Stop trying to be perfect
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You’ve seen a million professionally produced videos, and now you’re trying to make one yourself.
It takes forever. Weeks of research, gear, shooting, editing, tutorials, LLM conversations, courses and more tutorials, all to work out why your video doesn’t feel “pro” enough.
It’s a miracle if you ever feel ready to share.
But what were you really trying to do? Share a pitch. Show your work. Show your team’s progress. Explain something more clearly than you could over email.
None of that needs to be perfect. And I don’t want you to be.
Why not? Because the cracks are where your light shines through.
Perfect is uncanny. Oversimplified. Soulless. Perfect means smoothing down every rough edge until there’s no “you” there any more.
Perfect feels like AI.
It took me a long. time to understand this. Here’s how I got there.
Hiding behind my trumpet
I released music for years before I was comfortable putting my voice into it. I was so afraid to sing I learned the trumpet instead, thinking it would be a good substitute. But eventually I had to accept that words add a depth and expression to a piece of music that cannot be replicated any other way.
When I finally made a track with my voice in it, you couldn’t tell it was me thorugh all the processing. I showed it to a colleague who got so excited that he shared it round the whole office, about 400 people, several times. It was a very stressful day. It made my skin prickle.
But after that I wasn’t scared to share music with a little of my voice in it.
A month on one video
The next threshold was talking. I started a YouTube series about performing electronic music live with hardware, no laptop. The first video took me a month. I recorded a voiceover, made infographics, dressed up in different outfits. I had a vision. It was a whole thing.
And it was fine. But I learned something:
It takes an ridiculous amount of work to not be on camera.
You have to create footage for every second of the voiceover, whether it makes sense or not. If you just talk to the camera, you only have to show something now and then.
So the next step was to try going on camera. That was a learning curve. I looked bad, the lighting was bad, I didn’t have the gear. But I slowly got the hang of it.
A day a week cutting out the gaps
Then I started a podcast with a friend. For the first episode we just hit record. We found the name of the show in that first conversation.
And then I edited it. And edited it. I cut every fumble and every pause, condensing it into something that fast and punchy. For a couple of years I spent a whole day every week editing that podcast.
One week I relaxed about how much I was taking out. It was the episode I was most nervous about.
That was the week an old colleague came out of the shadows on Twitter to say: this podcast is really great, you should listen to it.
Perfect is a way of hiding
You try to be perfect so that you’re not vulnerable to criticism. But when you’re not vulnerable, you’re not human. You’re not loveable. How is anyone supposed to relate to you?
I wish I’d understood that twenty years ago.
The first one always costs too much
Part of why the first thing you make takes so long is that you’re inventing everything at once. The visual language. The titles. The graphics. The style that every later episode will follow.
TV companies do this with a pilot, and they have the budget for it. But I would recommend that for you. I don’t think it makes more people watch your first video.
Nobody is paying you for polish
When I stopped selling my time as a contractor, the rules changed. Clients and employers judge you on how much work it was and how professional it looks. Once you’re living on results, all of that goes out of the window. If the idea is good, people engage with it. If it isn’t, they won’t, however much you polish it.
So I don’t have time to polish ideas before I know whether they work. And I don’t think anyone minds if one person’s videos don’t have a perfectly consistent style from the first to the last. This isn’t The Sopranos.
This isn’t Hollywood
I think this is where the perfectionism comes from. It’s video, so we compare it with every video we’ve ever seen. But not all video is created equal.
Most of what we’re making isn’t supposed to be Toy Story 5. It’s supposed to be better than sending an email. It brings back the nuance of being face to face, which we take for granted in person and lose in text.
So if you’re testing an idea, don’t start from what you see in cinema. Don’t even start from those polished Kickstarter videos all the product imagery and fancy focus pulls.
Start from this: what would I do in person, and how can I improve on that?
Professional, not perfect
You can still be good. Be tight. Keep a good pace. Have a clear message, and write and rewrite it.
If you want to be taken seriously, don’t use your laptop’s microphone and camera. When the audio is bad, people are busy just trying to hear you, and all the subtle human cues we’re never conscious of don’t get a chance to work. Fidelity is what lets you come through.
I’ve spent several years of my working life backing that idea, through Video Pencil, CueCam and Shoot.
Live production
This is why live production suits most of us so well. We don’t have a production budget, or the time to make it “perfect”. But we still have a huge edge over everyone who isn’t using video at all.
There are plenty of live production tools, your OBSs and your Ecamms,. I’ve used them but they serve a slightlly different purpose.
I’m not trying to give you a TV production studio. I’m trying to let you express yourself on video, enhanced in every way the technology allows, without removing you. The things that make you you are your edge. They’re what people connect to, as much as the idea.
Why not AI?
So I can’t think of a better way to make people disengage than generating your video with AI, even when the ideas are yours. Even an avatar of yourself takes the human connection out of it.
A slightly janky but real video is so much better than a slick, polished, generic AI one with exactly the same content. They’re worlds apart.
How does this fit in with CueCam?
CueCam is built around one idea: do the work before you press record, so there’s nothing to fix afterwards.
You write what you want to say as a script. Each part becomes a card, with whatever you want to show attached to it: a slide, a video, your screen. When you present, your words are in the teleprompter and you just press “next”. You don’t build scenes or run a switcher.
That’s the preparation. You can write and rewrite as much as you like, and that’s where the polish belongs.
Then you do it live, in one take, as yourself. If you want to point at something, you draw on it with Video Pencil, the way you’d pick up a pen in a meeting. If you stumble, you carry on, like you would in a room.
There’s no edit to get lost in. The video is finished when you stop talking.
That’s what I mean by professional, not perfect: prepared, clear, good-looking and good-sounding, with you still in it.
Don’t try to be perfect. Just be you, sharing an idea. Flawed. Human. Loveable.