about what makes a good story and sort of the key components to making something a useful story. So I'm going to go ahead since we're a couple of minutes behind and just do a couple of quick polls to get an idea of where you're at with video personally. And so this isn't asking about you as an organization. This is asking you as Alex or you as Dana or you as Deborah to go ahead and click on the screen, Lily and Marcia and Michael. And let us know how many videos have you produced personally? Have you created? And these can be videos that you created on your cell phone and posted and shared for friends. It can be bigger production videos. And this helps give us an idea for our presenter who will be speaking in just a moment kind of where your experience lies. So I'm going to give just a few more seconds for people to participate by clicking one of those buttons on the screen. We'll show here. So about half 40% have done one to three and 16% have done four to seven. So we have more than half of our audience has at least produced one video or more. So that's great. So that helps give us an idea of who is brand new to this and who has a little bit of experience. And then one other quick question, what is the most important goal for creating a video for your organization? And this of course assumes that you're joining us from a nonprofit or library. I didn't include an option if you're not one of those types of organizations if you're just joining us as an individual. But what would be your key reason for wanting to create a video? And it might be all of the above, but I'm making you select just one. So it looks like about half, a little bit more than half of our audience is looking to have a video work for them for education and advocacy purposes. And so that's really helpful to know. I'm sure there are other reasons. You're welcome to chat those into the chat window for us to see. So I'm going to go ahead and hand it over to our key speaker today, Erin Bramley, who is the CEO, I'm sorry, Executive Director and one of the co-founders of Lights Camera Help who works on helping train people on how to create creative and compelling video content every day. So we're so glad to have you Erin. Thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's really a pleasure to be here. I love doing this kind of stuff, getting people excited about the process of creating video. It's always a really great thing. It's nice to have you guys chiming in on those surveys so that I can see a little bit more about your experience level. I thought there were a couple of people who are fairly experienced out there, but I think that you'll be able to definitely learn some good stuff. And if you have anything to add from your experience, please go ahead and pop it in the chat window and you might be able to get some of those tips in there as well. I oftentimes do stuff like this very live in front of an audience. The webinar format is not new to me, but I always still like to sort of visualize the folks behind the computer screens and try to virtually extend to you a great big smile. And if you could try to do the same thing back to me, that would be excellent. I can feel that energy. Doug with Holly, great smile. Marcia, well done. Really glad to have you guys here with us. Anyways, let me tell you a little bit about Life Camera Help before we go ahead and get too far into the presentation. Life Camera Help is a nonprofit that I started about five years ago with two colleagues of mine with the mission of encouraging other nonprofit and college-driven organizations to use film and video in order to get their message out. We started doing that through a number of different ways. And the first way that we decided to do that was with an annual film festival. And so we got together for the first time in January of 2009 and said, okay, let's have our festival in July of 2009 without really knowing what we were getting ourselves into. We got 150 submissions that first year from three different continents. We're absolutely blown away by the quality of the content that we got as well as the amount of content that we got. We had no idea what to expect. And this was in 2009. So as we were in the process of creating the film festival and sort of thinking about what cause-driven video is and what it can do and how powerful it can be to actually drive an organization's mission forward, we had nonprofits reaching out to us saying, hey Aaron, I love the idea of a film festival. I just want to submit content to your festival. I don't have any how. And that was the sort of big question that people had was how do I get started? What do I do? And so we started creating an educational workshop that would take us into nonprofit organizations and actually train those organizations on how to start using video for themselves. And that was meant to sort of get people interested in, okay, this is how I work with the production team. This is how if I actually wanted to pick up a camera and start shooting myself how I could actually do that. Really sort of meant to demystify the process of creating video. The third plank to the Life Camera Help program is a matchmaking program where we're teaming up filmmakers with nonprofits. We realized that nonprofits, some of them won't have the budget or time available to really create that first seen, polished video that really sparkles. So we wanted to make sure that filmmakers were getting an opportunity to help out and give back to the nonprofit community. So we're doing that through an event that we call the Real Change Film Frenzy where we pair up 10 filmmakers with 10 nonprofits and give them a week to create a film. It's a competition, very fast-paced fun event where within a week we're instantly moving our mission by creating 10 great cause-driven videos. Now I know that none of you guys are here to participate in any of those programs today with the exception of the education program. So what I'm giving you guys today