Alright, it's time to make your intro video. Now, your intro video  or your, uh, promotional video is the,  kinda the most important video for a couple of reasons. It's the first one people see. Okay? So when people are searching through different courses  and trying to pick one, it's the,  it's the main metric people use  to judge whether the course is for them or not. And the other thing is it's used for promotion.

Okay? So sharing it around Facebook groups or in your community  or paid ads, okay? It's the video you're gonna use. So be prepared  to spend a lot more time on this video than any other video  of your course because it is super important. Now, there is no right way or wrong way to do this. You would've watched mine before you took this course.

Um, you can check mine out, go right back  to the beginning if you haven't seen it. Um, and check out any of my other courses for  how I think I should do it. Okay? And there's no right way or wrong way. You will find courses online of how  to make the perfect intro video. You know, talking about introducing yourself  and your qualifications, any awards.

I started to, I followed a lot of those at the beginning  and just felt it wasn't me. So it came across real mechanical. My name is Daniel Scott  and I'm an award-winning instructor for,  and I gave my qualifications  and the companies I talked for, uh, you know, I've worked  with, and it just, it, it wasn't right for me. You might find it perfect for you. So go and check out, like instead of watching courses on how  to make them go through, find courses that you  feel like your audience will, um, engage with. So look for courses that are in the same sort of realm.

So if you are doing cookery classes,  look at introduction course, uh, videos for cooking classes. And you know, there'll be people like Ramsey who is yelling  and it's all drummer and they're swearing. And that might be your audience  and your personality and that's perfect. But if you are a bit more subtle and it's light and fluffy  and fairy, and I dunno what I'm saying,  but you get the idea, the opposite of Gordon Ramsey. I don't know who this person is,  but uh, you know, take notes. Don't just watch and go, oh, I,  I wish I could make something like that.

Take notes what you want to do. Like, oh, that's a great line. I could adapt that for me. You're not gonna copy it because it's, you can't,  you're not Gordon Ramsey. And you know, you'll, you'll kind  of frame it in your own way, but take actual notes  and kind of take little snippets and screenshots  and like, that's what I want it to do. And I want to cut away to actual product shots.

And then I want to go back to me explaining things  and then I wanna finish on this. And uh, and I feel like 30 seconds is long enough  or my case, that can be a couple of minutes. You know, at the beginning it's like it has to be 90 seconds  and I was trying to squeeze it all in there  and I just felt it wasn't right for me. So my, my intros can be a minute or two long  because I feel like I need that  to really explain what I'm doing. You know, like succinctly, but properly I might be wrong. Okay, well it's right for my audience  'cause it's working for them and I'm selling courses.

So have a look at other people, get inspiration, take notes. And there's another little thing you might have to do. There might be a phase one and a phase two. Phase one might be, you know, I can do that. I can do it now with the current camera gear that I have,  which might be a cell phone. And I can do that with the crappy microphone  that I have at the moment and the  terrible background I have.

And then you might have a phase two of like,  I wish I could do this. You know, I want this whole stock photography,  somebody following me around with a camera. And that might be something you really love  but you can't do for this first video. So get inspiration from other videos. That's my advice. Look at some of the courses, that's fine.

And get your own style  and just know that your first one, like me,  it'll be mechanical 'cause  you're kind of following a system. And then later on you'll work out  what is a nice flow for yourself. So that's it for inspiration. Next step. I don't know, what's the next step, Dan? The next step is, uh,  whether you do talking head stuff like this live action  or whether you just speak over the top  of either some slides, maybe some PowerPoint slides  or Google slides or maybe some examples of the work  that you're gonna be covering.

Um, yeah, that way or this way. And for your first course, don't be afraid just  to talk over the top of slides. You can always come back and fix it later on. Say the course does well and you feel like you're ready to,  you know, um, you have had,  you've had a bit more experience talking on camera,  you can come back and make another video. And if you are like, oh, I wanna do the headshot stuff,  but I can't because of the, I don't have a camera  and stuff, um, it's not really an excuse anymore. Like, um, smartphones are doing pretty  amazing with their cameras.

Okay, so you can set up a smartphone. The only thing you might need is a microphone. Um, you can do it with two cell phones. Um, use one as a microphone, kind of balance it off screen  and record on the memo pad and the other one to record  and sync them back up later on. But a nice cheap way of getting round using cell phone  and getting some half decent audio is a lapel mic. Those are the ones that clip on here.

Plug straight into the cell phone. Okay. You can find 'em on Amazon for like 20 bucks,  like cell phone, lapel mic. There's loads of them out there. Look, I'm not gonna give you one. Just look for the reviews.

And yeah, you can shoot quite a good shoot quite well on a  cell phone and you might, the only thing you need  to do is make sure you control the exposure,  which is pretty easy to do through any of the apps. You can get often free on a cell phone. But, um, go out and check and research. There's lots of stuff on YouTube for how  to get the best from a cell phone,  whether it's Android or Apple. Um, if you want to do talking head or you get the full hog  and get a proper video camera, normally a,  a digital DSLR camera  and a microphone and all the rest of it. But that's probably for a later course.

