Ten things about recording you won't believe

Before my first video I cleaned for two hours, straightening the shelf and hiding the mail and moving a lamp that didn't need moving. Then I watched it back and it looked like a set.

A set makes people careful. The coffee cup and the pile of mail are what tell somebody a real person lives here, and I'd spent the whole morning getting rid of them.

I cleaned so I'd be taken seriously, and that's the exact thing that kept people from believing me.

I own two of them. 😑

A ring light throws flat light straight at your face, which wipes out all your shadows. Shadows are what keep a face from looking pasted on.

It also puts a little donut of light in your eyes, and people have seen that in a thousand ads by now. So it reads as an ad.

Window light comes at you from one side. That's the whole fix.

People will sit through a grainy video all the way to the end, but they'll close a beautiful one in four seconds if the room echoes. I watched that happen to my own videos enough times to stop arguing about it.

And you don't need a microphone. Echo bounces off hard surfaces, so all you need is soft ones.

A rug, curtains, a couch, or your closet if that's what's available. Any of those will get you further than my first three hundred dollars did. 😅

I filmed sitting down for a year, wondering the whole time why I sounded like I was reading a hostage note.

Sitting folds your diaphragm in half, so standing up gives you about a third more life in your voice. Same script, same room, same face, and you didn't do a single thing differently.

Record one line both ways tonight. You'll hear it before you finish the sentence.

Careful, well-paced delivery sounds like reading out loud, while a little too fast sounds like you mean it. People keep up fine either way.

They follow what you're saying and don't even register the word you tripped on, so slowing down to be understood is the thing that actually loses them.

Which brings me to the one I got wrong the longest...

Your energy drops faster than your accuracy climbs, so by take four you're finally saying it right and sounding dead while you do it. I have folders full of take nine.

Not one of them has ever been watched by another human being.

You can hear the words getting cleaner, but you can't hear the life draining out, and that's what makes it a trap.

When you cut out every pause, you end up sounding like someone who never hesitates, and people pick up on that faster than you'd think. Once they do, they start wondering what else got taken out.

Leave the stumble in and you just sound like a person talking. I stopped cutting mine a while back and started getting more replies, and I still don't have a better explanation for it than that.

Nobody is looking at your jawline, I promise. What they're watching is your eyes.

When the screen is facing you, you keep checking yourself without meaning to, and your eyes flick away every few seconds. That's what reads as somebody with something to hide.

Nothing is wrong with you. You're looking at the wrong spot.

Wear whatever you'd have on if this person walked into your kitchen unannounced.

A blazer you don't normally own tells people you're performing rather than talking, and that comes right through the screen. I put a collared shirt on for an early video and my own mother asked me what was wrong. 😅

My voice cracked and I said the same sentence twice, and then I sat there with my thumb over the delete button. The only reason it ever went up is that I was tired and done arguing with myself.

It got more messages than everything I'd made before it put together.

The polished ones get watched and forgotten, but the one where something slipped is the one people write to you about.

Whatever you're about to cut is usually the reason somebody would have reached out.