is a hold out of a portion of our education program. And it's sort of the part that's meant to, after you sort of learned a little bit about storytelling, as you guys did last time, to sort of get you in the mindset of, okay, now that I have sort of my story in mind, what can I do to actually go ahead and capture that on camera a little bit, and how do I move the process forward? But we are going to still back up just a little bit in case there were a few things that weren't covered last time because I think it's really important that before you actually start shooting your video, you think about what the goal of the video is. And a lot of times nonprofits will say, oh, we've got an event coming up. Let's shoot some video of it. Or yeah, I heard this guy talk about the importance of video, so let's shoot a video without ever really sort of thinking about what the goal is behind that video. And the goal can be any number of things. And we saw what some of those goals were on the survey question that Becky had you guys fill out. And I was super, super pleased to not see everyone click on fundraising instantly. That was so amazing to me because when I started this, everyone wanted to come up to me and say, how can I use video to raise money? And yes, you can use video to raise money. It can be an extremely powerful way to raise money, but it's not primarily about that. And I think that to hear people say that they are actually looking at awareness and education and actual mission execution to some extent through video really shows how much this medium has grown in the last several years. So kudos to you guys for thinking about other ways to use video. Yes, it can be great for volunteer recruitment. Yes, it can be great for fundraising, but it can also be great for getting the message out of your organization. But you needed to find that goal before setting out to actually go ahead and tell your story. So once you have the goal in mind, it's okay, we need 10 volunteers or we want a piece that will help us change the hearts and minds of a select group of people in Washington, D.C. or whatever that specific goal is. After you have that, you can figure out what the story is that actually accomplishes that goal. And stories I'm sure you learned are super important because they help to build emotion and drive people towards action. No one is going to act after seeing a video if they don't feel emotionally connected to your video. The only way you are going to build that connection is by creating a compelling story that is really going to want people to pay attention and connect. So a lot of times people think, okay, we want to have a video. The stated goal is showing people what our organization is and does. And that's great. And so they say, who's the best person to tell that story? How about our executive directors? Because they know the organization the best. They have the ethos behind them that they are well-rounded and they speak well and all that sort of stuff. Chances are though, in order to build an emotional connection, your executive director is not going to be the person to do that. Because yes, they have firsthand experience with the organization, but they don't really have firsthand experience with the organization's program. There are a few exceptions to that, of course, where someone had become a great success story who had gone through a program and gone on to run the organization. But generally speaking, that's not sort of the way it is. So think about who it actually is telling your story. This can be a real person, so it could be a constituent, someone you tell, it could be a volunteer, it could be a board member. It can also be a fictional character. It could potentially be someone who you're thinking about as someone who has been through the program. So that's something to sort of consider is who is the best person to actually tell that story. It's probably not your executive director or your board members for connecting with a general audience. The most powerful stories that I see out there are the ones that really kind of build on constituent experience with the program and tell sort of a microcosm of the organization. So this is my personal experience with this organization. This is how they help me. This is how your $10 can help someone exactly like me. Those are going to be the stories that are extremely powerful and connect with audiences in a way that the executive director sitting behind their desk piled up with papers is not going to be able to do. Or some organizations get really daring and say let's mix it up and have our executive director sitting on their desk with a casual like. But that doesn't necessarily convey the message that you want either. So go ahead and be thinking about those considerations before you set out shooting. Super important to have as much specificity in the project as you can before hitting the chord. That's going to save a lot of time and energy in the editing process as you're sort of figuring out what the sort of final product is that you're putting out. Now that's it. There are actually three stories that get told when you're shooting a video. And it's not a bad thing, but these are our three different stories. There's the story you set out to tell. So that's the one that you put into a production grid that we're going to cover in just a minute. It's the one that you conceptualize the goal around. You thought about it. You've written out portions of it. You're really sort of invested in this story because you really think it's going to be the most compelling one out there. But then, especially if you're shooting live interviews footage as part of your story, there's the story that you capture that can actually be a little bit different. Sometimes interview subjects say the most absolutely amazing thing that you never ever would have predicted. And it actually does need your story in a slightly different direction or frame story in a different way. And that's