Maybe for this first one, just make it easy. Talk over the top of some slides or images. Next thing to talk about is whether you scripted it out  and whether you read it out word  for word from like a teleprompter  or whether you ad lib it as you go. I can only really give you my experience. I started with a teleprompter  because I thought that's the way you did it. You  Can set up a cheap teleprompter with an iPad and a mirror.

I found it fun to make that thing. Uh, but it sounded like it was a robot  and it was real clear that I was reading from a cue  card and reading it. Okay. And,  but that can be helpful for lots of people  that are really scared to talk on camera. I was, I'm not anymore, you can tell. Um, well I hope.

Um, so my advice though, I've done both where I've just kind  of given myself bullet points and try to read off those. And that's fine when I'm doing my actual courses. 'cause I find the colloquial conversational ness  of my teaching. That's my kind of style. So I like it. Um, but in terms of the intro, I need  to be a lot more concise and a lot clearer  and a lot more professional.

So I actually script it out. So I write exactly what I'm gonna say, but I don't read it. So what I'll do is I'll have it on the screen here. I'll type it exactly how I wanna say it in my head. Then I'll come up here and I'll chop it into pieces. 'cause I can't remember the whole,  like the whole three paragraphs  or 10 sentences or whatever it is.

So I'll just try and, you know, remember the first sentence  or the first two and just cut it together. So I'll read it, read it, read it, read it, read it,  come up here and I will do a load of cuts. So, um, I'll start recording and I'll say it  and then I'll stop and I'll say it again and I'll stop  and I'll try and get it eventually. And I'll have to go back to it. Like, what was I saying again? Okay, so I say this  because, um,  sometimes people are recording their first intro  or live intro  and they're like, man, it took me like two days.

Takes two days sometimes. 'cause yeah, sometimes bad days. And you're just trying to like remember what you were saying  and try and feel energetic. And you're like, sometimes you're waving your hand,  you're not sure and you're like, oh, they look dumb. So you record it again, don't worry if you've got like 30  seconds of speaking and it takes you eight hours  to record, don't worry. I do too.

Less and less as you get more confident. Um, I've said the words, hi, my name is Daniel Scott  and I'm Adobe certified instructor. So many times now that I don't have  to remember that, but it's coming out natural. So you can either bullet point it  and just kind of keep yourself on track with bullet points,  or you can read from a teleprompter  or read from something above your camera. You might not do a teleprompter,  you might just write it in a scrap of paper next to it. And what I do is I completely write it all out,  but then I try and memorize it  and I end up sometimes massaging it into a bit more  of a natural thing as I'm saying it out loud.

That is my process. So you decide how you want to do it. Uh, yeah. All right, next step. Next little tip about creating your intro is be prepared  for it to take a very long time to actually produce. So, uh, whenever I'm filming my intro, I always plan  for two days, always takes me longer,  always takes me three or four.

And that's working full time on it. So you can look at the quality of my intros case, search  for Daniel Scott, um, Adobe tutorials, and try  and find one of my intros, one of the later ones, not one  of the early ones, uh, just to get a sense of what  that three days ends up being. Okay. So there's lots of just, there's,  there's generally just one day of me recording myself,  trying to get all the right bits in there. And then there's another day of, uh, putting  that all together, then coming, then going away. And there's lots of voiceover in the middle of my intros  where I'm saying during this course you're gonna learn how  to, uh, put in fonts, pick colors,  and I am cutting away to things  that we're doing in the course.

So I'm either going through my old videos, trying to find  concise bits of interesting footage to go over there. It's called B-roll. B-roll would be the term used for that. So, and uh, often I'll just remake it. I'll find the files that I was working with  and record my screen  and actually do a very concise version  of it while I'm talking over. And then there's generally just another day  of fixing up things, adding some music underneath.

Okay? Often I'll put a noise floor in, um, you know,  snappy music, just, uh, you gotta decide whether  that's right for you or not. It'd be very common, um, especially for an intro  to get the kind of pace and get the tonality of your course. Um, it also hides really bad audio. So if it sounds like you've recorded in the shower, um,  real echoey, uh, you can put a little bit of music  underneath and hide that in your intro video  and you can surprise them with it in your,  in your second video  where it sounds like you're in the shower. Uh, so that's that tip.

Last tip. And the last tip, and it's the most important tip is  that perfect is the enemy of good or good enough. Now, my first videos were terrible in comparison  to what I'm doing now. So don't judge your video based on this amazing instructor  that you hope to be one day  or this person you're kind of projecting to being. Um, get, do what you can. If you've got an average camera  with an average microphone, that's fine.

If you are not very confident voice sewing over,  that's just the way it is at the moment. So do like, you know, do good enough. Don't wait till this, you know, this, this,  this package comes from Amazon  and this, uh, you know, I finally practice this thing  or the kids aren't around and I can focus more. I know those are valid excuses,  but, uh, I guess just get it done and get it out there. You can always, like I find in my head, the way to kind  of get past that is go, I can come back and fix this. I never do.

'cause I kind of move forward  and the next one's always gonna be better. It's 10% better and it's 10% better and it's 10% better. Your first one's a bit embarrassing and that's okay. So good enough is good enough. Get out there, make your intro video, put as much effort  as you can at this moment into it, but then move on  and make your next course  and remake the intro if you have to,  if you're real embarrassed. All right?

That is it for making your intro video. Go out there and make it, and I will see you in the next  video.