 Welcome everyone to Storymakers 2, Producing a Successful Video Story from Sound to Screen. Thanks so much for joining us today for this webinar. We are really glad to have you with us. Before we get started I want to make sure everyone is comfortable using the platform we are on today which is ReadyTalk. You can chat into us on the lower left side of your screen to let us know at any time if you need help, have any audio difficulties, or have questions for our presenters. We will be grabbing those questions throughout the webinar so feel free to chat to us at any time. If you are hearing an echo with your audio that is playing through your computer speakers you may be logged in more than once and you will want to close one instance of ReadyTalk. If at any time you need to have a dial-in phone number you can call toll-free with the number that Susan has recently just chatted out in the window to that number. If you have any issues with the slides and the audio stream keeping up with one another that is a great alternative to dial into that number as well. If you lose your internet connection go ahead and reconnect with that confirmation or reminder email you would have received. We sent the slide deck along with the final reminder email that went out an hour ago as well as with the confirmation emails for anybody who has registered in the past hour. So if you would like to be following along you can find that attached on the right side of the email. We will keep all of our lines muted today so that we get a clear recording for your use. So feel free to use that chat window to communicate with us. We will have this webinar available on the TechSoup website at TechSoup.org slash community slash events dash webinars and that's where you will also be able to find our upcoming events. We also put them on our YouTube channel and on our slide shares so look for them later. Within the next few days you will get an email from me that has the full presentation recording. So if you miss anything you can watch it again and review it, share it with your friends and colleagues. And you can tweet with us today at TechSoup or using the hashtag T.S. Webinars. We also will be using the hashtag Storymakers 2016 since this is a Storymakers event. My name is Becky Wiegand and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup. I'm glad to be your host for today's event. I've been with TechSoup for 8 years already and prior to that spent a decade in Washington D.C. at small nonprofits where I was often the one having to figure out our technology and our communication strategy so I'm happy to be hosting. We're joined today by two prominent experts on digital storytelling and video production so we're really glad to have them with us. The first presenter you'll hear from today is Aaron Bramley. He's a communicator and collaborator with expertise in video, social media, public relations, marketing, communications, and much much more. For the past 10 years, he's worked as the Director of Digital Media for Ridgewood Interactive Communications where he helps nonprofit and public sector organizations create integrated communication strategies. He is also the co-founder and board treasurer of Light's Camera Help, a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to creating positive change through a nonprofit digital storytelling platform. And he teaches courses and has a big contest film festival type thing every year. And he's also been a presenter for us on past StoryMakers webinars so we're really glad to have him joining us. Our second presenter that you'll hear from today is Mark Hornaf who founded Invisible People in November 2008 leveraging the power of video and the massive reach of social media to share the compelling, gritty, and unfiltered stories of homeless people from L.A. to D.C. These get posted across YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and have provided a global audience to hear the stories of people who are often treated as if they are invisible. He's the CMO at Rescue Mission Alliance and has been a broadcast professional with expertise in response television since 1990. So he has a lot of experience both in studio production and the professional sphere, but also in helping people tell their own stories with cameras out on street corners. So he comes with a little bit of a different perspective to offer. You'll see on the back end Allie Waseekian and Susan Hope Bard both from TechSoup who will be here to help you with any technical issues and to help you grab your questions for our presenters. We have a lot to cover today. So we are going to keep this moving at a pretty quick clip. We have quite a bit to get through. So we will try and do it quickly, but we will hopefully have some time for questions toward the end. And keep in mind that this is part 2 of a four-part series of webinars on Storymakers and Digital Storytelling. And this is also part of a full lesson plan that's available to you that I'll talk about in just a moment about Storymakers where we take you through step-by-step in these different phases of digital storytelling with short videos and a whole lesson plan and quizzes and things like that to help you walk through this process in more detail. So I'll quickly review the Storymakers lesson plan and contest for those of you who aren't familiar. And then we'll get into Aaron's presentation on what kind of video production equipment he recommends that you have available. He'll go over what kinds of shots you want to set up for day of shooting. He'll talk about things like the rule of thirds, what kind of shooting orientation, meaning do you want to have landscape or portrait, what kind of resolution you might want to be shooting in. He'll share some lighting best practices. And then we'll get to talk with Mark and hear a bit about his experiences with invisible people and how he goes out in the field and interviews people and captures these really compelling stories and how he's managed to get them shared and reshared and really made what was once somewhat invisible, very visible across social channels. So he'll be talking about those things and about filming in environments that are not studio controlled environments where you've got traffic noise and light and weather conditions to contend with. And if there's time permitting we'll have a couple of minutes just to talk about some ethical considerations, when to pick up the camera, when to maybe put it down, and things just to be aware of and think of. And then I'll share just a couple of other examples of videos created with simple animations and even one created using just PowerPoint. So lots of low hanging fruit ways that you can begin to tell digital stories at your organization. So I'm going to zip through really quickly just TechSoup. For those of you who are not familiar we are everywhere on this map that's blue. You can find us at TechSoup.org. If you're joining us from outside the US you want to visit TechSoup.global to find your local country. And I'm going to take us into Storymakers really quickly so that we don't get off schedule. But I want to share just a moment of this video that introduces you to the contest. So if you have a digital photo or