not a bad thing. It can actually be really fantastic moments where you're on your shoot and someone says something. They say, oh, that caught me off guard. Please go into the more detail and tell me that a little bit more. And that's okay. That can happen. But then there's the story that you edit and distribute. And for me, this is the most important story for a couple of reasons. One is I'm a video editor so I'm egotistical and think that my portion of the job is the most important portion ever. The other part of that is that it's the one that everybody sees. That's the one that goes up on YouTube, goes on your website. It's the version of the story that gets played at your gala. Whatever that event is, where eyeballs are seeing it, it's the story. So that's the one I think that you want to spend the most time and energy on. Yes, it's important to mention that you shoot quality footage and capture quality footage and that you can conceptualize your story well from the beginning. But if you have budget, if you have extra time, try to spend it on the editing portion of the film because that's really going to be where you can make some great strides forward in terms of telling the story. Anyway, so how does all this start? What I like to do is start with creating what I call a production grid. And this is an example of a production grid that I made for a client of mine. We made a video called The Extraordinary Healing Power of Mom. Now the stated goal behind this video was to get mothers to see that a simple problem in the developed world is a super complex problem in the developing world. And that problem is diarrheal disease. It's not something that most people want to talk about. Diarrhea is kind of a taboo subject in our culture and world. And their whole organization's mission is advocacy for getting people to talk about diarrhea. They're sort of a half joke, half frightening statistic that diarrhea is the number two killer of children in Africa and India, and number two sort of being the joke there, but also a frightening, frightening statistic. And so they really want people to get to relate to the fact that in other countries this actually kills people. We have in the United States and in Europe, and we have simple tools, salt and sugar solutions, for instance, to help us solve these problems and prevent dehydration, but in other places in the world, people die from that. So their stated goal was to get particularly mothers because they want to release this around a Mother's Day campaign to understand that children across the world are no different. Everybody gets diarrhea. It's only a matter of where you live that decides whether you live or not. And so I created this production grid to sort of talk about it. All that we had, tell the story, were a series of photos from their projects. They have projects all over the world, but they have a whole bunch of photos of mothers with their kids. And they wanted to figure out a way to turn that into a compelling video. So I created this sort of compelling, glorified music video for them that tries to tell that story. So it's actually the whole piece is about a minute and a half long, and we're going to share a link with you afterwards. You can go take a look at it if you want. But you can see that over here on the left, we have the timestamp that's the stuff that's actually happening in the video ticked by second by second. I like to break things down into anywhere between 10 and 4 second chunks. Generally speaking, people's attention span if they want something new on the screen every 4 seconds at most. So really trying to capitalize on that and figure out how many images we need and that kind of stuff to really get the message across. So every 4 seconds something sort of new should be happening is a great way to kind of think about it. But you can see that we have the timestamp, and then the content here is actually my conceptualization about what is actually happening on the screen at that point, and what the purpose behind that 4 second chunk is. So you can see here that from 2nd, 10 to 14, I want people to be able to relate to the video by seeing themselves now as a child in the photo. So getting people to sort of connect to it by seeing kids having, you know, playing, doing activities that they may have done when they were a kid, that kind of stuff. And then we have the next column with the visual aspect, what's actually happening on the screen at any given time. And then as I said, this is kind of a glorified music video. We don't have any audio component in terms of voiceover or anything like that. So I didn't need to put that in, but if there was an actor with a script that would be a column right here. If there were interview questions that we were asking people, I would actually write those out in a separate column here. So that as we are going through, we can make sure that we are hitting all of the interview questions. I'm writing interview questions I actually do write down the responses that I want to get from people as well which I think is really important when you are thinking about your story. And that's going to help drive those three different stories closer and closer together because if you already know what you want people to be saying to some extent, you can ask questions and keep asking questions and keep asking questions until people are sort of figuring out ways to answer them in a way that gives you what you need essentially. So that would all be written out. But you see here there is some good text that shows up on the screen. And then any comment, this is a great place to store contact information or leave it blank so that when you are on your shoot you can take notes or that kind of thing. I went ahead and just jotted down that this stock footage can get it from a 7 day free trial from a company. If you decide to use videoblock.com be careful with them. They are one of those places to take your credit card information and if