Making videos to practice public speaking

One of my motivations for starting a YouTube channel at the start of this year was to develop skills that I felt could be valuable; the main two being video editing skills and public speaking.

I’m sharing one video every week, and am very much in the experimental, learning phase. Every week I’m trying something new.

One thing I’m still finding my groove with is the extent to which I either focus on recording the whole video in one, or take multiple recordings of each segment and edit them to make a final piece.

On the whole, I find it takes a bit longer to do multiple recordings and edits, but that it leads to a slicker final cut. One downside is that things can sound a little unnatural sometimes, if I join two segments where my inflection doesn’t perfectly blend together.

When public speaking, you aren’t given this opportunity to re-take your clips and to edit our mistakes afterwards.

Therefore, I feel that the approach to making videos, of either leaning towards multiple takes or for full run-through recordings, affects the extent to which the skill development generalises. Focussing on the first approach means I’ll learn to make good videos, while working on the second can hopefully enable both great videos and great public speaking skills.

I stumbled across a video this week, which I found inspirational in this regard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9E8yaFCX0Y

It’s shot in one-take and in the same style that you would use when presenting to an audience. I have also seen a lot of similar such videos on the Charisma On Command channel.

Therefore, I decided this week that, going forward, I am going to have this as an end-goal in mind; to be able to create great videos (and therefore great presentations in the real world, if we ever return) in a single, continuous recording.