video story you can submit it. Hello Storytellers, welcome to this TechSoup Storymakers webinar. This program is part of Storymakers digital storytelling campaign designed to help you create better stories for your fundraising and advocacy. Here at TechSoup we believe that storytelling is the currency of community and we want to create a vibrant and rich community with your stories. If you're eligible to be a TechSoup member here or abroad you're eligible to participate in this campaign. With programs like this webinar, our new production curriculum, helpful blog content and exciting lineup of community events we hope you'll be inspired to get out there create some amazing photos or video stories for a chance to bring home some really great prizes. We have four prize categories with a total of $7,000. Thanks to our sponsors. The campaign launches on April 4th and will go to May 31st. That's two months of webinars, Twitter chats and meetups happening online and possibly in a city near you. Check them out and sign up for those events. After the contest closes we'll have a period of community voting from June 1st through the 15th and then we'll award those prizes. We look forward to getting to know some of you through your stories. Reach out to us on Twitter. I'm at Luisha, L-E-W-I-S-H-A. And you can find me at Alibaz, A-L-E-B-E-Z. Happy storytelling! Back to you Becky. You can learn more about Storymakers at TechSoup.org slash Storymakers and here's just a page where I've shown you where you can find the course introduction and that full lesson plan available to you. I'm not going to spend much more time going over this because we will include all of this in the final resources and I don't want to get us delayed. So I'm going to go ahead and have our first presenter, Erin Bramley, join us on the line to talk to us about those production nuts and bolts, the day of production. What do you need? What kind of equipment? What kind of gear? What kind of lighting? Take us through what are the basics that nonprofits and public libraries, churches might need if they're not professional videographers and don't have endless budget and resources for a big setup. What do you recommend, Erin? Thanks so much for joining us. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me, Becky. I am super excited to be here with all of you talking about equipment recommendations for scrappy organizations or nonprofits. Some of you large organizations may appreciate this scrappy approach as well because it's going to enable you to get started shooting video today, this afternoon, right? And we're really excited to get you going like that. So I'm going to start with these equipment recommendations. But before we do that, I want to play another quick video for you guys. This shows what you can do without a big budget. And so I'm going to go ahead and play this for you and then I'm going to explain a little bit about why it is I think you can create a video of this caliber without a very big budget. Take a listen. Hey, babe. Where are you? What are you doing? Stop. I hear guys in the background. What's going on? Okay, whatever, whatever. Just what are you going to be home for? Why not? No, listen. You don't know what I said about your parents. They're just trying to control your life. No, I'm just looking out for you. I love you. Hey, if you love me, you'd be hanging out with me. Right, so they set out to create a video with a very simple goal of showing people that a neglectful relationship is not necessarily bruised, or black eyes and broken bones all the time, right? An abusive relationship can be a conversation on the phone. And so they chose to actually put us in a very simple setting using a black background. They did very minimal editing on this using probably a simple editing program to sort of put that out. But what they did is they really thought about their story. So I want you guys to remember back if you're a part of the previous Storymakers webinar to some of that stuff you learned about plot development, and think about how that applies to a video like this. And using the equipment that I give to you today, or tell you about today, you're going to be able to create something very similar to this video that you just saw here. So as far as cameras go, let's go ahead and start with checking what's in your pocket, right? Most people have a smartphone these days capable of creating a video that is a relatively high caliber, right? It's going to be able to produce something with a really incredible image. The problem is with audio. We'll get to that in a little bit. Now for nonprofits, if you want a dedicated camera, I recommend the Kodak Zi8. This camera is no longer being made, unfortunately. Kodak kind of shut down this wing of their business. However, you can find them on Amazon or eBay for relatively cheap. I like them for a lot of reasons. I'm not going to go into all of them right now, but one is the replaceable battery. You can add replaceable media. So that means that when you fill up the SD card that it records to the little chip inside, you can put another one in. And you can also replace the battery, right? So you can film two hours or more without having to worry about running out of space on your camera. Now, you may also have a still photography camera that you can use. It may be a DSLR camera. You guys may have heard that going around. It's the kind of camera that has the long lens on it, right? It looks like a normal photographer's camera. But these are shooting better and better video all the time. In fact, it's becoming one of the industry standards to use this sort of photography-like imagery in your videos. So you may actually have something already that you can use, but make sure that it has a microphone input. And that's going to be that headphone jack looking device or 8 inch or 3.5 millimeter sized jack that you're going to need to really go ahead and make sure that that has so that you can get really high quality audio for your footage. Now, for tripods, for basic video, you don't need much other than something that's going to lock down your camera and keep it still. So check your attic, check the garage sale. It's next to the bread maker and the fondue pot that's at absolutely every other garage sale on the planet. But make sure it has all its parts. So bring your camera with you and try to hook it up to the tripod. Set the sucker up at the garage sale and make sure that it works. Goodwill has a lot of them. You don't have to spend a lot of money unless you're planning on doing camera work where you're going to actually include some movement, right? Pans and zooms and things like that. But for your first video project, if you're a beginner today, let's go ahead and just sort of keep the simple kind of basic tripod. Here's a few examples of tripods that you can use for your cell phone or your smart phone. So here's one called Gorilla that kind of clips around to anything. These are all flexible legs. This is just a clip that goes onto a normal tripod. You can clamp your phone into, right? And so these are pretty cheap and easy to come up with. You may also think about microphones. It's going to probably be one of the single most important