you don't cancel your account they will charge you. So just be wary of that that you can get some great free content from there but you have to stay on top of canceling your subscription if you don't want to be charged. I always like to give that caveat because I don't want anyone to be calling me up saying, hey you suggested I use this and it bankrupted me or whatever. Anyways, so you can go ahead and take a look at this. I will go ahead and show you my screen real quick. You can see that here is the actual video and I'm not going to play it because I actually didn't send this to the TechSoup folks beforehand so we couldn't get it into the presentation. But you guys can take a look at it on your own time. But you see at second 18 the text is right up there that we said was going to be up. The photo that we said was going to be up is up there. All sort of vary by the book and just kind of does its little thing and you can see it sort of cycles through a little bit. Some great images of happy children. I know you guys all love cute happy children. Anyway, that is the essence of a production grid. If you have any questions on that please let me know. It's a really useful document to have. If you're working with a production company on shooting your video, it's extremely useful for making sure that what you get out of the project is what you want. A lot of times I've heard some horror stories where people say, okay, we shot all this footage and it was all great but as soon as we got to the editing process they just went in a completely different direction than we anticipated. And now they're not saying that they're going to re-edit the whole thing because that's going to cost additional money. We don't have additional money but do we do about that? My solution to that problem is make sure that everyone is on the same page prior to shooting so that what you actually get out of your project is what you want. Okay, moving on to a little bit of a video boot camp. This is going to be some great stuff that we can talk about in order to get you guys started with the actual production process a little bit. But the idea is that you can be shooting video. I saw that most of the folks have shot some video before. There were a handful of folks who haven't shot any video at all. I think that that's totally fine. There's some real significant kind of barriers there that I understand to actually shooting video. But the important thing is to just kind of start doing it. And we'll talk about the best ways to sort of start doing that and factoring with it and get going. But the idea is that you actually can shoot really compelling video with the equipment that you currently have. And if you have a smart phone, most every smart phone, I think all smart phones out there right now have a camera capable of shooting video at fairly high resolution. So HD for the most part, you can get really good compelling images through a phone. The main barrier that a lot of these phones have is in the audio. So that would be one thing that I'd be wary about in shooting video with your phone. And we're going to talk a little bit about audio in a minute here. So that would be one thing to sort of consider. And then also they can be quite shaky. And that is something that is tough for people to watch. So if you do have a little bit of budget to sort of start thinking about shooting video, here is sort of our recommended starter kit for video. And you see that the camera that we recommend is the Kodak GIA8 or the Kodak Play Touch. These are no longer being manufactured but you can find them for fairly cheap around on eBay and places like that. We recommend them for a number of reasons, the Kodak GIA8 in particular, because A, it's super easy to use. It's kind of that flip camera like you saw on two slides ago that has one big kind of record button. It's got a menu with a few options and that kind of thing. But it has some advantages over the flip camera in that A, it allows you to plug in a microphone which is extremely important. We'll talk about it in the audio section in just a minute. It also allows you to go ahead and pull out the SD card and pull the footage off and plug in additional batteries that the flip camera does not allow you to do. For microphones I recommend the Sony ECM GS70P. Sony is terrible at naming their equipment so don't let all those initials and numbers scare you away. You can Google that and come up with some great ideas. It's a pretty universal microphone. It can serve as both a clip-on lapel microphone and then also can take room sound as well. Tripods, basically you just want something that will be able to hold your camera still. It can also shop for value on that light. If you decide you want to get into lighting it can be kind of a beast. But think about the fact that for $11 you can get a pretty decent light and you would just need two of them. The 5000K there that you see there is a color temperature. People have written their entire dissertations on color temperature so I'm not going to get into specific of what color temperature is but on the back of the light bulb look for something that is 5000K. That's the color of sunlight. That's going to be really good. And then editing software, we always recommend use the free stuff that comes on your computer if you have a mask. That's iMovie. Windows Movie Maker is fairly poor so I wouldn't recommend necessarily digging into that all the time but the YouTube editor is really, really impressive these days. So if you go to youtube.com slash editor basically you upload all your footage and it allows you to edit directly on YouTube and publish from there. It's becoming an extremely sophisticated tool. They have music libraries and photo libraries that you can access right from there. Pretty impressive stuff. If you do have some budget and want to invest the professional level software where Final Cut Pro now goes for $300 which is much cheaper than I purchased my last version for