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Showing Your Work on YouTube with CueCam Presenter
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Last time I quit my job to pursue music* I read Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work which says to make behind-the-scenes content in order to build a fanbase.
Times I quit my job to pursue music
2002 - I went part time in my day job to make more time for music
2007 - I quit my leadership role at a digital agency to pursue music. I didn’t want to be waking up every morning thinking about XML so I borrowed £10,000 from my ex.
2013 - I left the UK for Berlin to try to get my 10,000 hours of music performance, you know, like The Beatles in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers”. I didn’t technically quit my 2 day a week remote job until halfway through. I racked up about 200 hours in 3 months, but that didn’t make much of a dent overall.
2017 (the last time) - I rented a studio in Hammersmith and worked full time on music for several months.
I’d never been sure if it was better to be mysterious or open about my approach to production, but I got more attention by sharing than by trying to be secretive.
So what are your options for showing your work?
Option 1: Get a friend to film your project
This is a video I produced of my friend Graham Dunning’s Mechanical Techno project. He happened to have access to a stage in a shared studio with lots of lighting equipment and I turned up with my camera and audio equipment and we spent a day shooting.
Two hours of that was when I realised I didn’t have the adapter for my camera slider and took a cab across London and back to collect it.
Then after a few days of editing and mercifully little feedback, we polished it to “good enough” and released it.
Getting help from a friend?
This approach is logistically challenging and requires a lot of planning, editing and collaboration.
Option 2: Edit videos on your phone
When I first started showing my work like this in 2017, I made videos on my phone.
Here I had a Rode SmartLav+ plugged into my iPhone and I trimmed things down using the Clips app.
These days I’d recommend doing this sort of thing on TikTok using their app, especially since the videos are not muted by default!
Editing on your phone?
This is reasonably quick but I find it quite fiddly.
Option 3: Script and plan shoots in Final Draft
For my Leaving The Laptop series on YouTube, I learned how to write with Final Draft because I wanted to use industry-standard tools and techniques.
Here’s how I used it. I use LOCATION information (I’m misusing it here tbh), ACTION and DIALOGUE.
I built a tool to break out my scenes into a shooting checklist.
Here’s a deep-dive on the approach I took to the first video in that series. https://medium.com/@michael.forrest.music/the-problem-with-laptops-making-of-my-youtube-video-da4768aa2931
Script and plan shoots in Final Draft?
It’s effective but requires expertise, tooling, and still requires a lot of editing and post-production.
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Option 4: A better way
The biggest video production time-sink is editing. On a phone, it’s too easy to make mistakes and you end up repeating work multiple times to get a half-decent result. Alternatively, if you go with a full-blown Final Cut Pro edit, you’ll have to learn how to make a lot of difficult decisions about which footage to use, what you can throw away, going into infinitesimal detail just to make something flow naturally.
And this is all made a lot worse if you don’t make a good plan.
This ad-hoc shoot turned into a full three week, full time, long days, additional shoots, exhausting editing and post-production process to avoid it getting boring.
Never again.
So how do we avoid editing and make it easier to plan?
That’s where CueCam Presenter comes in.
I designed CueCam take the essence of a Final Draft script and merge it with a video production workflow that lets you shoot videos in one take.
You might do a bit of tidying up in post, or combine a couple of different takes, but it’s infinitely easier to get a naturally-flowing video without headache of media management and timeline editing.
Recording a video with CueCam
With CueCam you can quickly draft a script, adding title graphics, bringing in screen shares and video clips.
Each card’s content becomes the text in your teleprompter (or on your iPhone screen if you’re using that to shoot) so you don’t have to learn everything off by heart to get a decent take.
Here you can see the script for my Infinite Music Machine resurrection video. There are some titles and teleprompter notes. I share my screen in card 4.
I brought in another video and trimmed them to short clips (no need to leave CueCam’s interface to do this).
I added some quotations using CueCam’s markdown syntax.
Here’s how my desk is set up for recording videos. I have my big camera in an Elgato Prompter, a big light on a desk stand, my laptop and a second screen. I run Video Pencil on my iPad. I use a RODE Wireless Go 2 as my microphone, and a cheap in-ear bluetooth headphone to monitor audio.
All in all, this only took a few minutes to assemble and I recorded the video in a couple of takes (took longer than usual because I needed to drink water!). This is an example of the most rough-and-ready content that can come out of CueCam, and if I wanted to polish it I might take it into Descript or Final Cut Pro. (Mostly I was unhappy with boomy audio on this because I just added a load of acoustic panels!)
I hope this gives you an idea of how quickly you can achieve great results with CueCam’s editless workflow.