12. Platforms Explored: Decoding YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok for Comedians

In this episode I talk about what gear and software you'll need to start recording content and posting it online, as well as breaking down the differences between each video platform and what sort of demographic they have and what sort of content works best with them. I also talk a bit about editing a proper special based on my experience making All My Covid Jokes towards the end. It's mostly relative to stand-up comedians but if you're in a different creative performance art form and find it useful too, let me know in the comments!

The Vlog Kit / Tripod I mention

The camera my video guy Jake recommends

0:00 Very Short Intro
1:00 Gear needed to film Shorts, TikToks, Reels.
5:38 Free software to edit with on Computer/Laptop
9:00 How powerful Tiktok & Insta's caption tools are
14:31 Facebook
18:12 Instagram
22:20 TikTok
26:35 YouTube
35:29 Filming All My Covid Jokes & Classy Comedy

Intro Music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TN3tXX2XgjY

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Intro Music:
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Transcript

Morning, Ruddle Maniacs. The Ruddler is back. Happy Monday to you. Hope you're having a good day so far. I'm not going to waste too much time. We're just going to get straight into it today. Today's topic is going to be about recording and editing and posting content online if you are a performer. I guess predominantly this will be used for stand-up comedians, but maybe you're an amateur, a different type of performing artist, maybe you do poetry. or the burlesque drag shows, that sort of thing. Maybe some of these tips will be useful to you too. It's all learned by me over the course of about six months now. A lot of trial and error, just seeing what works and figuring it out along the way. So the first thing people tend to want to know is, how much or what kind of gear do you need to start filming your sets? posting them online and to be honest with you any standard run-of-the-mill cell phone nowadays especially will be more than sufficient. I've been using an iPhone 6s since 2015 and that thing is still going pretty strong. It's definitely getting to the point where I feel like it's no longer able to keep up with the quality that modern phones can provide with their camera quality but by, you know, for a company like Apple, who are sort of notorious for having planned obsolescence in their products and technology, this thing's hung on for, what, eight years now, and it's still performing pretty well. It's definitely on the way out, but I gotta tell you, I've been really surprised with how long this phone's hung on. And now you can film your sets using somebody holding your camera or placing it... You can always do a DIY tripod by leaning your phone against a cup or something on a table. I would really recommend putting it down because that will save you a lot of time in editing if you don't have to stabilize the footage. There are a lot of things that do it automatically in some of the software that we'll get to in a little bit, but that all involves cropping and zooming in. So you're gonna lose some of the real estate you have to work with by using a stabilize. So I really recommend getting... a way to make the phone stable while it's recording you. When I first bought a device for doing this, I made, don't do what I did, I bought a combination selfie stick tripod, but this was a big mistake. It was way too expensive. It cost me hundreds of two or $300, maybe not 300, probably about 200. And it was because I thought, oh, maybe I'll use it for doing vlogs and I can use the selfie stick aspect of it, but. I honestly never did, it was only ever used as a tripod. And because of the dynamics of a selfie stick needs quite a long handle, that means the legs of this, when it becomes a tripod, the legs have to be really long as well, and it was just never convenient to put it on it in a little pub or anything like that. So I don't recommend going for one of those. I found that nothing but pain. And it was actually last year sometime, a good friend of mine, Gerard Docherty from Dunedin. Very very funny comedian, if you're even Dunedin and you see him on the line up, do yourself the favour and go and check him out. Very good friend of mine, lovely guy, super helpful. He recommended me. It's quite an interesting name, it's a little... The technical name is Vlog Kit and it's... I think the brand is SmallRig and the model number is a Symore Vigor VK20 Vlog Kit. I'll post a link to that in the show notes and I bought it from RubberMonkey. com.co.nz whatever Rubber Monkey is and it costed me about $40 including shipping so it was way cheaper than the than the selfie stick and it is a lot sturdier it holds onto the phone a lot nicer it's the legs kind of turn into the selfie stick so you can use it as a selfie stick it extends from about 10 centimeters tall to maybe a foot so you it does have some selfie For the most part it's just a really solid little tripod that you can set your phone up on a desk or a table at the pub when you're doing your sets. Start recording, go to the stage, do your set and then just pick it up on the way back. It's like, it fits in your pocket basically. You can fit it in a handbag if you carry a handbag. I really can't recommend this thing enough so I don't think the particular one that I have is available anymore because it looks like they