19 April 2020

Getting More Into Making Videos


Real Estate Videos
When I heard about the power of video for real estate, I knew I had to begin publishing videos about real estate. Having now been publishing real estate videos for over a half-year, I still have more coming up.

That, in itself, is not particularly noteworthy.

Surprisingly, however, I received a lot of compliments on my videos. What I hadn’t realized was that not a lot of other real estate agents were publishing videos, at least not here in Cincinnati.

And Also JewishDrinking.com podcasts
While that felt good to receive the compliments, I also began to work more on video-editing due to my video and podcasting for JewishDrinking.com.

A Few with Drew
A big jump for me recently, however, has been doing my daily Coronatine project, “A Fewwith Drew”, a [nearly] daily video of 3-5 minutes speaking to the camera about a few topics and possibly with drink in hand (whether coffee, tea, beer, whiskey, etc.). Inspired by Gary Vaynerchuk’s “Tea with Gary Vee”, I decided to embark on this project, but I knew I didn’t have the time nor did I have the energy to engage in another video project involving editing. So I decided to do something I’ve never done with video-production and publishing: no editing.

Background
For some context, I began playing around with publishing videos in 2008-2009 (which also happened to be my final year in rabbinical school), on a few topics, but also did a weekly vlog post for 26 weeks (yes, a full half-year). (Here's one of my final ones, following that 26th weekly vlog post.)

(While I had a lot of enjoyment as a kid recording videos of various things (including videos of me shooting hoops and playing other sports with friends (I remember having a great clip of a really awesome badminton move with a friend)), there wasn’t a lot of editing, although I did sometimes hook up two VHRs and copy over certain scenes from one VHS casette to the other one (such as that badminton highlight), but none of that was in the era of publishing to the Internet.)

Following that vlogging experience, I then did my 30 Videos of 30 Drinks by a 30-Year Old, which was a cool project, which also got me an article write-up in an Israeli newspaper, but the most important takeaway for me from it was thinkingabout my speaking to the camera, especially in seeking to decrease or even eliminating filler words (e.g. eh, um, uh) from my speech, even if just on-camera. Of course, it also helped my video-editing skills through practice.

At this point, when people ask which software I used for video-editing, the answer is simple: I used Windows Movie Maker, which had come with my computer. That’s I got my start with video-editing - on a simple, video-editing software.

In 2013-2014, when I began editing and putting together some Star Wars material, I was looking around for some software online that would convert certain video files to other video file formats and stumbled upon one that also had a video-editor associated with it. Having downloaded it and liking it, I paid some money for the license to it. This software was Wondershare’s Filmora, which worked nicely.

While I would occasionally publish a video here or there over between 2014 and 2019, I really didn’t work on it much.

That is, until I began working on my real estate videos, as well as the JewishDrinking podcast videos.

“A Few with Drew” Serves as Catalyst for Further Videos
Having seen how easily I can make videos and publish them with no editing has served as a catalyst for considering how much more video-production and publishing I can involve myself in. The clearest example is having begun publishing a couple of Star Wars videos, especially on books. While those were directly-inspired by my “A Few with Drew” videos, as they involved no post-production and removed the friction of taking the time and energy to edit them.

Taking the lesson of my cocktails videos project of seeking to remove filler from my speech, at least on-camera, I have sought to eradicate any filler from my speech on-camera for the “A Few with Drew” project, which I haven’t fully perfected, but have definitely been improving. Taking this non-editing approach has enabled me to make more Star Wars videos, even if I need to be quite mindful regarding speaking to the camera without fillers and really knowing what I need to speak to the camera, as if it will be a complete product right there.

While I plan on doing some more with a bit of editing, certainly for these Star Wars bookvideos, I can do it with less friction for my own energies and time, which is great, and which I hope yields further Star Wars video content.

I am now also tempted to create more video content on Talmudic topics. While I have a broad interest in Talmudic texts, I really probably should focus it for JewishDrinking.com on Jewish drinking texts in the Talmud. Perhaps, at a later point, I can branch out.

For the time being, I am now excited about this “unlock” of ease of video-publishing that I had made more difficult for myself by necessitating or at least thinking I needed to edit any of my videos prior to publication.

Stay tuned.

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