Settling on a Style
The style I’m talking about isn’t my fashion, although I do look good in flannel.
Hindsight, the great revealer. The problem is when patience is limited hindsight never comes soon enough. Luckily, there’s a way to speed up hindsight and that’s through reflection.
A lessons learned forces you to retrospect, look back, and gain hindsight. It’s a practice I do two or three times for every project. My first retrospective is about the build, and I publish that here on my blog.
The second retrospective I do after I receive a little feedback in the way of statistics. This is specific to videos and social media. I post and wait to see how a video performs. I dissect feedback of all forms including click through, retention, and comments. In some cases I make changes, in other cases I note down what I did wrong in a video and why viewers dropped off in certain sections so I can rectify it in the future.
This practice of reviewing and analyzing my work has helped me improve my filming, editing, voice over, scripting, photography, titles, and a bunch of small things in between.
Those are all the fundamentals. The things that have to be done well in order to create a video, but they are the mechanical components. If one of them is done poorly people will leave, but if they are all done well people won’t necessarily stay to watch.
For example, we’ve all watched a movie we didn’t like. That movie was produced to a high quality with hundreds of thousands of dollars poured into it, but it wasn’t compelling. The story was the problem.
A New Retrospection
Which brings me to the new, third retrospection. I now look at my most recent project as a piece of my portfolio.
How does it fit in? What was an iteration on an element from the past? What elements should I carry forward? And most importantly, am I making slow progress or did I have a leap and how do I replicate success?
And I realized in a recent video that my stories were the major problem. My poor performing videos lacked it and my better videos contained a semblance of a story, but not always intentionally.
What my videos need is a script, but a compelling one. A script that doesn’t just describe what I’m doing, but shows how and tells why with a story arc and a bit of transformation. Combine that with the way I film and edit and all of the sudden we can go from a basic, lackluster video to a compelling, original video with the most important thing of all.
Style
Style needs to be consistent. When you turn on the TV and see your favorite sitcom is on you know instantly what you’re in for. Every single episode is the same. Set in the same place with the same people all acting the same way, so much so that you can watch seasons apart and hardly tell the difference.
It’s because they have a certain style defined and carefully crafted. There’s a team of people ensuring continuity in every aspect of the show.
When I started my videos were not consistent because I myself didn’t know what I wanted my channel to be. Serious or funny? Teaching or entertaining? Deep or light? There’s so many things to consider when developing a style but what I didn’t realize was I had a style all along and I’ve been honing it here on this blog.
My blog is a place where I teach both about woodworking and lessons I’ve learned in my life. Blogs about balance, drive, motivation, all written with the intention to inspire the reader to go pursue their passion.
These blogs entertain, educate, and are well thought out, I hope. So why not apply that same principle to my videos? Well that’s what I’m doing now, straying away from woodworking basics and DIY, there are plenty of channels on those topics which is fine by me. My pocket hole jig can remain buried in the bottom of a drawer so I can concentrate on the less common techniques.
I came to this realization when I noticed a trend in my video watching habits. I started watching YouTube as a beginner woodworker, looking to understand what the person was doing. As I watched I learned the what and wanted more. I didn’t need to be shown and told what was happening and I especially didn’t need to sit through 25 minutes of slow progress.
What I wanted was story.
Stories have characters. Those characters develop and grow. They overcome struggle and the audience watches as a big idea unfolds. A great story can translate that big idea into personal growth for not the characters, but the audience by connecting them, the viewers, to the characters. Making them feel what the characters feel and including them in the story.
And that is what I’m striving for. I am honing in on a style and transforming my videos from show and tells to stories. Having an identified path means I know where I’m heading and I hope my audience likes the direction as much as I do.