update them pretty regularly but... That would be my recommendation if you're looking for a really cheap entry level vlog kit tripod. So once you have your footage, the next step is editing it. As you know, there's nothing worse than somebody uploading a full 15 minute wide shot of an open mic set with no subtitles and then wondering why people don't sit through the whole thing. That's one thing to remember is people... in general don't have a good attention span for online content now. I've been looking at some of my content watching statistics and about 10 minutes is about all I'll get out of people. So that's definitely a sign to me to shorten the content that I'm putting out there and make it easier for people to get through quickly. So with the editing you can do this one of a few ways. If you're a PC person or if you have a laptop even I would highly recommend downloading a program It's by a company called Black Magic Design, DaVinci Resolve, excuse me, is the full title of that. It is free software and from what they tell us anyways, it is like the industry standard in Hollywood for editing and color grading footage and they're one of those companies that I suppose just due to the fact that they have so many corporate contracts with I guess Hollywood, they're able to offer an older version of it for free. I think you can download version 17 for free. There's also a paid version 18 onwards, but I've honestly never had to even consider upgrading to the paid version because the features in 17 are just so good. If you've never used editing software before, it might be, it might take you a little bit to get used to the UI. I didn't find it super intuitive, but that might've been because I'd come from using Adobe software, which was Premiere and After Effects. But now that I've gotten used to DaVinci. I like, I definitely, I can't go back to, I can't go back to Adobe software. Adobe, I'm not quite sure, I think it's Adobe. One of the benefits that DaVinci has over Adobe, so this is, we're going to come into the topic of subtitles. This is a big topic and it's going to apply to everything you put online. Pretty much everything needs to have subtitles that you post online now. Like obviously people will still watch content without it, but from what I've heard, it just hugely expands the reach that you can get in terms of accessibility because then people can watch your content on the train, on the bus, at work even, and they don't have to have the audio on because I guess not everybody's going to have their headphones in and they might just be scrolling through TikTok or YouTube shorts and I'm generally an audio listener but I've heard a lot of people just read the text as it comes up and still seem to get... the same amount of enjoyment out of it. And so one of the things I really recommend DaVinci over Adobe's software is because it has a built-in subtitles feature where you add a subtitle track to your timeline and then you just cut it when you want the subtitles to change. Whereas the older versions of Premiere had this system called Titles, which is where you would add, you would almost make a new image that would be overlaid over your footage and that was how you would do subtitles is you'd have to make all these individual subtitle screens and so your library would just be chock full of all these subtitle screens and it got all confusing when you wanted to edit them or split them into two and I just I found it a nightmare to work with I could not it just didn't work for me so I found the DaVinci editor a lot easier and then it has the benefit of it being free I also found that the DaVinci editor It had better transitions and it seemed to be a lot easier to apply than you just drag it from a library to the meeting point of your two clips and it would automatically chuck a pretty good transition. You might have to fiddle with it a little bit. You can change some settings, but very rarely did I have to do that. Your other options are actually if you're not a PC person and you're a phone person. To be honest, you have pretty good options there too. TikTok is really, really quickly. getting very good at transcribing your audio accurately using, I assume it's using AI because the reason I sort of got into subtitling stuff using PC programs is when I started trying to post content, this is, this is an example of how quickly technology is progressing now is when I started doing these things, there wasn't really a good option for TikTok or Instagram to subtitle your videos for you, but just in the last few months, These programs have gotten really, really good at transcribing what you say accurately and kind of with the right breaks and pauses in your speech. So quite often now when I have a clip that I recorded a mic and it doesn't matter too much about it looking super snappy with the subtitles matching up to what I'm saying on the screen, because I guess it's the trade-off. The trade-off of it being automatic is you have less control. over what the text looks like with TikTok. You can edit them and cut them down and stuff. But generally I don't think this matters. I think people just want the text as a thing to read while they listen to it or just as something to read by itself. I have a really bad habit of getting hung up on making the captions in the subtitles 100% perfect, matching up to what I'm saying on the screen at the time and making them short enough so that the impact, you know, the punchline is on its own subtitle so it's not spoiled