Best Tips To Make Better Home Movies With Your Phone
As we approach Father’s day, it’s a good reminder that being a parent is about both being present for your kids, but also about constantly being dumbstruck at how quickly the time has passed. One great way to help you do both, is to take home movies. Right now the cameras powered by even an older phone far exceeds the imaging and audio capabilities of our parents and grandparents. But it does take a little thoughtful technique to get the most out of filming for memories, here’s some tips.
Get Documenting
The goal of your home movie should be to document now. What do you look like, what does your family, pets, and home all look like at their best but also most normal. I say this because I understand we all could look better, but if you spend all of your time trying to get everything to look perfect, you’ll never hit a record.
Remember why you are making this—so you can reflect on the people in your life and the places you live and visit. It doesn’t need to be overly stage managed and conceived. Show the sign of the zoo and everyone walking past it. Show the messy kitchen if it’s generally messy. Show your mom, she may be gone soon.
The video linked above helped me recall that my son wasn’t even riding a real bike a year ago. Now he’s zipping around on one.
Get The Shot
Let the action come to you. Be prepared to move closer, capture faces, and allow for your subjects to leave and enter the frame. Watch that video above. They were just doing what was natural to them, but I ran ahead, or held back, or let them go left to right in the frame.
Compositions like that will help you edit and will give your movie life.
Also consider upgrading your phone camera app to something like Filmic Pro.
Get Editing
After taking the video on your phone, there are several apps that allow you to directly edit it, and most keep the original video clips intact.
My biggest secret to editing, cut out the boring parts. What’s boring? Things we’ve seen already, parts where the subject or actions aren’t clear.
People also can get lost in the weeds on which program to edit with, use the one that’s accessible to you. We use DaVinci Resolve which is cross platform on desktop and has an amazing free option, and iMovie or LumaFusion on ios. This list has a comprehensive review for ios and Android.
Get The Best Audio
One of the biggest problems with taking home videos (and any videos really) is the audio quality. Consider adding an external microphone like the Rode Video Micro, or only using incidental audio.
You may also want to look at using a music service like Epidemic Sound, or the YouTube.com audio library in the creator studio.
Get Posting
I find the quicker I can shoot, edit, and post something, the better. It allows me to really be present in the creation of the movie, but also allows me to move on after it’s done, without worrying and belaboring it.
Conclusion
We all can make amazing movies with our phones, use those tools, get more comfortable with them and you can create lasting, loving documents for the years to come.
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Ryan Reynolds X Taylor Swift
Let’s talk about the blockbuster Match.com commercial that dropped yesterday.
But first let’s step back and look at their channel in total. They had an engagement problem on their YouTube Channel. Match is a company with $2B+ in revenue for 2020, and a YouTube channel with 5,000 subscribers.
Let’s break down where most of their content lies on the Uncaring Valley.
A Typical Upload from Match.com’s YouTube Channel
This is a basic ad let’s look at the numbers. Comments turned on, but no one cared to leave one. 26,486 views with one like and five dislikes.
This is the the bottom of the soulless gulch. With so few likes (or dislikes) and no comments, the views clearly have come from paid media. No shame in using paid media, but if you watch the video, you can clearly tell (and there’s an onscreen disclaimer to confirm) that these are actors. It’s not coming off as genuine.
I put this effort at the bottom of the Soulless Gulch. No one cares about this content.
Let’s Make Love with Rebel
A year ago they had a campaign, Let’s Make Love with Rebel, starring Rebel Wilson, let’s break down those numbers. They made 13 videos, ranging from :16 to 1:22. Comments are turned off. so we can’t use that as a metric.
Across the 13 videos there were 6M Views, and 2500 likes or dislikes. The first few videos seemed to generate genuine enthusiasm, with 456 likes on the initial video, and 288 on the second and morelike than dislikes. But those numbers quickly drop off as the series progresses.
I put this as better than the above campaign, but still in the depths of the Soulless Gulch.
Engagement is easy with Ryan Reynolds in the mix.
Ryan Reynolds somehow manages not to be a total hateable person. He’s rich, successful, seems to have deep friendships, a great marriage and now he’s spinning up a full-blown marketing agency.
That he is also likeable is perhaps his greatest achievement.
Let’s look at the numbers: 7.3M Views in the last day across two videos. 500,0000 interactions on YouTube and Twitter. Astounding for a commercial.
What makes this work — collaboration, production value, and reading the room.
