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

I've teamed up with a few other up-and-coming podcasts and we're all helping each other grow by promoting each other's show trailers.
Check out Beyond The Shadows Here!
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Intro Music:
Funky Retro Funk by MokkaMusic

Transcript

Good morning Ruddlemaniacs 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 useful 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 uh 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 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 and 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 their camera quality but I've been really thoroughly impressed by you know for a company like apple who has sort of notorious for having planned obsolescence in their products and Technology this thing's hang 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 this I've been really surprised with how long this phone's on and now you can film your sets using somebody holding your camera or placing it you know you can always do a DIY tripod by by leaning your phone against a cup or something on a table I would really recommend putting it down because it will save you a lot of time and 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 going to lose some of the you're going to lose some of the real estate you have to work with by using a stabilizer so I really recommend getting a way to make the phone stable while it's recording you now when I first bought a device for doing this I made don't do what I did I bought a combination selfie stick a tripod but this was a big mistake it was way too expensive it cost me hundreds of two or three hundred dollars maybe not 300 pretty about 200 and it was because I thought oh maybe I'll use it for doing Vlogs and I can use the selfie spec 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 of the 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 since I'm a good friend of mine Jared Doherty from Dunedin very very funny comedian if you're ever in Dunedin and you see him on the lineup do yourself the favor and go and check him out very good friend of mine lovely guy super helpful he recommended me um it's a kind of interesting name it's a little the technical name is Vlog kit and it's I think the brand is small Rogue and the model number is a cymore Vigor vk-20 Vlog kit I'll post a link to that in the show notes and I bought it from

