Making YouTube Videos: Star in Your Own Video!

INTRODUCTION

HELLO FUTURE YOUTUBERS! Welcome to Making YouTube Videos, 2nd Edition — the book that does exactly what it says on the cover.

You want to be the next YouTube star? Do you find yourself watching YouTube videos and thinking, I could do that! or I really want to do that? Well, you’ve picked up the right book.

Millions of people are uploading their videos to YouTube — and there’s plenty of room for you, too. All you need is to turn the creative ideas in your head into videos. You’re going to have so much fun, and we’re going to guide you through every step.

ABOUT YOUTUBE

YouTube started in 2005 for people all over the world to share videos. We can’t imagine that anyone could have guessed how successful it would become. Would you have guessed it?

And now, if you want to learn how to do something, watch gameplay, or laugh at funny videos, where do you go? YouTube. And did you know that some people make YouTube videos as their job? How fun would that be?

Warning Your safety is the most important thing. Don’t include any personal information in the videos you share on YouTube. Don’t tell anyone online what your name is or where you live.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

They don’t teach you how to make YouTube videos at school, do they? If they do, you go to an awesome school. In Making YouTube Videos, we share what we’ve learned to help you make films. (We wish we had this book when we were kids. That would be impossible, of course, unless we’d had a time machine for us and for YouTube.)

They say that a wise person learns from his mistakes and a clever person learns from other people’s mistakes. We’ve learned everything we know from working in different areas within the filmmaking industry, and the mistakes we made along the way made us better. The great thing is that you get to avoid making a bunch of the mistakes that we made. You may still make mistakes, but it’s important to never give up!

In this book, you

Explore the different cameras you can use

Discover how to record sound

Find out how to light your scenes

Edit your video

Capture and edit gameplay from a console or computer

See ways to share your videos on YouTube

Discover how to get more views and subscribers on YouTube

Sometimes, you’ll see a URL (web address) for forms or examples we’ve placed online for you. You can find those extras at www.dummies.com/go/makingyoutubevideos2e.

Some figures will have a magnifying glass, like you see here. The glass is drawing attention to the parts of the screen you use. The highlighted text draws your attention to the figure.

ABOUT YOU

You’re interested in making movies. That’s why you’re here reading this, right?

We also figure that you have a way to capture film (a camera or phone) and a way to edit it (a computer or laptop).

We would bet that you’ve been online before and know all about clicking icons, and that you’ve pressed the Record button on a camera.

ABOUT THE ICONS

As you read the projects in this book, you’ll see a few icons. The icons point out different things:

Warning We use the Tip icon whenever we have information or advice that might help you with your film project.

Remember The Remember icon tells you the most important ideas. This is information you’ll use all the time when making films.

Tip If something might be dangerous, or if it’s something you shouldn’t choose, you see this Warning icon.

PROJECT 1

GET STARTED

DID YOU KNOW THERE ARE BILLIONS OF VIDEOS ON YOUTUBE? Billions! And that people add 300 hours of video every minute? That’s a lot of videos.

YouTube is a great way to share with your friends and family the videos you make. Don’t worry if you haven’t made a video yet. We're going to help you make your very own YouTube video as you read this book.

FOLLOW THE VIDEO-MAKING PROCESS

You can divide the video-making process into these five main stages:

Development

Preproduction

Production

Post-production

Distribution

If you imagine the video-making process as a trip, these five main stages are stops on the way. You can’t get where you’re going unless you go to each place along the way.

DEVELOPMENT

Development is one of the most important areas of the process — and it can be one of the hardest. It’s usually the longest part of video-making because it’s important to get the concept and the story right before moving into preproduction.

The development stage means completing these tasks:

Coming up with ideas and themes to create a story that has a good beginning, middle, and end

Building the story so that it’s ready to take into preproduction; that is, writing a script for the actors to work from and, sometimes, a storyboard for the director and crew to work from

A storyboard is a series of images that help you plan which shots to film.

PREPRODUCTION

The preproduction stage uses the idea, story, script, and storyboard to prepare for the production stage. In preproduction, everything is planned as much as possible.

Warning If you rush or skip preproduction, something may go wrong and it could take you longer to film.

Preproduction takes place when you

Choose actors.

Find locations.

Build sets for each scene.

Plan each filming day.

Organize rehearsals for the actors.

The work you do on these steps saves you time in the production and post-production stages.

PRODUCTION

The production stage is where the story and characters come to life as you film.

In the production stage, you

Run rehearsals for the actors to learn their lines and to develop their characters.

Set up camera equipment on location.

Film the scenes you planned.

Review the filmed footage to make sure you’ve captured everything and that it looks good enough to edit.

POST-PRODUCTION

The post-production stage is when you piece together the footage you captured during production. This stage is exciting. You get to see the results of all the hard work you put into the previous stages and also get to watch the video come together in the editing tool — that piece of software where video clips are imported, arranged into one video, and then exported for your audience to watch.

Post-production includes

Importing the footage on a computer

Editing in software like iMovie, Filmora, or HitFilm

Adding music or sound effects or other kinds of enhancements

DISTRIBUTION

Distribution is the final stage in the journey to make a video. At this point, your film has been produced and edited. Now it’s ready for the audience to enjoy.

This can be a worrisome time for you because the audience will make comments and give reviews.

Most blockbuster films are first distributed to theaters and then released on DVD, but you’ll distribute your video by YouTube.

GATHER YOUR TOOLS

A professional filmmaker could spend a fortune on tools. However, to get started, you need only a few basic tools, and most of them aren’t expensive:

Video camera: Without a video camera, there is no video. A video camera captures the picture and audio and stores them on a media card, hard drive, flash drive, or tape.

Remember A video camera can take different forms, which you can read more about in the next section.

Microphone: The microphone captures sound, which can be recorded with the video to a media card, hard drive, flash drive, or tape. The microphone can be built into your camera or not. (And in that case, it’s external.) Project 2 teaches you more about using a microphone for audio.

Light source: Your audience needs to see your subjects, so light is quite important. The source can be a natural one (like the sun) or an artificial one (like a lamp). Project 2 helps you with lighting.

Editing tool: An editing tool is a computer program where you import video footage, slice it up, and arrange it, ready for your audience to view. Project 3 is all about editing.

Tripod: A tripod is a great tool for keeping the camera steady in a fixed (single) position. It can be used to smoothly film moving subjects from left to right or up and down. Don’t worry if you don’t have a tripod — there are many inventive ways to keep your camera steady.

Media card/tape/flash drive/hard drive: This device is where your camera stores video footage.

Headphones: You can plug this device into a video camera or an external sound recorder to monitor the quality of the audio. How good is it?

Junior-girl HOW YOUR CAMERA WORKS

Don’t worry: We're not going to bore you with details here — but it is useful to know the basics.

A video camera works a lot like your eye. Your eyes see things as a series of still images, or frames. Your brain then puts them together so fast that it looks like smooth movement — it’s clever stuff, isn’t it? The camera does a similar thing: It captures movement in a series of frames, or still images.

Also like your eye, the camera records the images using light from the scene. The light enters the