Video Creation: How to Create Awesome Videos & Camtasia 101

Screencast videos are very powerful marketing tools and can be used for many purposes. Whether your goal is to deliver awesome content, educate/teach your subscribers, members or customers or create videos that convince and convert, screencasts are probably the best suited type of video for the job.

For one thing, a screencast presentation combines text, images and audio. It’s truly multi-medial. Psychological studies about effective learning show that this combination of text, images and audio are ideal for learning. What this means is that a screencast video is ideal for teaching, but also for “leaving an impression” in the viewer’s mind, in general. Whether you are making videos to teach or videos to sell, that’s always a good thing.

Finally, people simply pay attention to well-made video presentations. Much more so than to badly produced video or to walls of text.

For my videos, I usually use PowerPoint to create the presentations/slideshows. It’s likely that you are also using PowerPoint or perhaps Keynote or Open Office Impress. Or maybe you are a user of one of the several dozen other desktop- and online-applications that can be used to create presentations.

The good news is that it doesn’t matter. Whichever application you use to create presentations, the basic principles are always the same. The factors that make the difference between bland and boring presentations and engaging and exciting ones have nothing to do with the software you’re using.

In the following tutorials, we will be focusing on these principles. If at any point you have a specific question concerning the program you’re using, do a quick Google search (“how to do X with PRESENTATION PROGRAM”). This way, you can typically find a whole host of tutorials and videos to help you out with the technical details.

Here are the most important and most powerful principles of excellent presentations. Follow these and all of your screencasts and videos will be significantly more awesome than at least 90% of videos and screencasts out there.

1) Less is More

When in doubt, always reduce the amount of information on any given slide to the absolute minimum. Bad presentations usually have one thing in common: Too much of something. Too much text on a slide, too much information, too many different colors and elements,…

2) One Unit of Information Per Slide

This is closely related to the first principle. Show one unit of information on each slide. No more. The guideline here is this: If you need to spend more than a few seconds explaining something, it should go on it’s own slide. If you have three bullet-points and each one requires further explanation, then put them on three separate slides. If you have three bullet-points that require no further explanation, then it’s fine to have them all on one slide.

3) Use Supporting Images

As mentioned in an earlier video, using images in conjunction with text and audio is what makes screencast videos such a powerful teaching- and conversion-tool. So it only makes sense to add images to slides, whenever it’s suitable. Don’t feel compelled to add images everywhere, all the time. Use them where it makes sense.

4) Build Up Complex Information in Small Steps

Whenever you are presenting complex information, it can be very useful to illustrate it with diagrams, graphs or flowcharts, but only if it’s done right. If you display an entire flowchart all at once, it’s an overwhelming amount of information and people in your audience will rather go do something else than even begin to try to process all the information. Always build up a flowchart (or any kind of complex information) in a logical, step-by-step manner, to make the presentation engaging and useful.

I know that many of my fellow online marketers and product creators don’t believe in the importance of good design. Many product creators are proud of how quickly they make their products and like to brag about it (“I made a product in just three hours and sold it for $97!”). Of course, a product that’s made with this quick-and-dirty approach is not going to look very good, but according to aforementioned marketers, that doesn’t matter. It’s all about the content, not the presentation.

They couldn’t be more wrong. In marketing and particularly in the marketing of digital content, perceived value is a very important factor. Perceived value is the reason why sales-pages and landing pages (and websites in general) are usually well designed and polished looking. Perceived value is the reason we create eCover images for our virtual goods. Perceived value is the reason you never see a $2K product sold on a shoddy website that just consists of a wall of black text on a white background.

Good design is what makes up most of the perceived value of online content.

Apart from putting you in a position where you can charge more money for your content, good design can even help make your content more useful, for the simple reason that people are more likely to pay attention to, and take action on well-designed content.

This is why I take design quite seriously and you should too, if you value your business.

The good news is that good design doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming, as you’ll see in the following videos.

In the following videos, we’ll look at some very simple guidelines and rules for good design. And the best part is: Making good looking, well designed slides is actually easier than making crappy ones.

For one thing, there’s the “Less is More” rule, which is also very important for design. Your screencast video will be better if you put less stuff on your slides. You don’t have to write tons of text for your slides and you don’t need huge lists of bullet points.

Secondly, there’s the rule of consistency: For good design, pick one thing and stick with it. This means that all you need is one font (and one font size), one very simple color combination, a simple set of images and one set of animations/transitions and you’re well on your way to making awesome presentations. You pick the design elements once, and then simply stick with them. That, plus a system for creating the presentations results in a much more efficient workflow, when you’re putting together your slides.

Choosing a good background for your presentation or slide-show is quite simple. First of all, plain backgrounds are generally a good choice. When in doubt, go with a plain white background or a plain black background. Just combining plain white or plain black with one highlight color and a nice font is really all you need to create very striking presentations.

As we’ve already seen in one of the previous videos, you can even use the highlight color (like red or orange) in the background.

Another simple option is to use subtle gradients in the background. When using gradients, make sure that you keep them minimal and that they don’t end up conflictig with the slide content. Good choices are gradients from white to light grey or black to dark grey.