by the the sentence coming before it. You can really bog yourself down in these weeds, which I don't recommend you do. I think posting online good enough is better than perfect for posting online, because if you think of how voraciously people scroll through their feeds, they're not looking for the perfect video to, you know, set up on the TV or make some popcorn, sit down, load it up. They're honestly just looking for a little chuckle or the... the snort from the nostrils, they're just, it's people's bar for what they will accept is really low at the moment. You still need to have some level of quality, like it still has to be funny, it still has to be clear what you're saying and the subtitles help with the clarity, but people aren't consuming content like they used to, it's all instant gratification and just what's the next thing, what's the next thing, what's the next thing. You do also have Instagram. has a pretty good subtitle captioning feature. You upload it into your stories and then add the captions to it and then you can download that video again and it saves it as like an MP3, MP4, excuse me, on your phone. But I've always found that the way the Instagram display the subtitles, it doesn't quite match up with what you're saying on the screen. And I always found that really unsatisfying. I felt like TikTok did a better job of matching what you were saying to the captions. with Instagram you've only got about four styles that you can choose from and I really don't like any of them. There's one that shows them in big block capital like white letters and they fade in one at a time and that looks okay but then you have to find this block in your video that's not covering anything up for the subtitles whereas TikTok gives you a lot of options when it comes to putting a color down behind the subtitles or putting a stroke around the edge of the letters so it stands out from the video and I just yeah I really recommend playing around with the TikTok editor instead of Instagram, but if Instagram is what you like, then that's of course the right option for you. All of the different platforms have different time limits as to how long you can upload contents in these reels, shorts, TikToks, whatever this short form vertical orientation video, that's become the new thing that everybody's watching is. I think TikTok is like 10 minutes or 20 minutes. I'm not quite sure. I've never had to, I've never uploaded anything that actually used up the whole time limit of a TikTok. Instagram shorts is very strict. It has to be a minute or less. And I'm not quite sure if it still does this, but even if your video, if the video file was like 60 seconds and then 13 milliseconds, it wouldn't be able to be uploaded as a short and it would be uploaded as a normal video. but it was in the short orientation. It was really annoying. I think they might've fixed that though. And then Instagram reels, I actually don't know. I haven't uploaded an Instagram reel in a long time, but I think it might be a few minutes, two minutes long, something like that. I could be wrong on that. So yeah, now that I'm talking about the differences between the platforms, this is what you need to think about if you're wanting to be a content creator online or the app is you need to think about what your target audience are. And unfortunately, there's no one size fits all format. You can't create a video for one platform and then just repost it on the other two and it will do as well as it did on the main platform. I mean, you can of course post them on all three. I tend to hedge my bets anyways, because it's not that hard to export the one video and then just upload it to all of the platforms you have available to you. But in my experience, and from what I've talked to some other content creators, you kind of have to tailor your content for each. platform that you posted on is the culture of each app is totally different. Now, the Facebook platform is the first one I'll go through, and it's not going to be very long because I haven't figured out how to crack Facebook yet. I've seen people upload reels onto Facebook and get thousands of views, but mine never tend to go above a hundred or something like that. So I really don't know what the videos that people want to see on Facebook are. The demographic of Facebook is older. I think right now everybody's kind of accepted that this is the platform that your older relatives are on and they spend all their time arguing in the comments on a news article. That being said, we do still advertise a lot of our comedy shows on Facebook as that has the easiest... Wow. Even though the audience is older, there are still a lot of people on Facebook and because they're older, generally they are the people that tend to have money so... They're the ones that are fairly likely to buy tickets to whatever you're putting on, assuming that they're in your target audience. Just anecdotally, one video format that seemed to do really well on Facebook, just based on how much I would see it around, were these weird videos where, you can tell I'm not in the demographic because I don't get it, but they were these weird videos where someone would be like behind the camera and there'd be someone in the kitchen, for example. and the person in the frame would be like, hey, check this out, and they would start making, it was always some really decadent like potato grout and lasagna, cheesy bake. It was always this kind of like super decadent food. And the person behind the