Time spent watching YouTube
Really that's where all of this began, a momentary thought about "I spend a lot of time watching YouTube, I wonder if I could start a channel"
And so it started, first the question "ok, so what do I talk about?" which at the time was answered with "well, I notice there's way less older people on YouTube than there are younger people, let's see if we can change that. Of course the immediate way to do so was start a channel myself.
The original plan
At the same time I'd been talking to colleagues about some garden projects I'd done and I found myself messaging a lot of pictures so I thought "I know, I'll make a video of my DIY projects and put it on YouTube"
Now at this point I have to admit to having some experience in film making..
Yes I did a basic video editing course about 40 years ago. VHS had just been invented (go look it up if you don't know what VHS was) and our editing was old fashioned cutting with razor blades and re-joining with sticky tape (cutting and splicing to give it a proper name).
So obviously with this 'Expert Status' experience it was going to be easy... I have a smartphone with a video camera and a computer and stuff so I set to and made my first videos.
The original reality
Oh yes and I'd just bought a stand up paddleboard so the actual first videos I made and posted were about pumping up my paddleboard. I filmed them because before I bought it I was trying to find out how long it would take to pump it up but I couldn't find the information anywhere so I thought "I'll answer the question myself" and put it on YouTube. I set up my phone on a tripod which I'd had for about 30 years and started filming, again and again and again. At that point I hadn't really thought about how I wanted my videos to look but I knew I wanted to indicate effort involved and time taken on this particular one. But I'd no idea how. Pretty much a day later I had hours of footage but no real clue what to do next.
First money spent
I had my videos but I looked at the "raw" footage and thought it needed editing to take out some of the mistakes and join the bits back together. I tried using iMovie but in honesty I didn't get on with it. I looked around on YouTube and saw LumaFusion which is an app on the iPad. That suited me because I leave the laptop in the office and take the iPad home which meant I could edit in the evenings. I watched some videos of people using it, shout out to Tammy Sypniewski and Henny Tha Bizness
And I bought it. At the date of writing this (about a month in from the beginning) I think LumaFusion is awesome. It cost me money (£28) but I'm delighted with the investment. Next couple of nights were starting to learn what I could do with it which, as it turns out, is a lot..
B roll footage
I'd got no clue what B roll footage was, I just knew I wanted a timer or clock on the paddleboard video so I could show how long I spent pumping the thing up. Hmm, back to YouTube to research how to get a timer in a YouTube video... Ok, screen record the stopwatch on my phone, edit it, inset it into the main video, hey B roll footage of the stopwatch! Ok it's maybe not strictly B roll but I was getting the idea.
Some more editing, discovering I could speed up and slow down sections, added some free music, added some overlay titles (captions) added in some voiceover to explain what I was doing, I have to say I really enjoyed the learning experience, trying to think of what I needed to get across to the audience, what I'd want to see if I was the viewer. And for an initial result I was quite pleased.
New plan
So having got that one out the way I was on a roll. Or maybe I wasn't...
Something you realise once you embark on the YouTube journey is that to be even a tiny bit successful you have to fulfil some needs for the viewer:
Plenty of content for the viewer to watch
Interesting enough for viewers to want to watch
Of good enough quality that the viewer can bear watching
With paddleboarding, while I thought I could fulfil 2 & 3, I was never going to do enough of it to achieve criteria 1. Time for a rethink.
I went back to my first thoughts about sharing the garden projects, that was something I wanted to do anyway so on day one at the beginning of October 2020 I actually uploaded 6 videos, 5 of them were paddleboard stuff and 1 on a garden project.
A channel name
Oh, one other thing. Once you know you want to upload something you need to create your channel and it needs a name, I'll leave your decision on that entirely up to you.
The end of day 1
There you have it, the end of my first day as a YouTuber. In fairness it actually spread over about 3 days but the culmination was that on October 2nd 2020 I uploaded 6 videos and started the oldmanwith YouTube channel
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