pieces of equipment you will purchase. The reason for that is that you're much more likely to watch a video that has great audio and poor video quality than you are to watch a video that has really good video quality but terrible audio. And you'll notice about this about yourself as you're watching video around the web. But the idea is that you'll sort of be like, what is that? Is there someone breathing into the microphone creating a horrible sound or is there wind blowing by, right? So one of the ways that we can remedy this is by getting the source of recording to the microphone as close to the person or the sound of source as possible. So I recommend picking up a Lavalier microphone. That's the lapel microphone that clips onto someone's lapel. And you can see there's that clip that's included right here. I like the Audio Technica ATR3350. It sounds like a robot whenever you say camera equipment names. People are really bad at naming their stuff. But $22, I have some Audio Technica equipment. It's been a workhorse for me for the last, oh I don't know, 10 to 12 years. It hasn't broken. It hasn't let me down once despite batteries exploding inside of it and being on jet skis and all kinds of crazy stuff. So really good solid equipment. You want something that's self-powered. And that means the battery right here that you see is going to go inside of that. And it can look like a double A in some microphones. It could be a triple A. It could be all kinds of batteries. But if you're going to be plugging this in your smartphone, the idea is that that does not have enough juice in order to power the microphone. So it needs its own internal source of power. Now that's all well and good for interviews if you have one person talking. But what if you're at an event? If you're in an event you want to use what's called a shotgun microphone. I know that sounds a little bit morbid, but sort of think about what a shotgun captures or shoots, right? That sort of spread in front of it. And that's what a shotgun microphone is going to do as well. You see it has this thing called a wind screen right here that you need to put on there to keep the wind from creating that bad noise. And then you see the battery here as well, right? So it's self-powered additionally. It's got a few sort of stands and things like that, clips and hooks and stuff. But really you're going to sort of want to think about capturing all the sound that's right in front of it. So if you're at an event this might be a great way to capture some audio without the sort of pain of hooking up a lavalier microphone or a lapel microphone onto one of your interview subjects. Now if you're going to use one of these microphones with your particularly iPhone, right? Apple is extremely proprietary. Love them or hate them. They're the standard for phones out there these days, but you need an adapter in order to plug a normal microphone into your iPhone. So there's this company called KV Connection and they make a business out of buying new iPhones, ripping them apart, and engineering adapters so that they can go onto other equipment. So you can go there, pick up a little piece of equipment for $10 or so, and that's going to make any microphone with this kind of headphone jack looking input work for your iPhone. There are some adapters for Android as well on there, although some of those other phones like Samsung's are better at taking normal microphone inputs without an adapter. You'll have to do a little bit of trial and error and see how that goes for you. Alright, next up let's talk a little bit about how to frame a great looking shot. So you've got your equipment, you're excited, you want to go shoot your story, you've got that planned out. Let's talk about some of the shot types that you're going to use in order to capture people speaking. So for instance, here are three that you'll use. The long shot down here which is this person's full body, oops I clicked that by accident, this person's full body is going to be largely used for when someone's walking from point to point. So they don't look like they're spooky ghosts creeping across the screen. You want to show their feet actually stepping on land. Also use it for expansive backgrounds where there's a lot of movement and you don't want to worry about people running out of the shot. You're going to use the long shot because it gives you a little bit more space to work with. Now the medium shot is going to be mostly used for when you have two people talking or one person talking on screen. And this is good for two people talking as well as the long shot because it gives you enough space to sort of stand side by side. You can imagine if we use this close up shot that you see here with two people talking they would have to be almost in each other's lap in order to make both people on the screen at the same time. Now it's not to say that you couldn't film people individually as part of a conversation using the close up but you want to mark that out ahead of time so you know when you're planning on using a close up and when you're planning on using a medium shot versus a long shot. Now you may also hear about the extreme close up. Now this group of 229 people excluded non-profit people generally speaking aren't the most amenable we'll say to the extreme close up which is when the person's face takes up the majority or all of the screen. So we're going to kind of leave those by the wayside for your first video project. Sometimes you might use that to really show emotion or expression in someone. You know like you see George Clooney's face up there and his eyes are bloodshot and you can see that he hasn't shaved in two and a half days and he's got kind of a little gash in a pulsing vein. So that's when those are used but like I said non-profit people don't look like George Clooney. You guys excluded of course as I said right? Okay let's talk about the rule of thirds. This is a tried and true artistic method for making your shots more interesting. It's not going to be something you're going to use all the time but it's a great way to make sure that something is going to be a more interesting shot than just sort of centered in the middle. And it used to be during the classical period that cemetery was super prized. So portraiture everybody was in the center and that's just sort of the way things were. And then one day a portrait artist came around and they printed somebody off to the side in one of these sort of on the crosshairs here and everyone kind of like ooh, how artistic. And it just sort of activated something in our brain that makes things look more and more interesting. So you put the focal point or what the subject of your photo is on one of these crosshairs after you've divided your frame into these nine equal parts. Now what does that look like when you're interviewing a person? So here's a gentleman you can see that his eye what's called actually the dominant eye or the eye that's closest to the camera is actually right here on this crosshair. Now he could be framed up on the other side but his shoulders would be turned the other way and his other eye would then be the dominant eye. And that's going to really help you sort of make better shot