camera would constantly be going, what's that? What are you doing? And like, they would just be talking over every, they were like boxing commentators. They were talking over every single step. of this process and I just found it really irritating. I thought like, are we not looking at what they're doing right now? Like why do you have to tell in so maybe it comes back to the short attention span or something. Maybe people need to have this constant stream of consciousness commentary in order to stay engaged on the platform. But either way, I used to see a lot of them. I used to see these ones on Facebook that are like those old Howard Stern man on the street interviews where it looks like these people just go down to like a busy part of town where there's a lot of nightclubs letting out at sort of one or two in the morning and they just interview people and it seems like it's very click-baity because it'll be like asking young women sort of like fairly sexual question, how many bodies have you had and all this. I think it's meant to be kind of shock value, like, oh, look at this, you know, this young woman said this shocking thing on camera and everyone's sort of drunk and you can see sort of just mayhem in the background of. dudes running about and falling down is again not content I really find that appealing, I don't quite get it but the fact that I see so many of them means that people must be watching it because if people didn't watch it no one would be making the content. The good thing about the fact that Instagram and Facebook are owned by the same company is you can upload videos to both Instagram and Facebook as reels, you can do it simultaneously through their meta business suite. And really for that alone is why I would every now and then post reels to Facebook. It would be because it's basically just a checkbox at that point. You upload your reel through Meta Business Suite. You click Instagram, you put all the hashtags and you put the description. And then there's kind of like, do you also want to post this to Facebook as a real option? So there's really no, you don't have anything to lose. You might as well kind of thing. So that'll bring us onto the next app, which is Instagram. And Instagram is an interesting one because from what I've seen Instagram is a real melting pot of the other apps. I feel like Instagram's age range is really broad. There are like a lot of young people that they don't even have a Facebook account or if they have a Facebook account they don't use it that much and Instagram is almost their main sort of keep in touch with people's social media. And because they have that big explore page where you can see all sorts of content. you basically just see everything reposted from TikTok and I assume maybe YouTube as well so it's a bit of a mixed bag because I think really any type of content can go well on Instagram although it does seem like it's more slightly polished stuff so I'll jump ahead to TikTok a tiny bit here but the main difference between TikTok and Instagram is I think TikTok is a big fan of really unpolished stuff, you know, just people in their room talking into their headphone microphone, and from what I've seen, really slickly edited stand-up clips, unless they're already a fan of the comedian, they don't do so well on TikTok. Whereas I've had a couple of clips do really well on Instagram reels. I had the dumbest joke I've ever written, which was having a stroke, if you know you know. That got up to about 27,000 views and I can't remember 1100 likes or something like that. That's by far the best, you know, the biggest hit I've ever done online. And it's probably the dumbest joke I've ever written. And then I had a couple of other ones that did about 5,000 views, which is really small fry numbers. But for me, an unknown creator, it was like it was really good. And of course, you kind of know that Instagram tends to be a little more. What's the word? There's a lot of fitness influences, there's a lot of... It's weird, it's almost like less internety internet. I don't want to say less geeky because I'm sure there's still a lot of geek content on Instagram but it seems like there is a lot more, for lack of a better word, quote unquote normal people on Instagram. Like what I don't mean that in a disparaging way as in like the other apps have like less normal people on but what I mean is it's Instagram is sort of just people living their lives and posting what they do on their Instagram feeds And it's I found it really hard to run ads on Instagram I've gotten like no engagement from them and whether that's a statement about how likely people on Instagram Are to click through on ads to comedy shows or if it's just the fact that my particular Content wasn't appealing to them. I'm not sure I haven't run enough ads to really know but in my experience It has not been worth it to run Instagram sponsored posts. There also seems to be a, I don't know what you would call this, but it's almost like a tolerance for being advertised to and it's a curve in that it seems like Facebook, the Facebook audience, are very open to being advertised to Even though people grumble about it I would guarantee we've sold most of our tickets because people saw a Facebook ad and clicked on it and bought tickets I think Instagram is somewhere in the middle there's alongside the openness to being advertised to there's also kind of an authenticity curve and this is something I heard James Roquet talking about and that TikTok of