4 BIG MISTAKES – The Road to Launch my First YouTube ad – Day 7

BIG MISTAKES – Welcome to the seventh day of this blog series – The Road to Launch my First YouTube ad. Today I focused on editing the video.

It was always naive of me to think I could get what I needed in one video shoot. But that was the goal.

I made some rookie mistakes which led me to the conclusion that I must reshoot the entire video.

Here are 4 mistakes I made in the video shoot for my YouTube ad.

1. Wardrobe Malfunction

It took me less than a second after pressing play to realize that, my shirt was too tight around my chest. Leaving gaps to my bare naked chest. Not a huge deal, just looks really unprofessional. It simply would not do.

As well as this my chain around my neck was hanging out over one side of my shirt collar. Again, not the end of the world just really sloppy.

I didn’t check my look before the shoot. It was such a rookie mistake and I take full responsibility.

2. The Damn Waterfall

Waterfalls are really pretty and they sound delightful. However if you’ve got no audio equipement or just really crappy audio equipment, shooting beside a raucous waterfall is a really dumb idea.

No amount of iMovie magic will take care of that background noise. In fact when the tools provided in the software are used, what I was left with was some grainy amateur recording.

3. Splitting it up was not a clever idea

I thought splitting the video up into sections would work well. In some cases it did, but my video is essentially a monologue. Splitting up the scenes led to poor transitions.

If the scenes where meant to be different, it would work, but in all scenes everything is the same. If the continuity is broken up, it just looks very odd.

4. Lighting is Important. Duh!

We filmed this as the sun was lowering in the sky. The technical term for this is sunset.

Unfortunately the magical beauty of this was in direct alignment with the camera lens.

There was a glare all over the shot, the glass of the lens was sparkling, it was terrible.

While the sunset was outstanding, it was pretty cruel to the final video. Light has no mercy. It shines relentlessly down on us to point out our mistakes in all it’s glory.

Growing up and Getting on With it

If this happened me 5 years ago, I would have been so pissed off with myself and with life for these errors.

Luckily I’m a bit older now and I know this is all part of the process of learning and getting things done.

I would like to take a moment to thank life for these mistakes. I have learned well and will not be repeating them.

This day of editing has brought me one step closer to my goal. As I look up at the sky and shake my fist, saying “NEVER AGAIN”.

Here’s the notorious ad:

Day 8 will review the a second video shoot.

Missed day 1?

Check it out here – The Road to Launch my First YouTube ad. Day 1