One filming day, a month of posts
The saving is in setting up once for eight pieces, which means every decision has to be made before the day it is filmed.
Filming on the day you post is the most expensive way to make anything. Not because the filming takes long, but because everything around the filming takes long: the tripod, the lights, the tidying, the twenty minutes it takes to stop sounding like somebody being recorded.
Do that eight times and you have paid the setup cost eight times. Do it once and you have paid it once, which is the entire argument for batching and the only part of it that is really about time.
The condition attached is that a batch day only works if it is execution. Every decision made on the day is made badly, because you are hot, behind schedule and have already said the same sentence four ways.
Why is one day cheaper than four?
Because the fixed cost of filming is almost all of the cost.
Setting up a room, getting the light where it should be, checking the sound, clearing the background, changing into something you would be seen in, warming up until your voice sounds like your voice. None of that scales with how much you film.
There is a second saving people notice later. Nine pieces filmed in one session look like a set, because they were lit and framed identically. Nine filmed across nine weeks look like nine different accounts, because the light moved and nobody remembered where the tripod was.
What has to be decided before the day starts?
Everything you would otherwise be deciding at eleven in the morning with a camera running.
Write the list the week before. For each piece: what it is, roughly what you are going to say, which of your formats it belongs to, and what has to be in shot. Not a script, unless scripts suit you. A line and a half is enough to stop you improvising a subject from scratch.
Then add three things people forget. What has to be on the table or the bench before that piece can be filmed. Which pieces need the camera moved, so those can be grouped together. And what the first sentence of each one is, because the first sentence is where a tired person stalls.
Print it. Put it where you can see it from where you stand. Tick things off.
How do you stop it all looking like one sitting?
Change clothes. It is the entire trick and it is free.
Group the day into blocks and change your top between blocks. Not a costume, just a visibly different shirt or jumper. Three changes across a day gives three visually distinct sets, which lets you publish across several weeks without anybody realising they were all made on a Tuesday in March.
Two things get in the way. Once you have changed you cannot go back for a missed shot from the earlier block, so finish a block properly before you change. And take a photograph of yourself at the start of each block, hair and wrists included, because after lunch you will not remember which block you were in.
Film all the b-roll in one block
B-roll is the supporting footage you cut to while the main audio continues: hands working, the thing being made, the door of the shop, the kettle. It is the difference between a video you can edit and a video where every cut is a jump.
Do not film it piece by piece. Do it in one block, at the end, with the day's list next to you. Film each shot for longer than feels sensible, and film the same action twice, once wide and once close. Ten minutes of this rescues an entire day's edit, and it is the first thing dropped when the day runs late, which is why it goes on the list rather than in your head.
When do you film the hooks?
At the end of each block, while the setup and your voice are both still warm.
The hook is the opening: the first line that decides whether anybody watches the rest. It is worth filming more than one of for each piece, in genuinely different shapes rather than three rewordings, and it costs almost nothing once you are already standing there.
This is a working habit in this studio rather than a theory: multiple hook takes are filmed and sent along with the footage, and the one that leads the video is chosen from evidence rather than from the room, not on which one anybody liked on the day. What counts as evidence depends on where the piece runs: as ads or as separate short verticals, the openings can be tested directly and the winner carried back; on a plain organic upload, where only one edit is published and nothing A/B tests an opening for you, the read comes instead from what the first seconds of past videos in this format did, and from somebody seeing the hook cold. Several short vertical pieces come out of each long-form video for the same reason, because the material was filmed with that in mind rather than salvaged afterwards.
Say the take number out loud before each one. It turns an afternoon of scrubbing into a scan.
What actually goes wrong on a batch day?
The failure is monotony, and it does not announce itself until the edit.
A day of nine pieces, all filmed from one angle, all of you talking, means nine videos with nothing to cut to. The first one is fine. By the fourth, the edit has no options: no second angle, no close-up, no shot of the work itself, so the only available cut is a jump cut in the middle of your own face. That is why the b-roll block exists, and it is why the day should include at least one format that is not you talking.
The other failure is scheduling. Nine pieces is optimistic for a first batch day. Plan five, and if the day is going well the sixth and seventh will happen on their own. Plan nine and the last four will be made badly by somebody who wants to stop.
Pick a date, write the list a week before it, and put the b-roll block in the diary as though it were one of the pieces. The day itself is the easy part, and it is the only part most people plan.
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