all of the apps has the least tolerance for being advertised to and they want content that at least appears to be authentic and not artificially what's the word I'm looking for not artificially engineered to overproduce might be the better word to put it they really just want someone on the street talking into their phone or someone in their bedroom talking into their phone, that kind of thing. They really don't want super produced stuff. Whereas I would say Instagram is in between Facebook and TikTok. It seems like some people are open to it. They're not going to grumble about it, but they're also probably not going to click on it. They're kind of indifferent to it, I suppose is the best way to think about it. So then we have TikTok. Now this is another platform I don't really understand. I understand it a little better than I do Facebook, so I'll just let you know the things that I've observed from uploading content on TikTok. The first thing I've learned is my content that I was creating is not what TikTok wants because it was all filmed standup clips that I had added subtitles to and then uploaded. And I think people would just see the thumbnail of that and just keep swiping. Whereas I have a friend, Craig Westenberg, who's been posting these, I guess they're like satire journalism videos, and it's him in a dark room talking into his headphones microphone. And he's used the green screen effect to put a screenshot of a news article behind him. And then he just riffs on that. And he was up to like a thousand followers on TikTok or something like that. So that should give you an idea of what kind of content you need to be creating. I've heard a lot of people say that. sort of corporate execs, they have this idea in their head that they can just kind of jump on TikTok and just post content there and it'll go viral, you know, because everyone kind of knows the numbers of views that you can kind of get on TikTok, but you actually can't really do it without an understanding of what people want to see on the platform. And so it's been kind of explained to me that it has to be organic and as genuine as possible. That's why you see all these things like trend which are generally something that takes off. I think the whole base of TikTok started from people putting songs behind their videos and then kind of lip syncing to them and playing around with that. And they have all these kind of memes. Certain songs signify this social situation and all that sort of thing. You really honestly have to spend some time on the platform to understand. It's not something that I've been able to really get into. I probably do need to at some point, but. I just feel like a dinosaur sometimes. Some of it I just don't understand. And there's not in like a boomer disparaging like our kids don't know humor these days. It's just some of it, yeah. It's just some of it's over my head. And yeah. The thing is that with TikTok is it might seem like it's quite hard to get content that does well on this, but actually there's a huge spectrum of things you can post to TikTok. And like what a lot of creators are doing. I'll use Tom Lawrence as an example. He's a standup comedian, but most people that I know probably know him from his TikTok content, which is, it's nothing to do with standup really, it's him doing characters, like he had this series, I loved this one, it was going camping with your friend's family and he was playing the father and there was three different versions, there was one like where the father doesn't want you there, one where the father does want you there and then one where the father was unhinged or something. And he does a lot of other, he does really good impressions, but he is also a standup comic. So I think if you're a comic yourself, or I mean, even any other kind of creative, you don't specifically have to be posting what you do on TikTok. You can build a following based off doing other things that aren't your art form. Like there are a lot of standup comedians who post skits on TikTok. James Roquet is another one. And he was saying that what would happen is people would. begin to recognise his face from seeing him in TikToks. And then rather than him specifically having to advertise to them, they would just see his face on a comedy poster and go, oh, that guy's a standup. He's really funny on TikTok. We'll go and see him, see if he's funny in real life. So like I was saying before, when you're doing TikTok, you're not gonna get very far just blatantly posting ads for your gigs or trying to promote what you're doing. I think you have to almost... You have to almost let people discover you by themselves. So you just kind of entice them in with the content that's funny and relatable and sort of fits in with the culture of TikTok. And then also a few months down the line, people realize like, wow, they're a musician or wow, they're a comedian. And then you've got a new fan. So the last platform we're gonna cover, and this is the one I'm most familiar with is YouTube. And YouTube is an interesting one. because I would say their age range, oh, I don't think I covered it before, but the TikTok age range is very young and up. There are still a lot of older people on it, but it's a big broad range of ages with a lot of young people on it. And I think YouTube is much the same. I feel like YouTube is almost like the television of today. Everyone watches it, young and old, all over the world. If you've got the internet, you probably watch YouTube. So YouTube