- Hey, there. Caleb Wojcik from DIY Video Guy here,
and I've gotten feedback from peers
and people in this audience
that you want to see more behind the scenes
on some of the client work that we do,
so in this video I'm going to be showing you
the behind the scenes on how we made
the Freedom Journal Kickstarter video
for John Lee Dumas over at Entrepreneur on Fire,
and I don't know if you can see that monitor behind me,
but a few days into the launch of the Kickstarter project,
it's already over $150,000,
and we are honored and blessed to be a part of this project
to help get John's book out there,
but in this video we'll show you behind the scenes
on how we put it together, so let's get started.
The first thing that we did, both internally Tim and I,
and working with John was work up the script.
He wrote a tentative script and then sent it over,
I reworked it, shortened it, tweaked it a little bit,
put in my own spin and narrative,
and then John looked it over, made a few changes more,
and we kind of got the script locked
after two or three back and forths.
Then the next thing that we did
was something we haven't done too much of for videos,
but we spent a lot of time on this one
because we wanted to storyboard it,
and the reason we wanted to storyboard it is
because usually shorter videos need even more work
and more planning put into them
to make them really good,
so what we wanted to do with this video
because it wasn't something like a product
that you could show it working
like you can with a lot of Kickstarter videos
like the cooler with speakers
or any of the other popular Kickstarter projects,
this one was a book.
It was a journal,
so we had to make this inanimate object
into something bigger than that,
and so through storyboarding and through the script,
we were able to think of a lot of different ways
that we could visually show the kinds of things
you would use this journal for.
It's a journal to help you through 100 days,
complete one goal,
and so we wanted to have people thinking
about the kinds of goals they could be completing
when they watch the video,
and storyboarding was a big part of that.
What we used was the Paper app by 53 on the iPad
and a stylus,
and we mapped out the framing of some of the shots.
A lot of them were static and overhead,
and we spent a lot of time in that stage
of making this video.
Next up we went to John's to pitch that storyboarding idea
the morning of our shoot.
- Stand bag, slider, camera
because we need it for shooting scenes in traffic
because we're going to be in a lot of traffic,
teleprompter, jank audio bag.
(laughing)
- This is the best blog ever.
- Best blog ever.
- Best blog ever!
So we shot the talking head piece,
we shot some B-roll of him and Kate using the journal
in their home living room,
and we also shot some photos and we went outside
to shoot some more photos as well,
and then we shot a little bit of B-roll around their home
of him podcasting and doing other things,
so that was a wrap on that shoot day,
spent a lot of time tweaking the setup
to get it looking really good,
and then we ran through the script using a teleprompter
on an iPad and using my IKAN teleprompter
that I've reviewed before on the YouTube channel,
and we got through that section of the video.
The next day we focused on shooting a lot of the B-roll
of the book in our studio.
This is something that we're still pushing ourself
to get a little bit better at,
doing glamour shots of the physical products.
It'll help us as we review more video equipment
and gear for you guys,
and to show off what the gear looks like
and how to use it,
but like I said, this is a book
and so there were only so many ways you can show a book,
so we had to get as creative as we could
as we shot this thing.
Next we started shooting some of the live action B-roll
of the introduction shots, all those top down shots,
and how they all connected with movement
and made sure they all looked good.
I've had really good sound,
and we filmed a lot of those just right here in my home,
and we had a lot of the props here as well,
and there were only a handful of things we had to borrow
like the racing bib we got from a friend,
but there are a lot of different ways you can get creative
and make your videos a little bit more visually interesting,
just by grabbing additional things around your home
to use as props in them,
so it doesn't look so plain and bland.
Also while we were working on all that B-roll,
Tim was putting together the A-roll,
the talking head piece, getting the script lined up
with the best takes John had while we filmed at his house,
and going through each of those and nailing it down
to see how long this video is,
and slowly injecting the B-roll as we were shooting it
instead of waiting to the end
and seeing if we missed something.
After we locked down the story part on our end,
as well as did some color correcting and grading
and picked some music and tweaked the audio,
we sent it over to John for revisions through Whipster.
He had some changes,
and the biggest thing here was we shot a longer script
with different sections that we ended up taking out
and putting further down the page
or having him use for other marketing purposes,
so that that main Kickstarter video was a little bit shorter
and closer to the three minute mark
versus a five or six minute mark.
The last thing pre-launch was to have my wife, Jen,
do some of the photo editing on some of the photos
that I took while we were at John's
and get them out so he could start doing
some pre-launch marketing,
and lastly I shot some pictures top down
of the book at different stages,
and then created animated GIFs from scratch,
taking each individual part of filling out a page
of the book,
making it different Photoshop layers,
and then stacking those on top of each other
inside of Premier by bringing them all in
as individual layers,
and then having transitions that kind of made it look
like it was being written out,
then I exported that from Premier Pro
and used an app called GIF Brewery
of "Jiff" Brewery depending on how you pronounce GIF,
and then that GIF or "Jiff" could be put
on their Kickstarter page and we went through some revisions
of that as well.
Then on launch day,
John held a little Kickstarter launch party in San Diego.
I think there was about 40 or 50 people there
at Co-mmunity co-working space in North Park, San Diego,
and went there, got to chat with a bunch of people,
got to see John launch his book.
I think by the time we left that party,
it was at $80,000 that he'd raised already.
Now a couple days later at the time of filming this
it's at about $150,000.
Congrats to John and all the hard work he put into this book
and it was just great to be a part of this launch.
Hope you guys learned a little bit
about the behind the scenes
of making a Kickstarted video like this
for someone like John, for one of our clients,
and hope to do more of these in the future.
Subscribe here on YouTube for more videos like this,
and give it a thumbs up if you like watching
the behind the scenes.
Thanks so much for watching,
and I'll see you in another one.
Cheers.