How do you get a steady eye-level shot when you don't have a tripod?

You place a chair on a table, then you stack whatever is at hand to build up the extra height to your eye level, then you fill a sandwich bag, about two thirds full with rice or lentils or grain. Nest your smartphone in this, adjust the angle and now your hands are free to better illustrate the topic you are talking about.

When you're presenting to a camera you know where to look, at the lens, but where do you look with a smartphone?

In the TV world, it's called looking straight down the barrel, that's how you connect with an audience

Have you ever presented a video using your smartphone? You press RECORD. You start speaking and a few seconds later you have a sudden realisation that you don’t know where the lens of the camera is.

You realise that you are looking at the selfie image. You keep recording and your brow furrows slightly. Then your eyeballs start to visibly dart around and you think to yourself, ‘you know, I’ve never stopped to consider where the camera is on a smartphone when I’m using the selfie mode.’

Now translate that scenario into real life. A face to face interaction. Shifty eyes are not a great way to build relationships. You need to learn to locate and lock. Locate where your camera is on your smartphone. Just Google ‘where are the camera...

Who are the Painters Patchers Thatchers and why do you need them in your business videos?

Painters: make up
Patchers: wardrobe
Thatchers: hair

When would you bring them in? Every video you make! because distractions detract from your message.

anytime your audience is distracted they’re not listening to your message. Your message is diluted.

a pimple on your nose
a stain on your jacket
one piece of hair with a mind of its own

these are all small but enough to derail your message

ten seconds and a hand mirror will fix most of your problems.

Can you tell a story in as few words as possible? I love this one I found years ago. I want more examples. Can you help me by sending me yours?

Here's another; Eat food, not too much, mainly plants. That sums up the multi-billion dollar diet and nutrition industry's message in seven words.

Opening your mouth and just letting the words tumble out is not commercially smart. We have to pay attention to our words. Words have the power to create pictures.

Listen to a great story well told and close your eyes, feel yourself transported to the time and place, your imagination illustrating the story. Your words are an important part of your video. Paying attention to your words will help grow your business.

Key to making effective business videos is brevity or should I say Short Videos Rock! 

Whether or not you need a microphone I cover in a different video

If you have made the decision to buy one then the letter R stands between your happiness and your disappointment.

The plug, the connector, that joins your microphone to your smartphone is called a 3.5mm mini jack.

But not all mini jacks are the same.

You need to clarify that yours is TRRS

You see there are two types of mini jack. TRS and TRRS

Tip ring sleeve and tip ring ring sleeve

and if your plug doesn't have that extra 'R' then it won't work and you'll be really frustrated.

Would you like the Get Video Smart book Then I’ll give it to you.
You can download it, for free, because I want you to go start making videos for your business. All I ask is that you write me back and tell me how it helped you, or even better, make a video to tell me.

Video is such a great medium to capture testimonials from your clients. Their face exuding excitement. Their lips pressed with respect. Their head tilted in favour of you. All subtle clues that they are going to say something good about YOU and your service.. and then it all melts away because you ask the wrong question.

Start with this simple template: “Tell me your name and what’s the ONE THING you thought when …[you picked up your dry cleaning today] [when you listened to today’s speaker]”

Everyone can speak their name and ‘the one thing I thought was…’ gets them up to speaking speed. This acts as an on-ramp to the freeway. 

Your customers deserve SMART videos: Simple Meaningful Authentic Relevant and Tight. In this short video, I take you along in real time as I make a SMART video for an event where I was a sponsor.

A SMART video has a thousand faces

A SMART video always speaks to your audiences needs and respects their time.

A SMART video is simple, meaningful, authentic, relevant and tight.

I’m going to show you how to make one as it is happening to me right now.

I was a sponsor at the first Australian Intrapreneur Summit. I told the convenor Dr Irena Yashin Shaw that I’d make a SMART video to promote the conference while I’m there. I thought this would be a great opportunity to take you through the process with me.

SMART videos have four stages of planning

Script

Shoot

Edit 

Publish

Scripting is not writing word for word. Scripting is simply thinking ahead of time. 

SMART videos have one idea per video.  So if my headline is Intrapreneur is not a spelling...

Have you ever seen a loose thread on your clothing, tried to snap it off, but it won’t snap? You tug harder and the material bunches and you tug harder in response and now the thread mysteriously gets longer. It just keeps coming and you start to see things unravel in front of your eyes and you wish you had never tugged in the first place. Getting Video Smart can be a bit like that.

The barriers we face in making this work are not in the technology. You are literally seconds away from shooting quality video on your smartphone. The barriers are in our mind. Once we start unpacking some of the attitudes and assumptions that block our way to presenting ourselves well on-camera, we might well expose other stuff that we’ve been keeping out of sight. Just like the thread, our comfortable view of ‘how’ the world works might start to unravel a little.

This is a good thing for our businesses as it means we grow sales and customer satisfaction will improve and we will...

Smart video habits earn you money. Zooming is not a smart video habit.

Not all video for business is just a shot of you speaking to the camera. Often you will need to get some video of what you are talking about. Maybe it’s a community engagement video of a sausage sizzle that you put on to support the local sports club.

You walk around with your smartphone getting some video, and then you see some kids eating the sausages and you think, that’s a nice shot, so you zoom in …and that right there is your crime.

Don’t zoom.

Do you know why people zoom? Because they can. That’s not a flippant answer. Humans love to play with new technology. It’s novel. This is true for professionals.

The zoom lens was invented in the 1930s but didn’t become readily available until the sixties and seventies. Watch the movie Jaws shot in the 1970s. There are zooms throughout that movie. Compare that with movies from the 1980s and 1990s. Zoom shots in feature films...

Do you know about Clips?  iOS app that is a simple video editor, almost too simple really except for one thing.  It makes live captions as you speak. This saves you a number of steps and valuable time. Currently, you mostly upload your video to a transcription service like REV and it may take 20 minutes to an hour to get the caption file back, then you need to import this to your edit program, check for errors, then export your final video. I do this all the time and there is nothing wrong with it. If you have a short message that you want to publish for your customers or your staff, this might be a handy tool to have in your business video tool kit. I am certainly using it more and more.

It’s surprisingly accurate and if it does make a mistake you can edit it as easily as you edit a text message

This is Apple iOS only. I can't find a true Android substitute but this will all be standard fare soon. Please let me know if you know an auto video captioning app for...