hey everybody welcome back this is the second video about presenting to camera in the first one I gave you three tips on just how to prepare yourself and how to be on camera and how to address the camera and how to do things like body language and all that sort of stuff so definitely check that out but in this one what I wanted to give you is a couple of more practical technical tips which can be really important too sort of how you interact with your technology as well let's get into tip number one which is look at the camera or don't this is a really interesting one so a lot of the advice you see out there on presenting the camera will be make sure you make eye contact with the camera at all costs and what you get and I talked in the last video about people going too crazy Mr Beast Mode presenting where it's unnaturally like high energy and their eyes look really really really wide and a lot of people lock eyes with the camera like this and they don't blink and they try and get through their whole video without blinking at all and it feels really unnatural I should have said this in the last video too but you absolutely can blink but one of the other things I really think is really important and I'll probably do this now a bunch cuz I'm talking about it but is give yourself permission to look away from the camera to break eye contact with that audience for just a second sometimes that doesn't mean go like this the whole time because you'll look like something's wrong and you're nervous but don't feel like you have to have that wide-eyed contact and you can't blink and you can't look away because that's not what we do in real life um when in real life you're speaking to somebody you will look away when you're coming up with how are you going to say something and then glance back at the person and it is natural and it is ordinary for us to look away a bit when we're speaking now I'm doing that on purpose as I'm speaking and I'm really hyperconscious of it um at the moment so what I I don't want you to go into presenting thinking about this too much but what I don't want you to do is beat yourself up if you look away from the camera it is okay as you articulate a thought to glance away um or maybe look at the second camera here and then come back to your main camera if it helps you formulate something in your mind be more natural and emphasize a point as I mentioned in the last video too you want to try and present to camera less like you are presenting at it and more like you're speaking to somebody who's in the same room as you at the same level and tone that you would if they're in the same room as you and that can involve when you're speaking to the camera giving yourself permission not to lock in eye contact and never blink cuz that's just weird and crazy and people don't do that in real life I'm blinking because I'm thinking about it again um once you start getting in your into your head about it as I am right now live as I speak to you it makes you sort of do things slightly unnaturally so again this is one one of these tips it's just I want you to know it and almost forget about it until you look away or blink in real life and then just know that you don't have to beat yourself up or more importantly you don't have to stop yourself midt if you're not staring straight down the middle of the lens okay does that make sense good let's move on number two number two actually follows on really nicely from that one and but one of the other huge mistakes that people make and this is one that I fall for the whole time particularly because a lot of the time like I'm working with two cameras and what I'm trying to do is show people what's happening on this camera while filming from this camera for example totally ruined my second shot there but anyway um but what a lot of people will do is they will have a monitor with with their monit and as they go through the video they'll go from this lens to this monit here and they'll start speaking to the monitor because they see their face on that and is much easier to talk to a person than it is this but in all honesty with these monitors if you don't need it cuz I'm looking at it right now and it's really weird isn't it I'm not talking to you I'm looking at the monitor now I was just talking about how you can break eye contact with the lens but if you just start talking to something off camera like this and I'm looking even further on the monitor now for effect what it does is it looks really weird it doesn't seem right and people going to be like where's that person looking who are they talking to especially if it's something addressing the camera this is completely different for interviews I'm going to do a separate video on how to film yourself or other people for interviews um but when you are talking to an audience who is behind your camera um then it's really important to think about uh not looking at yourself on the Monitor and getting distracted people are especially bad at this when they have something like you know maybe the little screen on the osmo pocket 3 which is right under the lens or worst is the selfie camera on your phone because there's this huge huge screen right next to you and it's really easy just to have your eyes over here instead of over here um I'm on a Sony a74 by the way not a phone but the same thing stands I've got a little monitor right next to the camera so if in doubt what you can do is wh knock something off my table I've got this monitor right here instead of having that sitting there just once you've got your shot set push that out of the way unless you really need to actually be staring at that unless you need that for for some reason actually just push the monitor out of the way I'm going to put that down before I smash something or drop it because uh I'm good at both of those things but what that allows you to do is just focus on the camera itself and if you look away it's not because you're checking yourself out making sure your shot looks good it's because you are genuinely glancing away breaking eye contact and then reinitiating the eye contact again just like you would in real life if you were talking to a person who is actually in the room um so with that monitor pushed away the only thing you've obviously got to be careful of is you know the camera is still recording for example lots of people's video cameras will have a little red light flashing on them um and I know it can be difficult um I am even having sort of mild anxiety now I can't see the monitor I don't know if after I touched the camera I accidentally stopped the recording or not but if you find yourself constantly glancing at it it really can help you just get better results okay I'm going to assuage my anxiety right there see look it's different for everybody's situation isn't it but if you find yourself constantly looking in the monitor as I just did there when I brought it back um then hide it um then just have your shot set up and have a a a point that you have on the ground um that you can come back to so one of the best things you can do and I'm going to show you in a second what I'm doing is have a mark on the ground that you know to stand on so that if you've got your monitor tucked away you can always come back to that point that where your toes are going to be I like to have and what that allows you to do is make sure you're always being the right