so I won't tell you how much I spent on that but the last version of Final Cut Pro was much more expensive. But you also need a fast computer in order to run that equipment which can be an investment as well. So consider these options like YouTube editor and the free stuff on your computer for editing footage. Other options for equipment, always consider rental. A lot of places will honor nonprofits and make sure they cut off the sales tax on that for you. Think about your local community television station. I know here in Austin we have a community television station that will train people in being a producer and then once you train them allow you to use their equipment for free. And that's so long as you provide them with some broadcast material which hey, that's great promotion for your organization because not only are you broadcasting your stuff on a television network but you are also able to use their great equipment. College students, also I recommend taking advantage of those. This is a major university in your area. If they have a radio television film program or a communications program, talk to their PR professors, those sorts of folks are going to have access to really phenomenal equipment and students who are eager to learn and please. So that's a great way to get some video done. Anyways, next is going to be the sort of top 5 tips for creating really compelling video. And I imagine you will get into some of this stuff in your production webinar a little bit more as well. But things to be thinking about before you go ahead and pick. And this is all sort of about location scouting. So before you go out and shoot think about what you are going to hear in that location. Are you outside? Is it a windy day? What you see on camera is actually what you hear. So if you hear the wind you are going to see the wind more than anything else. If you don't hear the wind it might not actually look like much. I know that's a little bit kind of confusing to wrap your head around but surprisingly audio is actually more important when shooting video than video is. People are much more likely to watch a video with fantastic audio and poor image quality than great image quality and poor audio. That's just sort of the way we are. You'll sort of notice this about your own viewing habits. As you are watching YouTube videos and you say, oh I can't watch that. Think about why for a second. It may be a little silly or something like that but also there may be some high pitch sound or wind noise or something like that. So think about that. It's a great opportunity for you to put your director's hat on if there is a clock ticking in the room. Move that clock out of the room. If you are shooting indoors maybe make sure that you go in and either heat up or cool down the room significantly before you start shooting videos so that the AC or heater doesn't pop on during the middle of shooting. That can ruin some interview footage. If suddenly you have this big noisy fan pop on are there computers in the room, DVD players, TVs, lights, those sorts of things that are providing a little bit of hum. If you can figure those things out and eliminate them that would be really great and it would help improve the quality of your video. One other quick tip if you do have a camera that allows you to monitor the audio while you are shooting so it actually has a headphone jack in it that allows you to plug headphones and then do so and listen to your surrounding. Listen to what your microphone is picking up. As far as microphones, I think the single best investment that you guys can get is a lot of your microphone or a lapel microphone, the kind that clips onto a shirt. Maybe if you want to get your audio source as close to the source of audio or you want to get your microphone as close to the source of audio as possible. Next step in sort of doubting your location is think about not looking into the light. A lot of times people say, oh, we've got a great view out of our window. Let's go ahead and put our interview subject in front of the window and shoot them there. But your camera sensor is going to adjust to the window being the brightest thing in the room and then it's going to make your interview subject look super dark. So the best thing that you can do is actually turn your interview subject around with the natural sunlight that's coming through the window and shining on their face. Do your best to turn off as many fluorescent lights as possible. Those make people look sort of green on camera. Pick a room that you can that has regular sort of tungsten light bulbs or as I said, you can purchase some good lighting equipment. Shooting outdoors is fantastic. Try to avoid midday where the sun is directly overhead because it can cast shadows down on people's face and make them look super evil. Unless that's the look of course you're going for which maybe it is, I don't know. You want to cast someone as an evil character. That would be a good way to do it. Keep things brief. A lot of people ask me, Aaron, how long should my video be? I know if you're a competition you guys need to be at 90 seconds. That is an extremely great length with Internet audiences and the fact that cats with tinfoil hats are one click away. You want to make sure that you're keeping things fairly brief to keep the attention span. The other answer to this question is your video can be as long as you have compelling content for. So don't try to stretch something to be 90 seconds. You actually only have 30 seconds of really compelling content. You can tell a full story within 45 seconds, within 30 seconds. You really can. It's a unique communications exercise, but keeping things brief is going to be really important. In the PR world we have a saying that brief, be bold, and be gone. So don't linger around with your videos. Get to the point, make your impact, roll credit to get out of there. It's a really good tip for you to have. The rule of thirds is a great way to set