types. And I'll show you what this looks like in a diagram a little bit later on as far as setting yourself up in an interview room. But sort of keep this in mind and also keep this sort of open expanse in mind as well. What I'm going to talk about is how where you need to be positioned so that he's looking across that open expanse in order to be talking to you. And next just a little PSA for you guys. I have a problem with vertical video. It's real common on smartphones in order to use vertical video because it's a natural way of sort of thinking about it. Video does not turn sideways like photos do. So the idea is you want to make sure that you shoot your video horizontally. Always turn that video aside. Unless you're using a specialty app like Vine or Instagram to shoot the video that wants you to keep your camera vertical because it's going to actually create a square image rather than this sort of rectangular image here. So this is just something that we want to keep in mind. Now resolution is kind of a complex concept for a lot of people because it involves math. And people's kind of their minds kind of blur out whenever numbers are mentioned. But just want to keep this ratio in mind 16 by 9. And what a ratio is is just multiply any number by this number. You also have to multiply it by this number in order to make them an equal ratio. And so most video is going to be shot in one of the two upcoming formats. One is 720p and that means that there's actually 720 pixels or 720 little dots of changing colored lights that actually make up the image. And that's going to be the vertical measurement on our rectangle. And the width is going to be 1280. So you may hear about 720p as a resolution. You may hear about 1080p as a resolution. This is going to mean that those dots of light are closer and closer together, and they're going to produce a higher quality or a crisper image. And this is exactly why we don't want to use the extreme close-up on our nonprofit friends is because we have extremely crisp images these days. Now you may be hearing about 4K. And on the phone the other day I originally had, should I shoot in 4K? No down there. But Mark convinced me to change it to tentatively a well maybe. The idea is that 4K means that there's going to be 3,840 pixels across here by 2,000 some up. And it's estimated to be about 4,000 and why they switched to the width measurement versus the vertical measurement. I have no idea just to make it confusing for everyone. But the idea is that file sizes with that are really, really big. And sometimes it winds up burdening your devices a little bit. But you might as well go ahead and get equipment that shoots in 4K and start experimenting with it at your leisure. But stick to these sort of smaller formats in the meantime until you sort of get your feet wet. Now I'm going to buzz through lighting real quick because I only have a few more minutes with you. And I want to get to this sort of room setup scenario here in a second. And the idea is that when you're shopping for lights, you want to find lights that are the color of daylight. And the reason for that is that people really look good in daylight. Camera sensors, especially smartphone sensors are tuned for daylight colors. The idea is that Kelvin, like Fahrenheit and Celsius, is just a system of temperature measurement. And these degrees here are the temperature at which a certain metal burns in order to produce a light at that color. Now I know that is super jargon-y. You don't really have to worry about it. All you have to know is that when you go into Home Depot or you go into Lowe's and you pick up your clamp lights, those little things that look like a tinfoil hat with a sort of little lamp attachment to it, and a clamp on it. You grab one of those for 8 bucks and then you go to the light bulb section and find the compact fluorescent light bulbs, the one that looks like a little Curly Q or a Pig's Tail. Flip over to the back and some of the packages will have, in addition to the wattage and the lumens and the volts and all that. They'll have a temperature Kelvin that that bulb burns at. So you want to look in this 5,000 to 5,500 range to get daylight colored bulbs because people, like I said, look really good in daylight color. Otherwise, if you use normal lamps, you're going to get people that look kind of orangish on camera. I remember I said I was going to point out a diagram to you guys. Well, here's what it sort of looks like when you're setting up your interview room. I know you kind of abstract and do be looking with the stick figures, but we're going to walk through it. So right up here you have your sun or the key light. This is going to be the brightest light in the room. And so it may be an open window or it may be the actual sun if you're outdoors or something like that, but that's going to be coming in down at a 45 degree angle to your interview subject. And that's going to create shadows on the other side of the interview subject space. And that's because people have these really annoying things like eyebrows and noses and chins and lips that create shadows when the light sort of shines into them at an angle. So then you have your other light, your clamp light with the daylight colored bulb in it at a 45 degree angle the other way creating a 90 degree angle between the sun and your fill light to fill in those shadows on the opposite side of their face. Now remember that sort of expanse that I was talking about with that guy in the Rule of Third? He was looking across the camera at the interviewer who's you right here, right? And so if that's the case then this person would be framed sort of on the left, on the right side of the frame, and then they'd be looking across the left side towards you, right? Because you're on camera right. It's a little bit confusing, but just frame it up so that the camera is on your left, there's space on the right. The camera is on your right, there's space on the left when you look in the viewfinder, right? For your interview subject. And then a hair light is another light. Sometimes it's above and shining down. Sometimes it's below and shining up, or sometimes it's right behind the interview subject. That's kind of creating this halo effect around your interview subject. It tends to make them pop off the background a little bit. Not necessary, but can be interesting. Experiment with it. I wouldn't necessarily make that your priority. And then you have an interesting background object behind in that expanse, right? That two-thirds of the frame that is not filled with the interview subject. And you're only using an interesting background object if it somehow relates to what the interview subject is talking about at the time. So that's a little bit of Father Guido Sarducci's, if you remember this from Saturday Night Live, Five Minute University on film school. But what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to go ahead and pass it back to TechSoup and Becky to kind of take us into the next section of this presentation. It's been my absolute pleasure giving you this whirlwind tour of filmmaking. And I hope that you're excited to put this into practical use today or hopefully tomorrow. Thanks a