is a big, a big pie and even having a small slice of that could be bigger than having a big slice of the other platforms. I've heard some people say that TikTok numbers aren't actually as huge as people think when you compare it to something like YouTube. I haven't checked that. You'd have to look into the numbers a little bit more yourself if you wanted to, if you wanted to confirm that. I've also heard that apparently the whole idea of making money from your content. I know YouTube and Instagram have like affiliate programs where they run ads on your stuff and you get money for it and obviously YouTube has the YouTube Partner Program. I've been told that the TikTok affiliate, whatever it is, you don't actually get a lot of money off of it so if you build a huge audience on TikTok you then have to figure out. how to monetize it as horrible as it sounds monetizing your audience but you know everyone's got bills to be paid so i think for a lot of people with tiktok audience is just a way to sell tickets to their live performances or sell merch that kind of thing and yeah so youtube is they really want the i suppose they want the audience that tiktok has and that they want the young people to come over to youtube because they've invented a well invented they've they you can upload shorts which is what they call youtube shorts and they are less than a minute long and they're in the vertical format of TikToks and Instagram Reels. And at least right now, the time of this recording in 2023, they are really, really trying to push those in front of people. So the reason I know the most about YouTube is because it's the one I've had the most success on in that it seems like people are more than happy to just watch clips of standup shows with subtitles on YouTube. I'll upload a video, a short, excuse me, to YouTube, YouTube's algorithm. pushes it for the next few hours until it reaches. It's funny, they have these caps on the views and I don't quite know how to work. I haven't worked out what bits and pieces make your video get to these different milestones, but at about 1,500 views, they'll peter off. If you look at the chart of the views, they'll peter off almost immediately once they hit 1,500 views. And then there's another one at about 3000. So it's weird because you'll upload it sometimes and it'll get good views for the first hour, then it'll peter off, but then it'll pick up again and you'll hit the next plateau. And then after about 3000, it's 5000. And I've never had a short get any higher than that. So I guess they're kind of giving you steroids in a way and that they're giving you a really good boost to get your content in front of people straight away. Like I started, and with... recording shorts as well, you will pick up followers and that's the main thing you want is subscribers that go on YouTube, is you'll want subscribers because they're the ones hopefully that are going to watch all of the rest of your releases going forward. So I've found that whenever I do a shorts upload I'll gain between 4 and 6 subscribers. Obviously not all of them stick around, a lot of them do unsubscribe later on but for the most part mine have been pretty stable. and I've gone from 60 or something at the end of last year to around 270 but the unfortunate thing is I was having really good growth, I was getting 4-6 new subscribers per video but then I ran out of content, I had uploaded all of the rest of my backlog, pretty much every clip that I have of stand-up comedy apart from a few from my special which is sort of being drip released over the next few weeks now is online right now so that was kind of a satisfying thing to know that anything that I wanted to be out there is out there. A little tip when it comes to releasing content on YouTube that I got from Andrew Schultz. He was talking about how when he released his comedy experience called 441, which was a 15 minute long compilation of some sets that he did in New York City over one night, and he made it shorter than the normal hour special because he figured people weren't having they didn't have the attention span that they used to so he thought 15 minutes people will get through. like dead easy. But then he said what happened was he would send it to people and then he'd check in with them a week later and they go, ah yeah bro I didn't finish it. So he was just like, geez like how short is everyone's attention span now? But then he chopped it up into individual clips and he uploaded those to YouTube and those are anywhere between two and about six. Because there's another thing with the YouTube algorithm where from what I remember reading The YouTube algorithm wants you to upload things of around 10 minutes, because that's when it can sell advertising spots, like they play the automatic ads before and during the video. So it will actually prioritize longer content when you're actually uploading normal videos, which I've found to be quite a good ecosystem, because if you have a set, or a joke, excuse me, that is shorter than a minute, you can upload it to the shorts, and they'll absolutely pump it into people's apps. But if you have something longer, you upload that as a regular video, and then it shows up in people's recommended videos and they seem to watch that. Just to give you an example, my, um, my mini special, All My COVID Jokes is about 15 minutes long. I uploaded the whole thing for free. You can watch it at TaylorOddallComedy on YouTube. I uploaded the whole thing for free a couple of weeks ago now, and it's had maybe... 