Some of you may have noticed that the Soliloquy YouTube channel has reached 10000 subscribers.
This is amazing so THANK YOU for giving this channel a chance.
Some of you may have also noticed that we’re actually a bit over 10K now, but it wouldn’t
be a Soliloquy celebration video if it were on time, since it take me some time to make
my videos.
Which brings me to the main point of today, One of the most common questions I’m asked
is: How do you make your videos?
What software do you use?
You guys are really quite determined to find this out.
Well today your wish is my command, as for the rest of this video I’ll briefly walk
you through the lifecycle of a Soliloquy Video.
Every video begins with an idea.
These come from a variety of places.
Podcasts, other YouTube videos, just random thoughts that pop into my head,
and, of course, your ideas from the comments.
When I have an idea for a topic it gets added to the list
and eventually I might look into it further.
When it comes time to have a closer look into a topic, I’ll begin with some preliminary
research, the goal is to identify if there is sufficient interesting material to make
a video on the topic, and will involve an hour or two, reading Wikipedia, blogs, and watching
watching other videos that might already be out related to the topic.
In most cases this is where videos is scrapped.
Assuming I decide that the topic warrants a more thorough look, I then start to dig
deeper into the topic; at this point I’ll turn to books and journal articles and try
and get to the bottom of the story.
Then comes writing and the rewriting and the changes and the more rewriting and the more
changes, well the - you get the point.
With a script finished, it’s time to break out my microphone and record the audio
(product details and links of my current kit in the description by the way)
This relies on me finding a time. When there isn't too much noise
from the playground across the road from our apartment or from the next door dance School
I probably should record in a specialized program but I actually record directly into
Adobe Premier Pro.
I’m not terribly good at this part so it takes me much longer than it should to record,
but once this infuriating process is over, I have to tackle the audio edit.
I’m always trying to improve my audio quality, and some of that is applying some filters
to the audio, for my previous video on photosynthesis, I added a deesser, an equalizer to make the
track sound a bit warmer and some soft compression to normalize the volume.
Now I need to cut out the many many mmmmmm
Some of that is waited for cars to drive passed
Before I actually say random
@#$%!*
Now I need to cut out the many many many mistakes I made while recording
and get the track to form a coherent story.
Everyone has a voice in their head that they like and a voice that is in the recordings
that they like, err less.
I’m no different and I can find it as awkward as anyone editing the recording of my own
voice, but once it’s done I send that Audio over to Adobe After Effects to make the animations.
A quick side note, my early videos right up until “Everything you ever wanted to know
about colour” *inclusive*, had their animations done in a little known animation program called
PowerPoint.
If you’re wanting to start making videos, just do it, you can always improve your quality
and technology later.
But back to After Effects.
Where I have an audio file, and not much else.
So before I animate I need to have some artwork.
I make my drawings in Illustrator, some drawing Some Drawings I make from scratch,
but some I base of public domain vector graphics
that I can find on sites like Wikimedia commons and pixabay.
This artwork is then animated back in After Effects.
Like with the audio quality, with each video I’m trying to improve and try a new technique.
In “Photosynthesis is Fascinating” the growing plant you see at the beginning is
the first time I’ve used that technique, in “Why is Canada not part of the United
States?” it’s the first time I had animated a pen writing on a piece of paper, and in
“From Empire to Europe: Imperial Preference” animated a smoke effect for the first time.
With the animations done, this is then rendered as a very large avi file, and brought back
into premiere pro to meet up with the original audio.
The intro sequence and endslate sequences are added, as well as background music and
occasionally some folly sounds, and the video is ready to be rendered as an mp4 file for
upload to YouTube.
Preferably I get someone, usually my wife, to watch it before uploading it to YouTube,
and usually there is a small error of some sort that requires fixing.
While it’s uploading; I make a thumbnail in illustrator and set up an automatic search of Reddit
for the video being shared over on if this then that
I paste in the description and the tag; and set up closed captions, cards and annotations.
Once that’s all set up I hit the publish button and the video goes live.
I then wait for the first comment, if it say’s “first” I issue the commenter one of my
coveted Certificates of Firstcommenthood.
Finally I return to the comments to read about all the things I got wrong.
Then it's back to the list to start all over again!