Making videos as a means to practice public speaking

A new approach to making YouTube videos

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:

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.

---

LINKS

1 podcast: Big picture medicine

I binge-listened to this podcast this week. It’s a really well-edited, short-and-sweet podcast exploring interesting medical topics.

1 game-changing piece of software: beautiful.ai

I used this to make a presentation this week. It’s a fantastic alternative to powerpoint, which makes it much easier to make really clean and professional presentations.

1 youtube video: “Confessions of a YouTuber: I have no idea what I'm doing (700K subscriber special)”

This video provided a really refreshing perspective for me, and a timely reminder that sometimes the limiting factor is not ‘the next new tip’, but rather just deciding to try something and being willing to fail.

2 videos I shared this week:

I flexed my creative muscles and created a montage video of a trip to Oxford with my friends from a while back.

After watching a lot of ‘study with me’ videos on YouTube, I decided to record my own this week - here is a 1 1/2 hour video of my writing code, if you feel so inclined.

Personal update:

I’ll be talking at London.AI this week about whether AI will replace / augment doctors, and what the latest research shows.

---

Have a great week! Stay safe.

Chris