lot. Thank you so much, Erin. A lot of really great info crammed into a very short amount of time. And we know that, but know that these resources are going to be sent to you. And we also have infographics that show you how to set up the lighting. We have some short video clips in that lesson plan that I pointed to earlier. So you will have lots of resources and you can re-watch this anytime you want to practice and learn these things a little bit better. We are going to have time for questions toward the end. So we are flagging those as you bring them in and we're trying to answer them throughout as well. But I want to go ahead and bring us to our next speaker so we don't run out of time to hear all of the interesting experiences from him. But we are going to hear from Mark Horvath from Invisible People, a nonprofit that I mentioned earlier works with recording the stories of people who are living in a state of homelessness or living on the streets in various capacities. So we are excited to hear from him about how his organization works and getting some insight on how he interviews people and is working outside of a studio environment with natural light and in the rain sometimes and with loud traffic nearby and kind of how to mitigate some of those circumstances. So thank you so much for joining us Mark. We are really glad to have you as part of the program. Mark might still be muted. We aren't hearing you Mark. Are you on the line? Mark Horvath Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There we go. Thank you. So hi everybody. One of the really cool things about this webinar is you're not going to see my face. So my bad hair day doesn't matter. Most webinars have the video camera going. So I'm really excited. But this is me. This is me out in the field shooting video and really quick somebody asked in the chat room and we'll deal with the questions later on. But she was talking about being outside in the sun and that's a huge issue especially in places like Los Angeles, California. It sounded like you're already using shade and different things. Sometimes the sun can work for you especially if you're interviewing people that might have a darker complexion. But typically if the sun is an issue I used to carry a 4x4 flag or some diffusion or some way to hold up there and create my own shade when needed. So I'm going to go through some of this really, really fast and real brief history. My first video camera that I used to carry around and this is the closest I could come to an actual camera of that was a pan of camera. And I remember my first video shoot I was actually attached to somebody carrying the recorder. And yes, I am a broadcast dinosaur. My very, very first job in the television industry takes were two inches. That's a quad machine. So I'm director of distributions for StarCom Television. We did Real Fortune Jeopardy married with children playing for Jump Street, a bunch of other shows. And this is me today. I actually ended up homeless. We built my life. Tommy tamed. And I lost everything except my sobriety. And I went out with a backpack full of socks, an iPhone, and a camera from Best Buy, a real cheap camera. And I started interviewing homeless people and empowering them to tell their own story. And one thing that's really key here is I almost didn't do this because I looked at it and said, because I'm a television producer and video should have B-roll and music and it should have graphics and I want to win an Emmy. And so I almost didn't do it. And one day I said, you know what, I'm just going to put this stuff on YouTube. And that was the magic. This just made it all happen. So the nugget there is whatever you've got, don't look at it as a roadblock saying, oh my gosh, I can't do this. I can't do video. I can't do video. I need this. I need that. With whatever you have, you can do more than what I was able to do. And I reach millions of people every week changing the story of homelessness. So second time I'm going to go over these, skip past these quotes, that really when you're doing videos what is success to you? What is – you work backwards. You're a reverse engineer. So without a strategy like for instance, do you want to get donors? Are you trying to get volunteers? Are you trying to get – what is that success for you? And then you work backwards. And we'll go into a couple of different ways. You know, one of the things that I hear from clients and my boss and all these different things is people say they want more awareness. Now, this is puppy monkey baby. And if you happen to watch the Super Bowl or if you happen – and even if you didn't, you might have seen this video. I mean it costs $5 million for the spot. It could air twice. That doesn't include the production cost. But this didn't – it was a creative video. I personally liked it. A lot of people were freaked out about it. But it didn't get you to go do that action item, that success. The goal was to get you to be aware of your strength but how many of you went out and bought this, you know, the drink? Natasha, I was landed in Hawthorne Airport in Heathrow. Excuse me in London. I was not planning on shooting video. I just was looking for a place to get rid of my jet lag, grab a bite to eat and go sleep. And here was this woman, Natasha. And the video is loading and I'm going to play the video for you, hopefully. So you can offer a question. Yeah. Natasha, you're homeless in London. Yeah. It's raining out. It is. Where are you going to sleep? On the streets, unless I make 24 pounds. And what's 24 pounds going to get you? It gets the hostel for the night. The hostels cost? Hostels cost, yeah, unless you get a hostel for the council. So then the council pays for it? Yeah. My gosh. And you've got crutches? Yeah. I call the steps of seeing me off and just sleeping on the streets. And now how long have you been homeless? I've been homeless for four years. Four years out here? Yeah. Oh my gosh. Isn't there any help? I've tried everything, charities, everything. But I'm not a drug addict. I'm not an alcoholic. And I'm not pregnant. And there's three things to get help of. So I'm not being any of them. I don't fit for a charity. Right. So how do you survive? Day by day. I'm just hoping that people will help me. I don't get no benefits. Wow. Yeah. What's your future like? I want to be a writer. So for the sake of time, I think you all got that idea. And this was recorded on my iPhone. Overnight it reached 169,000 views. And the good part of that is it started a conversation about welfare reform in the UK, which is the goal. That's my success. Get people talking about change. And the team here, the nuggets to take away, the stories are everywhere. Be ready. I mean, there is going to be time when you're not thinking about stories. And a story is in front of you. You pull out your phone, you start shooting. Now you might notice that I, you know, sure she is using crutches. That would have made the image so much better. But I'm up close. I am up close because audio from the cell phone, that's one of the most important things. You can get away with bad video, but you can't get away with bad audio. And time and time again, you know, I'll shoot something that has horrible