up your shot. This is whatever reason, artistically, people like to look at photos that follow this. You can see over here on the right hand side that the frame is broken down into nine equal parts. Generally speaking that's how you want to frame your shot. If you have a person up on the screen, you want to sort of shoot them like this where their eyes or their nose are right at these crosshairs. Maybe they can be on either side of the screen for sure, but generally speaking just because of the way our brains work, aesthetically, human beings like to see stuff that looks like this. You can see here, he's looking directly into the camera. That can be a good way to shoot some footage. There's also interview footage where people are sort of peering in on a conversation. So as you're thinking about how you might write up your production guide, you might write, okay this person is shooting and facing into camera and talking to the audience or they're talking with an interview subject. If they're talking with an interview subject, you want them looking across the frame. So this is Israel Hyman here. Israel, you'd want him looking out towards the right or the left of the frame rather than off to the right over here. And that's going to help people feel like they're peering in on a conversation versus thinking that there's something over here that they should be looking at. A little bit more vocabulary for you guys. These are some great shot types to be thinking about. If you're working with a camera crew or production team, these are the types of shots that they're going to be using. Generally speaking, you don't want to have a shot that cuts off at someone's knees. That's a little bit awkward. So think about sort of close up shot being from the shoulders up, medium shot being from about the waist or the hips up. And then the long shot is sort of full body length and try to avoid anywhere of those sort of in between portions because those can look really strange. Long shots are great for when there's action happening on the screen when someone is moving from point A to point B. For someone talking, you're going to want to use the medium shot for the close up. Those are really great. There's another shot that's even closer than the close up called the extreme close up. And that's really common in Hollywood pictures. I would warn you against using too much of that mostly because normal people and particularly nonprofit people don't look good that close up. Not to say anything about you guys. As I said, I wish that I could see you all but I can't. But generally speaking, normal human beings without makeup artists don't look good at that extreme sort of close up or their face takes up the full frame. So sort of try to keep things in this range. Next, we're going to jump through a whole bunch of rules real quick. And then I want to get on to showing you one last thing before questions. So think about your questions real quick. When prepping your interview subject, these are just all interview subject tricks and techniques. You want to make sure that you prep them some so provide them with maybe three questions or so that you're going to ask, but not too much. And so prepare some other questions that you might want to ask them that they haven't been prepared for. A lot of people will try to write out their whole script and read it verbatim. That does not look good on camera. So you want to try to be able to catch them giving some authentic responses that aren't too reversed, aren't too factored, and actually really do kind of sound natural. Rule 7 is count to 5. So this is push, record, count to 5 with silence in the room. Make sure that you're recording. Make sure that there's no weirdness going on, like no boogers hanging from their face or anything like that. Just observe everything and then have them speak. And then after they're done, count for five seconds before you stop recording as well just to make sure that you don't cut them off or anything like that. I've lost whole takes because I accidentally stopped recording right before the sound sort of died out in the room. And so it just sounds like a really abrupt transition and can be kind of troublesome. Counting to 5 is also really interesting because what people will do is if you're asking them an interview question, and you get some journalism a lot, but you ask them a question and they give their answer and then you just sort of wait staring at them for five seconds, people will want to fill that silence with more content. And oftentimes what comes after that is the most honest, the most interesting stuff because they are off their guard a little bit. And that can be really useful for getting excellent, excellent content. Sometimes people will get extremely nervous when you're shooting videos of them. And I would recommend all of you have someone film you just say filming your elevator speech or something like that so you can understand what it feels like to be on camera. It's really an unsettling feeling to feel like everything you say is being captured or immortalized forever and it's going to go on the World Wide Web where anybody is going to be able to see it and it's going to live for the rest of human existence or beyond, right? So that is a scary thing. So there's a few techniques that I use to settle nerves. If my camera has a way of turning off that red record light, I try to flip that off. Another thing that I do for my interview subjects is all oftentimes if they're getting flustered we'll just take a break, get up, stretch that kind of thing. I'll also tell them really, really, really bad jokes like on the scale of, so a duck walking to a pharmacist wanting to buy some Vaseline, a pharmacist says, hey, how do you want to pay for this? And the duck says, just put it on my bill. Like really bad, bad jokes and that does a few things. It usually gets a little bit of a chuckle out of someone and that really is a few endorphins in their mind. But it also