Collaboration
If this ad was made made Weiden+Kennedy or Chiat Day or any of the other large agencies, I think of course it would be well executed, but it would miss out on two key aspects. First is Ryan Reynolds is a social media superstar. These ads went on his channels and got major cred and boost from that. It feels more like a short film sponsored by Match.
Second, Ryan Reynolds can call up Taylor Swift and ask for the unreleased remaster of her song and get her to tweet about it. This is first and foremost a collab between Ryan and Taylor. That’s what turns this from a simple ad into a newsworthy event.
Production value
If You’re going to have a newsworthy event, you need to support that with the highest production values as possible. This is on par with the best Super Bowl commercials and approaching Hollywood Blockbuster levels with the makeup, production design, and locations. If you’re going to go big, make sure it’s actually big and nail it with the best. The Rebel Wilson campaign wilts in comparison — a single set, an actor without a strong social following, and lacking anything newsworthy.
Reading the Room
Everyone is tired of what this year has been, and some of us still dread what’s to come in the next few months. This is such a direct way to talk about it all, without getting bogged down in specifics of the year, or mentioning any features of the app.
I would put this with the best in class of commercials and advertising.
TL;DR You can cross the Soulless Gulch, but you need a strong voice and a budget to, ahem, match if you want to get there.
The Uncaring Valley
A New Way To Think About Making Social Video
In animation and robotics there’s a term bandied around called the Uncanny Valley. It’s a term that’s been around for over 40 years, coined from a translation of Masahiro Mori’s 1978 book Robots: Fact, Fiction, and Prediction, written by Jasia Reichardt.
Here’s what it looks like:
This graph illustrates that we humans are more accepting and empathetic with robots and computer animations up until a point, after which we get creeped out because the humanoid starts looking less like a manufactured object and more like an actual human that isn’t quite right.
An oft-cited example of this is in the 2004 movie, The Polar Express.
Even searching for this gif killed my soul a little
The dead eyes, the lack of facial movement with a somewhat realistic face. That’s the uncanny valley.
Onwards took a less “realistic” approach.
Animators and roboticists have two ways to tackle this problem: reduce the character design to be more abstract and look cuter, more “cartoony,” and less like a real human face. They can also go boldly towards full-on hyper realism. Both can work, but it’s usually easier to dial down the realism and go for the cute approach, because if you miss on the hyper-realism you risk tanking the whole project.
Defining the Uncaring Valleys
There is something similar that helps describe why your videos aren’t getting shared organically. I’m calling it the Uncaring Valley. And instead of it being a single dip like the uncanny valley, there are two low spots.
The upper left corner is where completely unpolished, but compelling news events live. These are things like police misconduct, spontaneous global celebrations, and natural disasters. They aren’t edited, they may not be in the perfect position, but they are interesting and shareable because of the story they are showing and they are breaking news.
These videos can’t be particularly be planned and only have value to news organizations and social platforms.
As we proceed along the curve we enter the first downward slope into the Uncaring Valley, the Disorganized Gulch.
Disorganized Gulch is so named because of the messy execution. Very little thought goes into what you’re trying to accomplish, camerawork is lacking, audio is poor and there is no regimented release strategy. Disorganized Gulch is where most User Generated Content (UGC) lives because it’s not newsworthy, and not particularly shareable unless you know the people in the videos.
As production quality and organization of the video improves, you move away from Disorganized Gulch and into The Shareability Sweet Spot, and this is where you want your videos to live. Going back to the uncanny valley analogy, this is where your cute and cartoonish robots live, think Wall•E, or Buzz Lightyear. The best in class of this sort of video content is timely, efficient, and polished. Think of your favorite online video stars that produce a lot of content, but still have a strong connection to you and just overall kick butt. Their videos land firmly in this high ground.
Let’s look at the Washington Post’s TikTok channel as a large brand that is killing it by using a consistent release cadence and good enough production values. Dave Jorgenson helms the channel, and he is able to follow on trends quickly, post daily, and be irreverent without being blasphemous. It’s sort of amazing.
Videos slide off of this sweet spot when something gets out of balance. The usual suspect is lack of immediacy. When you have too many cooks in the kitchen, or too many layers of approval before a video is released, the immediacy starts to slow down. When there is no urgency, there’s less of a need to release the content now. And without the need to release right away, there’s the temptation to tinker and “fix.”
While I’m not suggesting you release a video riddled with errors, it’s better for you as a brand to treat content release akin to software releases — release content quickly and often. Be accurate and polished, but also respect your release schedule and refine your production pipeline to be faster moving forward.
Lorne Michael, producer of SNL, has famously said:
“The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.”