focus, or maybe a dog hits my tripod, and it gets shaky or whatever. And I don't want to put up that video because other filmmakers might look at it and go, oh my gosh, it's out of focus, or looking as a shaky tripod. But nobody noticed, nobody just complained. I put a video up from Austin, Texas, it's out by a homeless person, and it had this horrible shadow on the guy's face. I almost didn't put it up because I was embarrassed. And here's the thing, authenticity is replaced production value. It used to be a nonprofit video that cost about $1,000 a minute, a five minute video about $5,000. Now you can have impact right with your iPhone. Distribution is key. Now the distribution through this was YouTube. And then it was through social media, and you can't shy away from conflict. So what made this video go viral was that some people started arguing whether she was homeless or not. And that usually nonprofits like see that conflict and go, oh my gosh, this is horrible. That conflict is what got that video to go viral because more people started looking at it. And then the conversation started changing to welfare reform. So I'm going to play a clip of another video that I never show anybody. So this next video was something that I did in Sudan many, many years ago. You're one of two audiences I've ever shared this with. And so the point of what I'm going to show you is the most creative, well-good-looking video might not necessarily produce the success that you want. So we'll let this video load. Our Bridge of Hope ministry team just returned from Sudan where they met Barb Vogel, a retired school teacher who's labored tirelessly both at home and in Sudan to bring help and hope to the starving people of this war-torn nation. Here's what Barb had to say. The food that's been supplied to these people is just paramount. You know, children laying in the piles of the dirt and along the road. And we saw the day before the child and they beat the grain down licking, digging in the bottom of that and licking out the bottom of that wooden thing for the tiniest morsel of food. All these people will eat for the next few months is what breakthrough provided. You know, I saw yesterday the child brought into the... So again, for sake of time, I'm going to advance it. And one of the key things here that I didn't write in the next slide that outlines it is be flexible. So that particular video raised $4 million in one month's time. Now there was an organization and distribution and there was a lot behind that to raise that amount of money. But I had met the schoolteacher. We had flown to Kenya. We had flown to Sudan. And we had everything pre-produced right down to the team, the storyboard. And then I met Barb Vogel. And I went, oh my gosh, like attracts like. So Barb Vogel was our major donor. She was the same demographic, the same age female of our major donor. So having that validation from like attracts like. So what I'm trying to point out here is if you're doing a story trying to, you know, engage youth, use youth. If you're trying to do a story that you want to engage seniors, you use seniors. Like attracts like. This is targeted to the donor and the ass strategy. I mean, there was a strategy behind the video. Now, people give to vision. As you saw in this video, we were talking about the vision. You have to be careful. So often we talk about need. Oh, there's hungry people. There's hungry people. You need to be able to leave people with there's the vision of feeding them. And again, the distribution. One of the things today, I will tell you right now, all the rules are gone. There's no rules when it comes to video. But the key to getting your video success is your distribution channels. So just a couple weeks ago, I was in San Jose. Now I'm not playing this video. But I did a little short. Now Twitter allows 30 minutes. And this is a little short video. I'll be 30 seconds. This is a little short video. Again, poorly lit, poor audio. But here is a tech worker playing a flute trying to make a living. And I just use this as an example because today you have Instagram. It's just the second video. You have Twitter with 30-second videos. These are things that you have to be aware about. Here is a video from Vine. A Vine video really quick. There used to be a start-up called 12 Seconds that had 12-second videos. And I thought it was crazy. And the 12-second video, when Vine came out with 6 seconds, I didn't think it was going to stick around, but it brought back the stop-action. And the stop-action has really, really brought this thing to key to filmmakers. Again, when Haynes took me to a park in New York with a Vine producer, I didn't think we would be able to get this nonprofit hand-in-out type socks content. So this campaign, and it was paired with this campaign reached 132 million people two December ago. One month's time, 132 million people interacted with this campaign. And it was driven by those Vine videos and these stories. So again, it was a timing culture. Vine was very popular at the time. It was the network. I have a large network, but you use influencers. You leverage other people's networks. And I was reaching out to friends, family, people I knew and said, hey, would you share this? What happens behind the scenes is almost more important than what is happening above the scene. Distribution. Again, it was through distribution channels. When I first started producing network television, I had no experience. One of the CEOs said, sit and watch 60 minutes. Sit and do the best. 2020, the news story. Sit, take notes. Also, watch response television. Response television is so live for commercials. Get rich, create quick. You'll see they use testimonies. They use the personal testimonies. Hey, I read this book and now I'm a millionaire. And for the nonprofits, for your video as a nonprofit, that call to action to get people to take that call to action that you desire. The other thing is watching network news or watching your local news because these guys are running and gunning. They're out there with the camera and they've got to shoot this package within a short amount of time and get it back to the station to have it air on this very hard day. Whether it's 5 o'clock or 11 o'clock. And they take some shortcuts. So if you look at 60 minutes, 2020, you look at response television. And then you also look at how these people, because I'll be honest with you, I have never had the time that I really want ever to produce a video. Sometimes it's month. Sometimes, you know, the boss says, hey, you got to produce this video right now and you just go make it happen. So stories are everywhere. Get in the habit of reaching out to programs. So in programs, you're a nonprofit. Your programs people have the stories. They're not going to come to you. I've tried everything. They're focused on being on the front lines, helping people. Get on the front lines yourself. Minimum four hours a month. I mean, that's where the stories are. Get in the habit of going out there. Check with your volunteers, your clients, your donors, your co-workers, social media and listening. There's a lot of hype and there has been the last couple years on storytelling. And it's pretty easy. You've