puts me in this position of like they're thinking, oh wow, I'm not this guy who tells really horrible jokes like this. And they feel superior and that's going to help settle their nerves and make them a little bit more calm. I also assure people that there's an opportunity video for this organization. We want to make sure that you look and sound good, so please just go ahead and feel comfortable. We're going to make you look and sound good. Other things to sort of prep your interview subjects with is that they need to be thinking about repeating your question in the form of their answer. So if I ask you, so how did Lights, Camera, Help affect your organization? Their answer needs to start, Lights, Camera, Help affected my organization by. And this is going to make sure that everybody who's watching your video and your editor will know exactly what they're talking about. Answers with no sort of frame of reference there are a little bit tough. A lot of takes can also be ruined because humans have this compulsion that when you ask them a question, especially the second and third time you've asked them a question, they start with so and then jump right into it. And that can actually ruin some takes a little bit because you have this big so at the beginning and it sort of flows right into the response and you're not going to be able to get good content from that. So I always try to tell people it's completely normal that you do this but I will ask you to repeat yourself if you have a so or too many us at the beginning or something like that. Just prepare people for it. And usually that's enough to help people avoid it or they'll catch themselves doing it. So just kind of think about that ahead of time. It's a great way to prepare your subjects. Real quick I'm going to burn through a few sort of finding three things. A lot of times people want free resources. Creative Commons is a really excellent resource for getting great content that you can use in your videos. It's actually a type of copyright. I'm going to go ahead and show it to you real quick. It's a type of copyright where people have actually copyrighted their content with purposely giving you the ability to reuse it. So this is their website and you can see that they have a whole bunch of sources down here. Some for photos, some for video, some for music, some for clip art, sound effects, that sort of thing. And it's really great. So say you were shooting a video about the importance of Apple. You would just kind of enter in your search subject here. If you're fundraising, say yeah, you want to be able to use it for commercial purposes. I know fundraising for a nonprofit is not a commercial purpose but legally you take for someone to get in a position where they say, okay, cough up 25% of everything you make from that campaign because you used my photo or song or whatever. So just go ahead and keep that check. And then something you can modify, adapt, or build upon because you're going to be editing and that kind of stuff. And then just choose the source that you want to look through. So for instance, we're looking for Apple. I would click on Wikimedia Commons maybe. You can see A, we come up with a whole bunch of logos for Apple computers because that's what Apple apparently means on the Internet these days. Ah, here's a good one. So you'd want to use this photo. If you want to use it, scroll down until you find here's the license. It's under Creative Commons. You can see that you're free to share, copy, distribute, and transmit this work to remix it as long as you provide attribution. And so attribution is found right here. This image was originally posted to Flickr by KillOnDude. So sometimes it can be a little bit embarrassing when you have to credit Boney Boy 73 in your video or something like that. But yes, you do have to credit them. And I usually just at the end of my video put Creative Commons content provided through Flickr by the following users and sort of list them out. And that's plenty in order to do that. And then for songs you can do sort of the same thing. Jemendo is a great source for finding music. It's a little bit needle in a haystack kind of stuff in order to track some things down. But you can actually type in a mood or an instrument that you want to hear. And that will actually come through and lead you towards finding some good content. Moby Gratis is a site where the recording artist Moby has allowed some of his content to be used in films. It's stuff that didn't make his album. So you can set up a count there and use some of his content. Archive.org is a great way to find stuff in the public domain. Public domain content needs no attribution. Really great. It's generally speaking very old stuff, but a lot of it has to do with things that people recognize on a regular basis. So I could do an interesting video that would use some great old prestigious footage or whatever is there. And then three sound is for finding sound effects that you need in your release. But with that said, I'd love to go ahead and jump through to some questions and answers. Do you guys have any questions for me about that? Go ahead and put them in the chat window. With that, I will turn it back over to Becky. Great. Thank you so much for that, Erin. Really interesting stuff. And I would like to say nonprofit people are extremely good looking. So I don't know what you're talking about with the Hollywood close-ups. I'm only kidding. So we have a question about the counting to five. And so is that something that you would count to five before you start filming or you give them five seconds after you ask the question and then begin filming? Or I'm not quite sure how that works. I didn't understand the explanation there. Yeah, absolutely. So generally speaking, I will hit record and then count to five and then ask my question and have them respond. And then after they're done responding, count to five again and then stop recording. But just sort of thinking about