Nothing is ever really ready, or finished, it’s simply time to go into the world so you can more forward and try again. If you don’t have a self-imposed release schedule, you will not release anything because something else will always be more important or the situation will change and the content won’t be relevant.
Consistently releasing also allows you and your brand to more authentically trend hop because the pipeline to create and approve content quickly is already in your wheelhouse. Trend hopping is always tricky, but there’s nothing worse than jumping onto a trend when it’s already dead.
For those that can’t resist the urge to keep tinkering, they will inevitably slide into the second Uncaring Valley, the Soulless Ravine. This is where budgets escalate, connection with the audience weakens, and ultimately no one cares about what is produced.
Content that lives in the Soulless Ravine is fine. There’s nothing wrong with it, but there’s also nothing right.
Content that lives in the Soulless Ravine is fine. There’s nothing wrong with it, but there’s also nothing right. This is where paid media goes into, and may be somewhat effective, but also might be better served making a ton more videos in the sweet spot.
The Soulless Ravine is like a private box at a stadium, there’s a few people there in their fancy streetwear and high-end sneakers, but there isn’t a lot of joy to be seen, and fewer true fans. The Soulless Ravine is where there’s a lot of self-congratulation, and a lot of paid media support.
Where the Disorganized Gulch is lacking in organization and intention, the Soulless Ravine is choked off with both. It’s art by committee and is rarely embraced by a wider community.
The final peak transcends everything and is where most of us aspire to work at, but never fully achieve. It’s the nexus of art and commerce — Avengers Endgame, The Mandalorian, Christopher Nolan (the man and the body of filmmaking), or Game of Thrones. Approaching this nexus are commercials at their very best — i.e., the two Super Bowl commercials each year we all remember, and things like Apple product announcements.
Avengers Endgame cost $500M to make and advertise, it’s universally lauded as an artistic and commercial success and Marvel spent $2.75M per minute to make that movie.
Ms. Nygaard’s most recent video
Our favorite YouTuber is Safiya Nygaard, she shoots thoughtfully executed videos using a $500 camera, has great audio, fun concepts, and spends a lot of time with a small crew making them. On some of her higher-budgeted episodes she rents studios and buys every color of lipstick. So guesstimating that she spends $5k-10k per video in labor and materials, sometimes more and sometimes way less.
Her latest video is 38 minutes long and has 4.4M views in two weeks. If we say that this was closer to $10k in cost, her cost per minute is $263/minute or four orders of magnitude less than Endgame. Meaning for every single minute of Endgame, Saf could shoot over 10,000 minutes of content. She could put out a 38 minute video every day for 9 months for every single minute of Endgame. If she was given the whole Endgame, Ms. Nygaard could produce a single video that lasts 3.5 years.
So is Endgame overpriced? Is Safiya Nygaard underpaid? No and maybe? That’s besides the point.
Navigating the The Uncaring Valleys is a process and not a straight line. So much of creating any sort of content for online audiences is about consistency — releasing enough for the algorithms and the audiences to build with you. But you can’t just release consistently, you also need to learn from each and every release so that you’re improving and growing with your audience.
Spending money to rise from the Disorganized Gulch to the Social Sweet spot is very possible. Training costs money, better gear costs money, hiring helpers costs money. That investment also requires the time to grow and find your voice.
But at some point you hit diminishing returns. Spending $200–500/minute will (probably) pull you out of the Disorganized Gulch, but spending more than $500/minute on production doesn’t guarantee anything, and will probably doom your video to be beautiful, but unshared in the Soulless Ravine.
If you’re dreaming of a 6-figure video for your brand, consider a long term strategy and make 10 videos for that budget (or even 100 videos…) and have some money left over for buying media to boost awareness of your work ($200M+ of Endgame’s budget was for advertising).
Quantity is always superior to quality when it comes to creating for online audiences, and using the Uncaring Valleys model can help you and your organization navigate those tradeoffs.
How do you apply this?
Master the basics of video making
You need solid understanding of writing, audio, and camera operation.
Think in terms of campaigns and series, not single videos
Spending $60,000 on a single video is a much worse idea than making 40 $1,500 videos. Audiences build with consistency.
Optimize for speed and consistency over looks
Set a release schedule and stick to it. Whether that’s daily, weekly, or monthly. Do everything in your power to keep hitting that release schedule and work to be more efficient and responsive to audience feedback.
Use any extra dollars on marketing
Video for business shouldn’t be only organic views. See which videos your audiences organically respond to and then spend money promoting those. And use videos to find new customers and target them.
Kent Nichols is the founder of Agent Bee Agency, an agency dedicated to making social content that people love.