got a beginning, the middle and end. You start, you get the middle and the end. I look at it as a bridge. You know, I've got to start this video. I've got to give some content in the middle and I've got to end it. One of the key things for nonprofits is what we used to call in the television industry, the lead-in effect. And that's why the helicopters work so well because people want to lead in. They want to, you know, what's going to happen at the end? And one of the greatest examples, I don't know how many of you have seen ABC's Extreme Home Makeover, you'll notice there's five minutes of good. There's five minutes of the bus. The bus goes away. Everybody's happy. They cry. They got a new route. But there's 55 minutes of drama. See, Hollywood has it down. People are addicted to drama. And in the nonprofit world, we are drama at first. We produce these videos that are really safe. But so we have noticed here at the rescue mission that when somebody's trying to get sober, you know, when they're in the process of getting their life better, when you share that, there's so much more interaction because people start leading them along than, hey, there's somebody here in the house. So what I'm thinking, this is not what they're going to teach you in school. So most people will tell you, and you'll see this in interviews, the head is turned, right? The head is turned in most interviews. Well, if you look at my video, the head is right looking at you because when I'm talking to you, if you're watching me right now, my head would be pointed to you. I don't know why people turn their heads during interviews. And again, this is not textbook. This is stuff that I have learned. But here's the emotion. I also keep up close with people. You want to see the eyes. It's like you're talking to each other. It is so, so very important, especially if you're going to transmit empathy, which is what you want to do because once the viewer has empathy, they're going to take your call to action. You'll notice now I used a shot by Mike, which was referenced earlier. And part of the reason is, but when I'm under a bridge, this is a tunnel under Las Vegas, I might not have time to hook a lavalier mic. The right way is a lavalier mic, but I don't good enough people in challenging situations. So I personally use a shotgun mic, and I use a monopod, a $30 monopod from Best Buy. And it's real important. And then I go up close. I go, now a lot of people want to shoot wide or they move the camera to get some of the background. No, that's not necessarily how people communicate. You have to have a home guide. So one of the best things at Google, if you like, Outbound Strategy, Outlook Strategy, Chris Brogane gives credit to this, Outpost Strategy. So YouTube gets enough traffic. When you share a video on Twitter, don't share the YouTube link. Put it on your blog and share your blog because that's where you collect emails. That's where you collect donors. That's where you engage volunteers. So it is so very important that, you know, when you look at social media and your distribution strategy, that you have to think of all the distribution channels, Facebook, YouTube as Outposts, and you bring them into your website, to your blog. And become a media company. Don't just do one video. Even Rescue Mission does stories from Skid Row. People want a series. They produce these videos on a regular basis. People that are homeless and have gone through their mission and they have gotten help. It has increased online donations in a huge way. So one of the things that you have to be very, very conscious of is one-year producing videos. It's not just the one-off. It's not just the one-time moment. Gary V. asked Gary V. to search the hashtag. He's brilliant. He's putting up all these series, episodic episodes of videos that engages people because people don't want more. They don't want you to keep on continuing. And I won't read all through this for the sake of time. I'm probably getting wrong with this. Although I don't hear anybody tell me to shut up yet. Usually, by now, they're saying, Shut up! And basically, one of these people tells you a short video of what's happening. This was Motor Trend Magazine and this is their one billionth video view where they came right out and said, I think the biggest one was not giving YouTube crowd credit for being a mature enough to see real media not better content. In the early days of online video, there was this false belief that videos would only be successful if they are short and simple. Time proved that to be a minute's conception. I think we really started to hit a stride on YouTube when we begin to produce longer-form videos for more in-depth content. And so people will tell you, short, short, short, short. But look at basketball games. Look at the Super Bowl. It depends on the content. And I'll tell you, YouTube starts rewarding you around 17 minutes. So I produce short videos. I produce long videos. It depends. Just don't think in this world. People say short intention stands and they look at the drop-off. If you look at any video, there's huge drop-off. People that start watching your videos stop right away, most of them. But there's a few that keep on going. That's the people you want to reach. So don't let the analytics of your video drop-off scare you into saying, oh, we should only do short content because those people that are always staying for 20 seconds, they're not going to stay for whatever content you put. So go for the long video. And as Aaron put it, we knew I was going to do this. So this bothers me too. I do agree with him on this. But vertical video is here. And my point is not to shoot vertical video. My point is there's no rules anymore. Especially now, you know, you have your parent scope and now Facebook video live is big and people are shooting all kinds of different stuff. You just, my encouragement to you is to get out there and start shooting because that's how you're going to learn. You're going to make mistakes, but so what if you have authenticity and good content and a worthy cause, people are going to be attracted to your work and you're going to have success. So thank you very much. Thank you so much for that, Mark. A lot of really great information again. And I love that you just encourage people to get out there and that there are no rules anymore. So just get out there and try it. For folks with questions, we're going to get to those in just a moment. I wanted to show a couple of other ways because these guys talked about live people on film for the most part. And I just wanted to share a couple of examples that if you don't want to put people on film or you have a reason that maybe you can't or you're just afraid to do that to start, here's an example of common craft. If you're not familiar with them, they use great little paper cutouts to teach mostly on different topics. And they actually have a cutout library that you can use little shapes like this. You can create your own little shapes to use. We also have an example that I'll just play a few seconds of before we get to Q&A from an organization called TrickleUp. They used PowerPoint to create this animation. So it's something that most of us already have on