Energy like children
In the video you just watched, I suggested you think about how you read stories to children – I mean little children at bed time. It’s all about the voices and it’s all about the slightly over-the-top feel that children love.
You can usefully take that idea further by the following exercise:
- find an otherwise utterly boring piece of text. It might be the phone book or the instructions to your new household device – anything that’s not exciting
- read it out loud in a normal way
- pay attention to how you read it and give that level of energy a score out of ten: typically it would be about a three or a four
- read it again as a six
- jot down what you did differently and how it felt – probably it felt uncomfortably ‘pushy’
- not read it again, as at least a score of eight, if not ten
- jot down the differences again
- come back down to a six and read it once more – notice how much more natural it feels this time around.
That level is a reasonable guess at how energetic you need to be for a camera!
Exercise: look at some of the videos you like to watch on YouTube and give them scores out of ten for energy. What do they do to give you that score? What would it look like if they were a point higher? And what about a point lower? What is it specifically that they do? Which of those tools can you adopt? How?
This exercise can be a great excuse to just slack off and watch youtube – it works best if you jot down your answers! A handy tip is to create a formal scoring sheet with a set of criteria that you can use to compare each video. (Cuts, posture, movement, gestures, eyes, head etc) 🙂
For example, take a look at this video: https://youtu.be/z2-dQ6begfM. (I’ve picked it almost at random.) What is it the presenter does to keep her energy high?