170 views. It was sitting around there. I don't think it's cracked 200 yet, but the following week I uploaded the opening joke from that which was about how I miss wearing masks in the pandemic, and within a couple of days it got more views than the full special and it seemed like people watched through the whole thing because it was only a couple of minutes long. I think it was a three minute bit or something. So I guess just to recap, I might have whitted on a little bit there. If you're uploading for YouTube, the age range is huge. You can basically assume that your niche will be on YouTube. They'll accept pretty much any kind of content. I've uploaded little skits that I've done for TikTok onto YouTube and they actually did better than I thought they were going to do in terms of people watching them. I.e. they weren't stand-up clips, they were me doing little character bits where I was playing two characters and I had different clothes on as each character. And they did surprisingly well on YouTube. They- They didn't do any worse than my regular standup stuff. And I think they might've done a little bit better. But then when you have longer video clips, you upload those as normal videos to YouTube. Oh, and that was the piece I forgot to say that before, but Andrew Schultz noticed once he clipped all of his stuff out, people would find his YouTube page and then they would stay there for like three hours watching clip after clip after clip. So they wouldn't sit through one 15 minute video, but they'd sit through. three hours of two minute videos and he calls this the snooze button effect he said what's the best sleep you've ever had in your life it's when you your alarm goes off you hit the snooze button that next five minutes is like the greatest sleep you've ever had and then the alarm goes off again and you can choose if you want to get up or you can stay sleeping again he likens it to that where people they watch the video and then they have the choice it's like Do you want to leave and you want to get up and do something else? Or do you want to watch another clip? And because there's that little element of choice in it, people are more likely to do it because they feel like they're in control. It's this weird, you almost have to give them something to do. Maybe that's why Netflix does that, I used to watching thing. The other added benefit to uploading things to YouTube is you can share the links to people a lot easier. I think YouTube, a lot of people probably have the app, but also it opens in your browser. Whereas in my experience watching TikTok videos without the TikTok app is hell. They just don't work. Stuff loads and there's things hanging over the video that I always click on by accident. And it just, I would dread when my brother or somebody would send me a TikTok to watch and I didn't have the app installed. It would just never work. I just have to wait how long I thought the TikTok was and then write back LOL or something. Whereas YouTube, a lot of people have the app and it opens really nicely in your browser so you can send the links. or you can just share them on your performer pages. So we're coming up on probably about as long as I wanna do for this episode, about 40 minutes. I would just like to really quickly cover shooting my mini special and what kind of gear we used. I'll kinda combine this with another show that I shot. I did a show called Classy Comedy, which was me trying to do 45 minutes of clean material. And we also filmed that with multiple camera angles to just see if we could edit together and make it look slick. So if you're doing a proper special, you're definitely gonna need decent cameras. In my case, I got super lucky and that good friend of mine who I studied with in later life, he got really into filmography stuff. So he was willing to work with me and film stuff that I do and kind of teach me a little bit of how it works. So if you're not quite in that lucky of a situation, you might have to learn all this yourself, but. Otherwise I recommend just going to design school when you're 19 and meeting someone that you think might eventually get interested in videography later. I asked him what kind of cameras he uses and he said the one he filmed our most recent one on was the Sony Alpha 6100. Again, I don't really know much about cameras, but the selling point that he told me for these Sony cameras and just Sony cameras in general is he said they have good low light, which as you can imagine. If you're doing stand up, you're doing music, you're doing poetry, you're going to be in a fairly dimly lit space. There might be spotlights and stuff, but for the most part you need something that's good and low light. And in terms of the setup and what you actually need to capture, what I would recommend doing for filming a special or at least just a high quality video clip of a set. This is very specific to stand up, but you kind of want a... good high quality wide shot on yourself that way you can see the audience in front of you a little bit. And then if you have access to multiple cameras, what you can do is from a different angle. So let's say your wide shot is shot from the right, you would set up one to the left that is more of a close up on your head and shoulders. I would also recommend if you can, getting even if you just set a little Dictaphone down, to mic the audience somehow because that's really what you want the person watching to hear is the laughter of the