Transcription
This is me, Andrew, and I'm a filmmaker with over 5 years of experience. And I always get asked the same question: "How do you make your videos?" Well, today I'm going to show you everything.
Stories are the backbone to any cinematic piece. When framing a story, I like to focus on three main components. And to break all this down, I'm going to use a pot and a plant. Oh, and a little bit of soil. All right, let's do this.
It's quite simple. A good story must contain structure, which is the pot, a character or a subject, which is the plant, and development, which is the soil. When all three of these things work together harmoniously, you already have the makings of a cinematic story.
"But Andrew, how do you come up with your stories?" That's a good question. Let me show you. I'm not going to lie, coming up with stories is hard. I often overthink, stress, and worry if any of it will make sense. The process can be messy and long.
Over the past year, I realized I kept trying to write stories I thought others would want to hear, constantly changing or explaining ideas based on what I assumed the audience would like. Recently, I decided to change that. I wanted to focus on stories that I found interesting, things that I was going through. That being said, the process can take a bit more time, and then out of nowhere, it'll all come together, and you'll have an idea for a story that you're proud of.
I know this isn't isn't a practical way to write, but everyone writes differently, so embrace the way you write. There's a lot of truth to that. At the end of the day, you have to follow your intuition, write what you know, and be willing to take risks. And if I've learned anything about storytelling, it's that the thing you find uninteresting about your story is often what others find fascinating. You got mail.
"But how do you turn your story into a video?" That's a good question. And the first thing you need is this: a camera. But first, the shot list. Everyone does it a little bit differently, but I'm going to show you what works best for me. The goal of the shot list is simple: match your visuals with your story. And the best way to do that is to mix your camera angles. Start wide and slowly go tight.
So, let me break down how I would shoot this line of story: "I was tired, so I listened to some music to unwind." First, let's get an establishing shot. This gives your audience understanding of where your subject is. You can get creative and add some movement or keep it static. After that, we'll show a closeup to communicate the emotion that he's feeling, inviting your audience to connect with the main character. Then, we'll introduce the action, which is listening to music. This can be a closeup. Show the relation between the subject and the action. This is where your creativity can show. You can experiment with different angles, movement, or anything that you feel is important to move the story forward.
"But how do you make your shots look so good?" Believe, believe it or not, it's actually pretty easy. I'll show you. And while most people think it takes a long time and a lot of headaches to achieve, it's actually a lot more simple than you think.
Before we ever click record, we need lighting. And a lot of ways, lighting will be the determining factor whether a shot looks cinematic or a shot looks bland. Lighting is ultimately one of the most powerful and most underrated tools in all of filmmaking. So, I want to show you guys how I would light a scene.
The first thing that I do is I use haze to diffuse the light and make everything look a little softer. Next, I'm going to set the background lights, which are the practical lights. These allow the audience to understand where the light is coming from. After that, I'm going to do what we call the cinematic triangle. So, there we go. Pretty much what is happening is I have a key light right in front of me, and it's just a softbox. It's the Zion 90D, and that is illuminating half of my face, and there's a soft runoff coming right here, which I could make harder by closing my blinds. There we go. So, there's no light coming. So, the whole goal here is to create contrast, shadow side.
First, I have my practical lights, which aren't adding any like light to my face. So, if I turn it off, it doesn't add almost anything to the way that I'm illuminated. But what it's doing is it's giving you the logical sense of this part of my face is being lit up by this. When in reality, it's my key light. So, if I turn off my key light, you can't really see me. There we go. So, you want to separate the levels of lighting. You want your depth lighting, which is your practical lights, and then you want your subject lighting, which is your key light, and that illuminates the individual.
"What does my editing process look like?" I'll show you. Editing is where you bring your video to life. Music, color, and rhythm. It's all put together in the edit. Everyone has a different editing style, so you have to find what works best for you.
The first thing I do is find music. Music will dictate the pace, the rhythm, and the emotion of the video. It's important that you find music that fits your story. Once I have my song, I'll edit each part to the rhythm of the music.
Once my music is chosen and I have my shots, I'll start on the narration process. Voiceovers are not easy, and for a while, mine never sounded good. To help, I put together a free audio preset that's linked in my description below. Totally free and really easy to use, so check it out if you want it.
Once everything is put together in the timeline, it's time to color grade. Color grading is the life source of your video. It takes footage that looks lifeless and, well, turns it into this. Color grading is difficult, and it takes a lot of time to practice, so I want to show you exactly how I color grade.
First, I'll get my shot. It's important to make sure lighting, ISO, and picture profile are all working together. For me, I shoot in a low ISO, using picture profile 8, using the cinematic triangle for my lighting. After that, I'll import my footage into DaVinci. This is where it gets fun. I created a preset that mimics the depth of color related to film. It's designed to be a one-click grade. To prove it, I'll show you. All I do is drag and drop. Sometimes I do have to change the white balance and exposure, but most times it comes out exactly the way I want. This took years to develop, and it's something I'm really proud of. It's linked in the description below if you'd like to take. Good luck.
Okay, so we're shooting the thumbnail. Big R, big softbox right here. All right, so the way I do my thumbnails is I record a scene and then I just pull the stills from it, and that's that. That looks good. All right, I hope this is the thumbnail. Here we go. You ready to see me like pose? That's it. So I just, I don't know, I just try different, a few different things. I'm going to put my arm like that. So my big thing with thumbnails is getting contrasting color, so green, blue, red, and good lighting.