our desks. I'm not going to play more of that one. I just wanted to give a little tease. You don't have to have the extraordinary different capacity to be out there for hours a month if you really can't or you're maybe afraid to invest that much time. There are ways of doing things. Creating short, effective video with the tools that are already at your disposal as well. We have some questions in the queue so I want to go ahead and get to some of those. The first one for you, Mark, we had a couple of people asking if you get releases signed. Do you have a model release for the people that you're interviewing for your homeless subjects? And one person mentioned that they work at Rescue Mission as well and they're wondering what the process is for releases. Very cool. So I am going to respond to that. Yes, I wrote the bar vocal script. I wrote for all of that. I don't necessarily know how to respond to all these questions here, but let me go and talk about releases. So first off, it was actually a piece of my presentation. We just didn't get to it. So when CNN is flying over people on the roof at Katrina, they don't drop or work down a release. I mostly use media in that aspect. I don't use the videos or photos for commercial reasons. Now for you guys, my nonprofit did a release, 100% did a release. For me, I give everybody a business card with my cell phone and my email because for me, it's about ending homelessness and I'm trying to build a relationship. And so many times people have come with a camera and interviewed almost people and it's been a bad experience for them or their videos or their story was put up. So I give them my cell phone number, my email address, and I tell them I make them a promise that any time they want their video removed or their photo removed, I will remove that and I will keep that promise. Now that's just something I do because my goal is to really build a relationship with homeless people, but on the recognition side when we're doing stories, we do get model releases signed. This is a precaution. And I have to run. Sorry, everybody's hardly normal. I'll answer all your questions and thank you TechSoup. You guys are wonderful. Thanks so much, Mark. You've got to jump off for a different call. But if we have just another moment, Aaron, we had a person that asked a question about whether you can use pictures and video merged together and how you might recommend somebody doing that. Yeah, absolutely. So pictures and video go great together. A lot of times what people will do is they will put pictures over their video so that you hear the audio of the video playing, but the picture is showing on the screen. And so that's somewhat what we call B-roll, right? A-roll is the interview footage and then B-roll is going to be the footage or pictures or whatever that plays over the audio of the A-roll. But the idea is that for starting out, it's best to sort of think about either just doing photos or just doing video. And then once you get a little bit more experienced and start exploring kind of more advanced editing software, then you can bump up to some of that. The reason for that is that basic video editing software doesn't easily have the capability of adding multiple tracks of video, whereas more advanced editing software does. So I would say it's absolutely something that you should explore because it's a really effective way of telling a story. But start with one or the other, and then after you're comfortable with that and feel like you've mastered that some extent, then sort of graduate on to more advanced features. Terrific. And we have lots and lots of apps that are coming out these days where Mark mentioned Vine and Instagram, where you can create these short videos. You know, Animoto, there's Flip-a-Gram, where you can take a bunch of your pictures and set it to music, and you can come up with a 60-second, little short video. So there's lots of really low-hanging fruit waves of doing this without necessarily needing the professional cameras and the professional video editing. We aren't going into those in-depth today, but there's a lot of different options out there. Which program do you use for your editing? We had people asking about the editing software. Right, so I use a variety of different programs for my professional editing, so I use Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere for those. For some of my amateur and just kind of hoisting around videos, or even just quick things that I want to do for work just real easily, I'll use YouTube Editor, so youtube.com slash editor is completely free editing software. And then I sometimes use iMovie. If I'm working on a PC, I'll use Camtasia Studio, a sort of cheap and easy editing software. But the YouTube Editor is really something that's a very powerful tool. And in fact, there's actually a create slideshow button you can push, and it guides you to the process of creating those. Yep, and it's totally free, which we all love. We use that a bit here at TechSoup as well. And we use Adobe Premiere, which you can get the Adobe Creative Suite through TechSoup's catalog. And we also use Camtasia. We probably use that the most on our team. And that is available through our JourneyEd donation program for a pretty substantial discount from TechSmith, the company that makes it. So definitely look for those links if you're looking for editing software. We will talk more about editing in our upcoming webinars. Here's what's coming up on our calendar. We hope you'll join us for some of these events. The one that I was just mentioning where we'll talk about editing tools and we'll talk a lot about YouTube, and in particular how to get your story out there and how to use those types of editors is on April 28th, polishing your digital story to make it shine. That is the third Storymakers webinar. And then if you're particularly interested in using photos to tell your organization's story, this is the fourth one in the series on May 5th. And we'll also have an event geared toward public libraries and how they're using Instagram. But if you are a nonprofit, a library, a church, what have you, you're welcome to join us for that one on Instagram for Public Libraries that's going to speak directly to that tool. And then we also have a couple of GrantStation related webinars. So if you're looking at the GrantStation tool for finding potential donors, we recommend you check that out. And then next week we'll have one with Cindy Adams, who is the CEO of GrantStation talking about how to write a really great, what's the statement, need statement, sorry, for your grant request and how to really hone in on that to win those grants. So join us for those events. Thank you so much to Erin and Mark for their excellent presentations today. We hope you got a lot out of it. And that you'll join us again for these other events. Lastly, I'd like to thank you, our participants, for joining us, Susan and Ali on the back end, and ReadyTalk, our webinar sponsor for providing the use of this platform. Please go ahead and take that post-event survey when you close out so that we can continue to improve our webinar programming. Thank you so much everyone. Have a terrific afternoon. Bye-bye.