Creating a welcome video for the home page of my motivatedtolearn.com site has been on my to-do list for a long time. Last night, I decided I was going to do it, no matter what. A couple of hours later I had a number of videos done but none that I was really happy with, so I’ll try again today. If you see one when you go to that page, you’ll know I was successful.
In case you were thinking of doing a talking head video yourself as well, these are the steps and I’ll mention where I had trouble:
Over a year ago when I attended the NAMS marketers workshop in Atlanta that I like so much, one of the presenters was Maritza Parra. She uses online tv and video a lot and showed us a quick, non-techie way to record a video presentation that looked totally natural and not like you were reading a script. Using her laptop, Maritza went to cueprompter.com and copied what she wanted to say into their free teleprompter. Then she duct taped her video camera to the top of the screen, turned the teleprompter and the camera on and started to speak. The words scrolled up the screen as she read them, but since she was facing the camera, it all looked totally unrehearsed. The photo at the beginning of this post shows one you can buy on Amazon and the idea is the same.
It all looked easy when Maritza did it, but the teleprompter was a little harder to use than I realized. I adjusted the settings so that the words were fairly large and got started. These are my results:
- first attempt, the text scrolled up so slowly that there were long pauses.
- 2nd, I tried making the font size smaller, then the text moved so quickly I couldn’t read it fast enough.
- 3rd, finally noticed at the top of my cueprompter screen were numbers for the speed of the scrolling.
- Changed the number. Still too fast. Changed again. A bit too slow.
- Finally, got the speed right and managed to record the whole video. When I reviewed it, the audio part was fine, but I didn’t like the way my face was so close-up and showed every blink of my eyes.
I’m not looking for perfect, but am going to try again before putting anything up on the site. I was working with my netbook and standing fairly close. For my next try, I think I’ll use my desktop computer instead. Then the screen and text will be bigger and I’ll be farther away.
Wish me luck and please comment and let me know if you’ve tried this yourself or plan to.
Until next time,
P.S. I’ll be going to Atlanta again in a few weeks to attend NAMS 7 (I’ve been to all but the first one, it’s that good). If you’d like to join me and learn from Maritza and a lot of other smart online marketers as well, in a friendly, hands-on environment, click this NAMS link for more information. And make sure you let me know if you’re planning to be there so I can introduce you to some people.