Finally, you can also use images for your slide backgrounds. When using images, make sure that they are fairly “boring” images, since the background should never distract from the slide content. A good way to find suitable background images is by searching for “textures”, online.

The guidelines for using fonts are ones we’ve already encountered before, namely “less is more” and “consistency”.

Whatever you do with fonts, keep it consistent. Many different fonts and font sizes almost always end up looking messy and unprofessional. To make a stylish and professional looking presentation, pick one headline font (large, bold) and one body-text font. That’s all you need.

When picking individual fonts, always opt for simple, minimalistic fonts. There are many “special” fonts that are wild and funky, but the eyes get tired of those very quickly, so it’s best not to use them at all.

The second rule for picking fonts is: Whatever you do, never use Comic Sans.

For combining fonts, either choose two fonts that are very different from each other (contrasting fonts) or two fonts that are exactly the same. If you have a headline font that is just slightly different from the body text font, that will cause a bit of a visual conflict, so it’s best avoided.

Finally, for text-effects, the rules are very simple as well: Using no effects at all is always a good choice. If you want to use text-effects, make them subtle and only use one. Combinations of gradients, shadows, reflections and other effects, usually ends up as optical train-wrecks.

Finding good images for your videos, that you have the rights to use, can be pretty difficult. At least, if you don’t know where to look.

My favorite sources for free images are listed above.

Particularly the site with the free icon sets is not to be underestimated: It’s amazing what you can do with a few high-res icons. They’re also very suitable for stylish, minimalistic presentations, where you simply have icons as supporting images.

Finally, I highly recommend you create your own personal stock of images (just save anything interesting you find on your searches). Building up your own stock of images like this means that every time you create a new video or new presentation, you’ll spend less time looking for new images, because you can just go back and use ones you’ve already saved.

In this video, I show some examples of how you can use text in a graphical way. These are some easy ways to make visually interesting presentations, without using any actual images.

Video media has become faster and faster paced over the years. By now, even news-shows work with lots of animations, CGI effects in the background and cuts/camera switches. For TV shows, movies and especially music videos, it’s become the norm to cut from scene to scene at an incredibly fast pace.

The idea is not that we try to keep up with this kind of fast pacing, but we do need to be aware of the fact that video-media typically moves quickly and learn some ways to keep our own videos reasonably dynamic as well.

Most importantly, you need to avoid the “why is this even a video?” effect, which is when you show just one static image or just one slide and talk about it for minutes on end, with nothing actually happening in the visual component of the video. I’ve seen many videos that could have easily been replaced with an audio recording plus a single image.

In short: Avoid showing static images for minutes at a time, in your videos.

In the following modules, we’ll look at how to use animations and transitions and we’ll learn some “shortcuts” to creating dynamic and engaging video content.

The leading principles for using animations and transitions are ones we’re already familiar with, namely: “less is more” and consistency.

Particularly in PowerPoint, many of the animations and transitions are just completely over-the-top. They’ve got texts and images swiveling and bouncing all over the place and slides dissolving into a million pixels and reassembling spectacularly as a new slide. This may be quite entertaining to look at, but in a presentation, it’s nothing but a distraction from your actual content.

Very simple sliding and fading motions are always a good choice, as they give a presentation a “smooth” feel without drawing attention to themselves.

Also make sure that any animations and transitions are short. Usually half a second to one second is more than enough time for any kind of animation.

In this video, we take a look at the most common mistakes people make in their online videos (and screencast videos in particular).

The mistakes are:

1. The Redundancy Effect

As discussed in a previous video, if you have all the text on the slides and you simply read that text out loud, presentations become very boring and the viewers are probably going to stop paying attention to either the slides or your narration.

2. Text-Heavy Slides

Big slabs of text and long lists of bullet-points are very un-appealing. Always reduce the amount of text on a slide to the absolute minimum and use graphics wherever possible.

3. Long, Rambling Videos

Keep in mind that the video viewers are benefit-driven. They don’t want to hear every last detail about a topic, they generally want an end-result. In you messages, say everything that your audience needs to know, in as few words as possible.

4. Monotonous Narration

Formally written scripts read out word-for-word in a monotonous voice are booooring! Narrating off-the-cuff generally makes for more lively videos and whatever you do, put some heart into it!

5. Long, Motionless Stretches

A video is pointless if there’s no motion going on. Ideally, there should always be some motion, something going on, in your videos. Realistically, you can’t make perpetually moving presentations, but make sure that there’s never stretches of a minute or longer where nothing’s happening on-screen.

Avoid these mistakes and you’re already well on your way to creating compelling and interesting videos!

Summary

When you’re creating your videos, should you write a script for you narration and then read off of that or should you just go through the slides and narrate them off-the-cuff?

Personally, I prefer and recommend narrating videos without a script. While I have my reasons for this, I also realize that some people simply aren’t comfortable with winging it and would rather write a script.

Whether you want to write a script or not, one important thing to keep in mind is that A) formal written language is very different from spoken language and B) informal, conversational, spoken language is much more effective than formal language. So, if you write a script, make sure that you write it in a relaxed, conversational style.