If you currently go out to shoot footage to make a video and end up coming back with more
footage than you know what to do with, or even less footage than you needed, and then
you just end up not making the video at all, then in this video I’m gonna show you how
you can completely avoid that just by really planning out your videos, whether you shoot
vlogs, How Tos, Tutorials, Travel videos, Educational videos, any video really, you
just need to plan properly, and I’m gonna show you how.
So the first thing that you wanna do in planning is make a bullet point list of all the things
you might want to cover in your video. Just get your ideas down on paper or something
like Google Docs so that you can just start to just visualise what your video's gonna
cover. This is also gonna give you a better idea if it’s a video that you’d actually
even be interested in making in the first place. Then the second thing is to think about
your video in sections, or chapters. Once you’ve made your bullet points, try and
group them up or think about your bullet points as individual sections of your video. So for
example, if you were shooting a travel video and you wanted to show off some of the awesome
places you visited, where you could grab some great food, activities that you could do,
that kind of thing, you could basically break that down into sections, and you might also
find that you could split all this out into a few videos rather than one super super long
one that could just end up being boring to watch in one long go. Another reason why this
planning strategy is really handy actually is because YouTube allows you to add chapters
to your video when you upload it by adding timestamps in the description, so people are
gonna be able to skip to certain parts of your video, rather than starting to watch
it, getting bored and then leaving because they can't quickly find what they're looking
for. Instead, if they know what’s in it, they're potentially more likely to stick around
and watch the whole or at least the majority of the video.
Now the third thing that you want to do whilst you’re planning (which doesn’t necessarily
apply to vlogging) is write a script. You might be thinking ‘sod that!’ But hear
me out. Before I started doing this, I’d literally just switch my camera on and wing
it, and then I’d forget to mention something that I wanted to talk about, or wonder mid
way through if I repeated myself a lot, and then I’d have to shoot the whole talking
piece again multiple times, and that was just a pain in the arse, and a right faff, to the
point where sometimes I didn’t even end up finishing the video because I lost the
direction that I was going with it and then at that point just lost interest in making
the video. So I’ve saved myself a lot of time by actually writing out a script for
each of my videos. So give it a go, write a script and then reread it several times
to make sure you’ve covered everything and to make sure it sounds natural when you say
it. I know this is sounding like a lot of work, but you’re actually making the whole
filming and editing process that much quicker by doing this up front. And you don’t have
to necessarily write out a whole script if you’re not planning on using a teleprompter,
but it can still help you get all your ideas out in this way. Also, this is a really great
way to know what b-roll you need to shoot ahead of going out to shoot so that you’re
not just willy nilly shooting anything and everything, or missing shots and having to
go back out to shoot stuff that you forgot or didn't think about. Build your script from
your bullet points and use the script to plan your b-roll, it’ll also make editing a lot
quicker because you can look at your script and see where a piece of b-roll needs to go
when you start cutting it all together.
And that brings me onto the fourth tip: make a shot list. This doesn’t have to be super
detailed laying out what angles or focal lengths you’re gonna use, but just loosely write
out a list of what b-roll you want to shoot and where you want to shoot it for example
indoors or outdoors, or in certain rooms because it’ll make going out and filming much more
enjoyable and quick. Also, the benefit to writing a script is that you can go through
the entire script and highlight text that’d be good to shoot b-roll for. Then these highlighted
sections would make up your shot list. But if you don’t write a script and just go
with summary bullet points, you can still write a shot list by looking at that list
and thinking about what you’ll be covering in the video, but this is why just writing
a script makes it so much easier because you can just pick out your shot list from it even
if that’s all you used the script for.
I’ll delve into b-roll a lot more in upcoming videos because there’re several types of
b-roll that you can shoot depending on what your video’s about, but that’s it for
planning. I hope this video was useful. If so hit the like button, and drop me
a comment if you have any questions. Thanks for watching, see you next time!