rubbermonkey.com.co.nz whatever rubber rubber monkey is and it costed me about forty dollars including shipping so it was 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 about 10 centimeters tall till maybe a foot so you it does have some selfie stick capabilities but 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 you see it and then just pick it up on the way back it's it's uh like it fits in your pocket basically you can put 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 it's sort of entry level um 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 called DaVinci it's by a company called Blackmagic design DaVinci robot resolve excuse me is the 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 then 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 um but that might have 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 Edo software Adobe I'm not quite sure I think it's Adobe uh the one of the benefits that DaVinci has over Adobe so this is we're going to come into the topic of subtitles um this is a big topic and it's going to apply to everything you put online pretty much everything needs to have subtitles on 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 not everybody's going to have their their headphones and they might just be scrolling through Tick Tock 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 the older versions of um 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 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 at nightmare to work with I it could 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 being free I always have found that the da Vinci editor had a lot of it had better Transitions and that seemed to be a lot easier to apply let me just drag it from a library to the 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 are your other options are actually if you're not a PC person and you're a phone person um to be honest you have pretty good options there too tick tock 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 tick tock or Instagram to subtitle your videos for you but just in the last few months these um 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 the 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 the text looks like with Tick Tock 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 something to read by itself I I have a really bad habit of getting hung up on making the captions and 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 subtitles so it's not spoiled by the the sentence coming before it and you can really bog yourself down on 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 just you know sit up on the TV or make some popcorn and sit down load it up they're honestly just looking for a little chuckle or um the the snort from the nostrils they're just it's people people's bar for what they want to 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 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 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 Tick Tock did a better job of matching what you were saying to the captions and 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 tick tock editor instead of Instagram but if Instagram's 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 tick tocks whatever the whatever this short form vertical orientation video that's become the new thing that everybody's watching is I think Tick Tock is like 10 minutes or 20 minutes I'm not quite sure I've I've never had to I've never uploaded anything that actually used up the whole time limit of a tick tock 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 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 have fixed that though and then Instagram reels actually don't know I 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 uh online on 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 could you can of course post them on all three I tend to hedge my bits anyways because it's not that hard to export the 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 H 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 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 100 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 well 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 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 there were these weird videos where someone would be like behind the camera and there'd be someone in the kitchen exam for example and the person in the in the frame would be like hey check this out and they would start making it was always some some really decadent like potato gratin 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 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 and 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 like those old Howard Stern man on the street interviews where it looks like these people just go down to like a 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 questions 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 they're 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 check box at that point you upload your reel through metabusiness 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 on to 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 or 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 Tech talk 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 tick tock a tiny bit here but the main difference between Tech talk and Instagram is I think Tick Tock 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 Tick Tock whereas I've had a 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'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 um 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 influencers there's a lot of it's weird it's it's almost like less internety internet um 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 disparaging way is 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 there 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 um there's alongside the openness to being advertised too there's also kind of an authenticity curve and this is something I heard James Roque talking about and that Tick Tock 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 not artificially what's the word I'm looking for not artificially engineered to too overproduced might be the beer word to put it they they really just want someone on the street talking into their phone or someone someone in their bedroom talking into their phone that kind of thing they really don't want um super produced stuff whereas I would say Instagram is a is in between Facebook and and Tick Tock it seems like some people are open to it they're not gonna Grumble about it but they're also probably not going to click on it they're kind of indifferent to what I suppose is the best way to think about it so then we have Tick Tock 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 Tick Tock the first thing I've learned is my content that I was creating is not what what Tick Tock wants because it was all filmed stand-up 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 Tick Tock or something like that so that should give you an idea of of what kind of content you need to need to be creating I've heard a lot of people say that the sort of corporate execs they have this idea in their head that they can just kind of jump on Tick Tock and just post content there and it'll it'll go viral you know because everyone everyone kind of knows the numbers of views that you can kind of get on Tick Tock 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 it's been kind of explained to me that it has to be organic and as as genuine as possible that's why you'll see all these things like Trend which are generally something that takes off I think the whole base of tick tock 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 you really honestly have to spend some time on the platform to understand I I it's not something that I've been able to really get into I probably do need to at some point but I I just feel like a dinosaur Sometimes some of it I just don't understand and it's not in like a boomer disparaging like our kids don't know humor these days it's just some of the yeah it's just some of it's over my head and yeah the thing is though with Tick Tock 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 Tech talk and like what a lot of creators are doing I used Tom lawrenson as an example he's a stand-up comedian but most people that I know probably know him from his his Tick Tock content which is he's it's nothing to do with stand up really it's him doing characters like he had this series I loved this one it was um going camping with your friends 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 when where the father was unhinged or something and he does a lot of other he does really good Impressions but he is also a stand-up comic so I think if you're a comic yourself or I mean even any other kind of of creative you don't specifically have to be posting what you do on Tick Tock you can build a following based off doing other things that aren't your art form like there are a lot of stand-up comedians who post skits on Tick Tock James Roque is another one and he was saying that it what would happen is people would begin to recognize his face from seeing him in tick tocks and then rather than him specifically having to advertise to them they would just see his face on a on a comedy poster and go oh that guy's a stand-up he's really funny on Tech talk we'll go and we'll go and see him uh see if he's funny in real life so like I was saying before it's when you're doing Tech talk you're not going to get very far just blatantly posting ads for your gigs um or or trying to promote what you're doing I think you have to almost you have to 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 and relatable and and sort of fits in with the culture of tick tock 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 going to cover and this is the one I'm most familiar with is YouTube and YouTube is an interesting one because I would say that age range oh I don't think I covered it before but the tick tock 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 an if you've got the internet you've probably 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 ticked off 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 tick tock effortlet whatever it is uh you don't actually get a lot of money off of it so if you build a huge audience on Tick Tock 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 Tick Tock 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 the audience that Tick Tock 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 tick tocks 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 heard the most success on in that it seems like people are more than happy to just watch clips of stand-up 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 reach 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 what pieces bits and pieces make your video get to these different Milestones but at about 1500 views they'll Peter off like if you look at the chart of the views they'll Peter off like almost immediately once they hit 1500 views and then there's another one at about three thousand 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 three thousand uh it's five thousand and I've never had a short get any higher than that so I guess they're kind of give 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 and with recording shorts as well you will you'll you'll pick up followers and that's the main thing you want is sorry subscribers I got on YouTube as you want subscribers because the other ones hopefully that are going to watch all of the all of the rest of your releases going forward so I found that Winnie whenever I do a shorts upload I'll gain between four and six 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 four to six new subscribers per video but then I ran out of content I 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 instead 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 to 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'd go ah yeah bro I didn't finish it so he was just like geez like how how short is everyone's attention span now but then he 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 cover jokes is about 15 minutes long I uploaded the whole thing for free you can watch it at Taylor Auto comedy on YouTube uploaded the whole thing for free a couple of weeks ago now and it's had maybe 100 170 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 witted 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 tick tock 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 and each as each character and they did surprisingly well on YouTube they they didn't do any worse than my regular stand-up stuff and I think they might have done a little bit better but then when you have la longer video clips you upload those as normal videos to YouTube oh and that's 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 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 choices 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 are 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 Tick Tock videos without the tick tock 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 uh dread when my my brother or somebody would send me a tick tock 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 tick tock was and then right 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 want to 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 kind of combine this with another 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 going to need decent cameras in my case I got super lucky and that good friend of mine who I studied with in later life we 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 ever situation you might have to learn 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 uh 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 as they 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 in 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 this is very specific to stand up but you kind of want a good high quality wide shot on yourself that we 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 make 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 she could then you kind of sync it all up in in your editing software and that way you've got like a really strong laugh track you know genuine life track not a 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 they don't want the camera on them we 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 um you know like a like a a racial thing and like the director would cut to a black guy laughing in the crowd so that everyone at 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 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 in not need it than not need it flooded already it's better to have it and not need it than not have it and need it I'll get that in post um 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 angry us throughout but the main thing you want this for is in the edit I've released the first part so I edited all my cover 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-quarter 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 I didn't they weren't a hell 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 covert so it was all about reminiscing about the the lockdown and stuff like that and it's okay to do this once or twice throughout the special 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 close-up 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 and then maybe a crowd shot would be more than enough to make a really possible combat special so I think that's about the that's about the extent of my knowledge when it comes to recording at an image level recording your footage at a show editing it picking the right uh the right medium to the right app excuse me to post it to and then a little bit at the end about if you want to do something a little bit high 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 my Facebook or Instagram I'm happy to have to clarify anything I might not have made clear whilst uh rambling on for the last 40 minutes I hope this was still interesting to anybody that's not a comedian um you know 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 hope the rest of your week goes really well I hope you 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 taylorruddlecomedy check out my special all my covered jokes by finding me on YouTube you can watch that for free 15 minutes of covert jokes and maybe watch it and pick apart see which parts you think 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 thank you