spot and you'll always be framed correctly when you come back obviously having a mark on the ground is really good if you're using a tri IP OD but if you're using something Vlog style or selfie style um and you're not sure where you're going to be on camera then it can really help to have something like a DJI osmo pocket 3 or if you're in the Sony ecosystem the zv1 um that can actually track you and follow you around so you're always frame correctly autof framing can be really handy some people do see that as cheating but hey if it has you in the right spot for your video and you're not cut off because you're framed in the wrong place that can be really helpful so you've got a bunch of different options there but I guess what the ultimate goal there to do is to make sure that you are not constantly looking at you on the screen and that you are looking directly at the lens when you're talking to an audience of people or someone that specific person you're thinking about who is behind the lens and finally we're on to tip four just how to deliver your script to the camera or the content that you are going to deliver to the camera to the camera what I mean by that is are you going to read off an auto queue are you going to have a notebook next to you that you glance down and look up points from uh it's kind of what I'm doing today I'm doing half of that and half just off the top of my head because I know this subject matter quite well I'm very lucky in that regard I have traveled the world training people to do this professionally for some time and that's why I feel confident in bringing this to the camera and just for the most part talking off the top of my head but I do have some notes next to me to make sure I don't miss any key important points because sometimes you do just miss things when you're talking to a camera in a live Workshop I can always Circle back later on and add those things in or remember them and bring them up but in a video I don't want to do that to you do it 10 minutes later or edit it in and from another shot at the end so I'm kind of using a hybrid but I think it's really important here to pick the right one for you different people are going to have different ways of doing this some people a very select few will write a script and memorize it and say those exact words to the camera I think that takes a lot of work and I think that personally is one of the most stressful ways of doing things um I studied to be a professional actor and even then as somebody who who started off their career learning to learn lines and I certainly wouldn't ever do that for YouTube videos now I'm quite good at improvising cuz I spent a long time in Live Events so what I quite like to do is just talk off the top of my head for a lot of my videos and that probably shows in the way I structure some stuff but for videos like this where I need to be a bit more structured and take you through a series of points I will have these handwritten notes that I've got I will actually structure it and bullet this stuff out and maybe between each of the points I'll quickly glance down at the notes and double check what it is I'm going to talk to you about next to make sure I cover everything I'm going to cover there's no right and there's no wrong here I don't want to say that one way is better than the other it depends on you and how you operate a lot of people as well will use a teleprompter if you don't know what a teleprompter is it's basically what news readers use to read the news to you and make sure they get everything absolutely right you Stay classy San Diego I'm Ron bergundy damn it who typed a question mark on the teleprompter it has a script on it and as the script rolls you just read it off a screen and at first people can seem quite wooden while they're reading something off a screen um but the more you practice the more natural it gets and I'm quite good at teleprompters to be honest now I can do them quite naturally but for a lot of people when they first use those it comes across as very wooden and you can see their eyes darting back and forth because they're probably too close to the teleprompter um so it's really interesting how it can be different for absolutely everybody my batter's about to run out teleprompters can be a really valuable way of making sure you get your script right every time and what you'll tend to find is that when you when you use something like a teleprompter and what you can do is start to refund it and iterate as you actually read your script I certainly tend to find that at first people will stick to the script and read it exactly as it Scrolls up the screen and then when they get more comfortable with it the behavior you'll tend to see is as the script is rolling people will tend to improvise different ways of doing it as they get more comfortable with that it can also be a great way if you're filming somebody else to make sure they stay on script and we use that a lot in the corporate world when you're dealing with senior Executives for example at companies you need to get details and facts about something right as well um I know there's people on YouTube who use them I'm pretty sure Gerald un dun um who's the tech review Channel uses a teleprompter too and you see he actually is really really natural but if you really watch him really closely when he's not doing those interview things where he's talking to somebody else and it's natural and unstaged you can sort of start to tell that he is doing a script when he's doing those more technical breakdowns of camera stuff and fair enough I couldn't remember all those numbers and all those statistics either but I don't think it hurts his presentation and it's really important to know that a teleprompt them won't make you wooden especially if you practice at getting it right and getting the feel and flow for it with a teleprompter as well you can adjust the speed of it you can adjust the size of text um and you can get them relatively cheaply off Amazon I've got this pronu thing I'll put a shot of that up on here I'll put a link to that in the uh description as well which was only 40 or50 off Amazon so thousands of dollars in Australia or um $60 or $70 in the US I think exchange rates fluctuate the entire time but they're definitely worth getting your hands on and definitely some of my videos I have done a more scripted approach to make sure I get what I'm trying to say across in a succinct way as you can tell I kind of rabbit on a bit sorry not sorry I enjoy talking to the camera hope you enjoy watching me all right that is the three tips that's it um I hope that was helpful I hope that helps you actually present to camera better what I would love to hear from everybody out there is how would you like to improve on camera how can I help you I have a decade plus of doing this professionally and helping people be be their best on camera so let me know what you're struggling with and if I can I'll make a video about it to help you out that would really help me out to help you out help me help you wrong accent for the wrong movie I think help me help you Tom anyway I'm not going to start doing Tom Cruz Impressions that was terrible the Accents in this video have been absolutely atrocious so I apologize sorry not sorry um take care of yourselves have a wonderful day enjoy recording videos and I look forward to seeing you in the next one