audience and if the camera's at the back of the room even though they might have microphones on them it doesn't always capture the whole it doesn't capture the scale of how hard people laughed so i'd recommend getting i mean heck you could even just put your cell phone in the crowd somewhere recording the laughter which you could then you kind of sync it all up in your editing software and that way you've got like a really strong laugh track, you know genuine laugh track not a canned one but still important to have. And then you can do a crowd shot if you want but I've noticed that a lot of people don't want the camera on them. With Classy Comedy because we weren't releasing it, people didn't really care but we also found that we never really needed to cut to the audience. It's a very 90s thing to do. like somebody tells a joke, a sort of risky joke about, you know, like a racial thing and like the director would cut to a black guy laughing in the crowd so that. run it home can go oh no it's okay he laughed at it so we're allowed to laugh at it but like you know it would have just been him laughing from another part of the show that they've cut in um but you don't have to do that kind of thing anymore it comes down to the authenticity of it again so you can do a crowd shot if you want but we did it you know record it and if you don't use it then it doesn't matter, but it would be better to have it and not need it than not need it. It's better to have it and not need it than not have it and need it. I'll get that in post. So the main thing you want two camera angles for is actually not so that you can, I mean, it does add to, it makes it look a bit more legit if you're switching camera angles throughout, but the main thing you want this for is in the edit. I released the first part, so I edited all my COVID jokes myself and we actually only filmed that from one angle, but because it was from a wide shot and it was in a very good quality camera, what I did was I zoomed in on it, so I kind of made the three quarters shot of my head and shoulders that was zoomed in and then exported that as a separate file and then I used that to cut between the wide shot and the close up shot. and what you can do with this in the edit is you can cut stuff that you don't want. You can just cut things from the special. Like, I removed a couple of jokes that I didn't really feel like aged that well and they weren't a hill that I was willing to die on. I also noticed in post so many of my jokes started with me saying, you guys remember when? Because it was all about COVID, so it was all about reminiscing about the lockdown and stuff like that. it's okay to do this once or twice throughout the special but it once you notice it you don't unnotice it so I did my best to cut any of that faff in between and you do that by switching camera angles at the point that you want to cut and it becomes really seamless because if you just cut it out you're going to jump around on the footage in the wide shot but by changing angle you're cutting anyway you're jumping around on the screen anyway but it looks deliberate and the audience won't notice that it doesn't match up to where, if it was one continuous shot again. So you can cheat your way into having two shots by just make sure you get the wide shot and then you can create your own closeup. The only downside to doing that is you don't get the angle change. I remember reading somewhere that if you have three angles of a show, that's like perfect. But if you're in the same situation as me and you're very much amateur, having two maybe a crowd shot would be more than enough to make a really passable comedy special. So I think that's about the extent of my knowledge when it comes to recording at an amateur level, recording your footage at a show, editing it, picking the right medium to the right app to post it to, and then a little bit at the end about if you want to do something a little bit higher quality, you want to film like a mini special or a special. I hope that was useful to some of you out there. It's been a lot of trial and error for me to figure it out. If you have any questions, just send me a DM on Facebook or Instagram. I'm happy to clarify anything I might not have made clear whilst rambling on for the last 40 minutes. I hope this was still interesting to anybody that's not a comedian. Hopefully it's not too inside baseball for you. Going for a little bit of a shorter theme to try and get people to listen to the whole to listen to the whole episode rather than just some of it. So I hope 40 minutes is enough for you all. I hope the rest of your week goes really well. I hope you've got something amazing and exciting planned for the weekend. As always you can find me on all the social media platforms except for Twitter at Taylor Ruddle Comedy. Check out my special All My Covid Jokes by finding me on YouTube. You can watch that for free, 15 minutes of Covid jokes and maybe watch it and Might have been where I cut a joke or cut something out. And I hope it's a good study tool for you. We'll catch up with you again next week. I'm pretty sure next week is going to be the first episode of Phantom Files, which is UFOs, ghosts and cryptid stories from good old Aotearoa. I've got three, possibly a couple more really good stories for the first episode, one of my own. Really excited to releasing that. I'll probably get on to editing that later on this week. So until then... This is The Ruddler signing off. We'll catch you next time.