it gives you a little bit of time to just sort of make sure that everything is running smoothly and all that. And that everything in the room is lined up the way you want it to. It's sort of a way to – for me I find to be like, okay, my camera is rolling. Everything looks good. Great. Terrific. Now I can focus on asking this interview question if I'm shooting by myself. Sure. That makes a lot of sense. Okay. Thanks for that expansion of the explanation. We also have a question asking if you had to break down production considerations, which comes first, audience, vision, budget, technology, something else? Which would you think is the first consideration in production? The first consideration in production, as I said, is thinking about the goal of your video. And that's going to really frame everything else about your video. I know that budget is not necessarily something that's flexible, but the way you sort of conceptualize the story is so really the goal of video is most important. And in that goal is going to encompass your audience, right? Because the goal is always focused around your audience. It's who's going to be seeing the video and what you want them to do. If it is something that you want them to do, which primarily nonprofit video should be sort of requesting some sort of action I think. But the idea is that your audience will help sort of define that goal, and your goal will actually help define your audience as well. So those are the two primary considerations. And then after that it becomes the story and what's feasible for your organization. I've seen some great videos that tell amazing stories and have a budget of $0. They're just done in a single room with an actor and a little bit of editing at the end. But I mean the story is really what is going to make or break video. You can have the most amazing glittering imagery ever, but if your audience can't connect to it, it's going to be useless. Great. Well we have one question that came in that I'd like to just give a minute to even though we're almost out of time. Sarah asks, any suggestions for domestic violence or sexual assault crisis center and how we would use former clients in a video while also respecting their confidentiality? And I guess we could make this a bigger question about confidentiality in general because this is around the baby steps competition, also recognizing people filming with children. And so what do you do if you need to be protecting children or models or actors in your filming process? Yeah, absolutely. So I always have my interview subjects signed releases. There are a bunch of sort of boilerplate model releases that are out there on the web. If anybody wants to see the one that I use, feel free to send me an email at Aaron at LightsCamerahelp.org and I'll share that with you. It's very simple stuff that I pulled off the internet but it sort of just guarantees that anyone can use your image in perpetuity or anyone from my organization can use your image in perpetuity. And that's going to legally protect you. For children, that always has to be signed by their parent or guardian. If you don't have a release signed by a parent or guardian, you can't put that person's image on camera unless they're in sort of a public space. Even then, if you have a child's image on camera and you can see their entire face and hear their voice, I would always recommend having a release signed before you publish any of that just to completely protect yourself. Some other ideas for doing that, if your participants need to remain anonymous, you can artfully sort of shoot them so that you're setting up a camera maybe on their hands or you're getting a whole bunch of other footage of maybe elements of their clothing, their shoes, if they have a button on or something like that, you can get little bits and pieces of them without showing their face. That's a good way to sort of think about that. There's also the keeping someone shrouded in darkness which I wouldn't necessarily recommend because it's not very visually appealing as far as I'm concerned, but you can if you want super backlight the person. Put them in front of that really bright window and put as much light behind them as you can and that's going to keep their face dark. But generally speaking, that's not going to look real good unless it's professionally done. So try to think about maybe saying, okay, can we figure out a way to put other footage over this and just use their voice or something like that. But that's a really good question to be asking about ways that you can do that. You can also think about using actors. Reach out to your local university or a high school theater program and think about maybe actors reading the testimonials of your clients and just be super clear about that these are not actual clients. In order to protect identities, we're using actors that might be used as well. That's a great idea. I like that. Well, in light of the fact that we are at the 12 o'clock hour, I'd like to go ahead and just share a slide that has some additional resources. Again, you'll receive all of these later this afternoon in the follow-up email that will have this full recording. And I'd like to go ahead and thank our presenter, Erin Bramley from Lights Camera Help for sharing your expertise with us today. Thank you so much for being with us. And I'd like to thank our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk which makes the use of this platform available so that we can present these webinars to you on a regular basis. We hope that you'll join us again for the next webinar in the Baby Steps series on January 9th, and one after that on January 16th. And you can also check our website TechSoup.org to see other upcoming webinars like a site tour that we're doing next week. So if you're not familiar with TechSoup, feel free to join us for that one next Thursday at 11 Pacific. Thank you so much everybody for joining us and have a wonderful day. Thank you very much.