Okay, so for all those like pan and shots, some of you might have been wondering, there we go, um, might have been wondering like how I did that, and that's with this slider. So I'll put the camera on, and essentially, I'll just slide it like that. Um, this isn't the best slider. I don't even know what it is. I just found it at a thrift store, so I kind of just grabbed it. Um, but if you're wondering how I did it, I literally would like, let's see. So if it's like this, and the camera's on here, I would literally just do this. So it would just be off to the side, and I would move it with my hand underneath so you couldn't see it, and then just move it.
A lot of people have been asking me, sorry, I keep like changing the light. Um, a lot of people have been asking me how I get that like warm light. Well, I use this sunset lamp, and it's really, it's kind of cool, but it's super easy. Um, I just have it like this behind me somewhere. Kind of go like that. So, wonder if I did this, how cool that would be. Uh, not that cool. Okay, so that's like $10 off Amazon. You can definitely do that. Wow, it's bright. Okay, I'm wrapping. I like that the light's green. I'm wrapping the day. Friday. And again, only got about 40 seconds of footage. Um, filmed for about 4 hours.
But today was very much like, I would come up with an idea, I would try a lot of different things, and then a few things would stick. A lot of video creating is that. It's the same with music. It's not that we have this idea completely fleshed out and it's going to be good, but we have an idea, we try it out, and it's like trial and error. You try something, it doesn't work, so then you adapt and you try something else. And that's what cinematic footage is. That's what cinematography is. That's what storytelling is. You try it, you try to go down an avenue, it makes sense, and so you build off of that. And then it doesn't work, so then you have to go back and you build off something else. And that's what these last few days have been. It's been, um, a lot of time, a lot of effort. Things have worked, things haven't worked. My battery is at like 1%, so I should probably end this video.
But yeah, it's been a fun process making this video. I've kind of held myself to a higher standard because I want to do, I want to do this video really well, and I want to, I want to share really honestly, um, everything that I'm doing. So guys, it is pre-production day, which is awesome. So I'm pretty much going to plan out my whole video, um, that you just watched, how to make cinematic videos, and I want to show you how I put and organize everything together using a great platform called Milanote.
Pretty much, Milanote is an amazing tool for organizing creative projects. I use Milanote because it's essentially a digital whiteboard that you can kind of just throw everything onto however you feel fits your creative style. So I wanted to show you what my storyboard, my script, and how I curate everything to allow me to film in the most efficient way.
So, one of the first things that I do is I'm going to try to find two colors that I like that contrast each other that I'm going to use throughout my video. And Milanote has an awesome feature that allows you to kind of pick and choose colors, and it kind of has these little color cards that you can just place in your board. I also love using the checklist feature that Milanote has. It allows me to stay on track because I often find myself starting here, moving over to something over here. I have a very sporadic brain, so having this checklist in the middle of my mood board and script is amazing.
From there, as you can see, I like to really rely on visual inspiration. I am such a visual person. I get ideas, thoughts, I, I, I curate moods all from visual inspiration. So Milanote has an amazing feature where you can literally just drag and drop photos. You can connect photos to these lines, so if you get like a shot list, you can kind of connect your photos to your shots, which is something I do. And I just throw it all in one place so that I can get this idea and this feel of how this video is going to look and feel.
Now, again, back to the color thing. What I really like is I'll curate everything on my board, and then I'll actually take a step back and I'll say, "What colors am I noticing?" I'm seeing a lot of blues, I'm seeing a lot of magentas, I'm seeing a lot of reds. So then maybe that's where I'm naturally leaning. Let's start to implement those colors. So one thing I have is another board within this board that gives me color grade ideas. So I'll click that, and I kind of just curate all of my colors in one place.
And the great thing with Milanote is you can actually invite other people to the board, and they can give and leave a little note if they like it or not. So if you need advice, if you think something's, if you're unsure about something, you can invite your friend to take a look, which is what I do with all of my colors.
Another amazing feature that I use all the time is the fact that you can add music to your Milanote board. And I really suggest that you guys do this. It is great to play the music that you want in, in your video, as you're script writing. So that's why all of this is so great because you can have everything together all at once. So as you can see, I have my script here to the left. I color code it, and I will play my song as I'm writing, and so I'm able to kind of curate my script in a way that is on tempo, that's on beat with the song that I'm going to use.
Guys, I think Milanote is one of the greatest creative platforms that you can use to implement and bring your ideas to life. Milanote is available for free with no time limit. So if you want to sign up, just use the link in the description below. And guys, I highly suggest that you check them out.
So guys, if you've made it to this part of the video, that means you are a part of the 20% of people that have watched it all the way through. Statistically, only about 20% of people watch YouTube videos all the way through. So I always love, if you did make it this far, to leave a comment saying, "You are a part of the 20%," so that I can connect with you.
If you want to make something creatively, if you're a writer, a musician, you make videos, whatever it is, the greatest thing that has helped me in my creative journey is to allow myself to fail. Fail often, fail a lot, fail big. The more you fail, the more you learn what you want to do and how you want to do it. But trying to be perfect and trying to create and curate things that are perfect only allows you to play in the realm of things that you know.
If you fail, it means you've done something you don't know how, and it didn't work out the best. But it's in that act of failing that you start to learn how to do it a little bit better. So in this journey of filmmaking, I have failed a lot, and I've looked back at my videos and I've asked myself, "What can I learn? How can I get better? And how can I fail again?" And then I embrace that.
So guys, fail often and fail a lot, and let me know what it is that you would like to be doing creatively and how this video has helped you. So I'll see you guys all in the next one. Peace.