the average person has around three close friends and 38% have at least five but what if you want to film a greatl looking video and have none well some of the biggest and best YouTubers on the planet have no friends and yet they still manag to create cinematic videos all by themselves but how I had to know and so I spent days incessantly watching four of my favorite YouTubers entire channels until I had some answers so in this video I want to share four tips I discovered along the way and the one thing they all
have in common so you can use them to start making better videos without ever making a friend but first what does it mean to be cinematic it's a term I don't really care for but it's all over YouTube and to me it really just means looking sounding and behaving like a movie of course that's pretty vague and how do you do that well depends here on YouTube that usually means buying some new equipment all you do is buy this camera and it looks like a movie I bought this lens and and it was like boom
Netflix I'm telling you this light gave me six-pack abs actually I'd probably buy that last one but for this video I don't want to focus on camera gear and instead I'm going to look for tips anyone can use to make their videos more movish is that a word and so to start I watch the entire channel of a YouTuber that I think makes incredibly cinematic videos mostly by herself if you don't know kesa she's documenting her real life turning the mundane into the spectacular and it's easy to get immersed into this world she's created relaxing
calm and upbeat take a look at this sequence I was such a sad boy when you caught my [Music] only because she films most of her videos by herself accomplishing a sequence like this requires a combination of two things the first is called coverage which had around 3 hours of watching her I found she talked about here this means getting a variety of shots for the scene you are filming I'm not going to lie this takes a long time so she's setting up the camera filming a take moving the camera and repeating the process getting
a variety of shots along the way and this is really important you can never have enough coverage because well variety is the spice of life I always try to get at least five types of shots when filming a scene a wide shot to establish a scene a medium shot for dialogue and action close-ups to convey emotion inserts to focus on specific details and a creative shot to just have fun with it and yeah that's all great but the second is what really creates that movie Magic so what is it just like Tom Cruz or Maro
Robbie she's acting you might be thinking well what are you talking about you just said she's documenting her real life and yeah that's true to a degree the experiences may be real enough but her videos are filled with her faking it when you're creating a video by yourself you're in charge of everything and it's inevitable you're going to be doing a million things like setting up equipment checking camera settings and reviewing your footage all the time and that can be pretty draining but you don't want your audience to feel that you want them to feel
like it's organically happening for the first time I'm acting in all my videos in real life my name is Matt I own a pet supply shop sup actually I was just acting there or was I now clearly I'm no thesbian but I found the best way to do this is simply repetition the more takes I do the more relaxed I get and the more natural it looks and doing more takes allows you to play with different energy levels and speeds so you have choices in the edit I always try to do at least three takes
for everything although it usually ends up being closer to 10 on to the next YouTuber he's a filmmaker that makes a lot of short documentary style videos I've seen a few in the past and I think they're excellent so I decide to watch the rest and see what I can learn I think anyone who's watched one of Nicholas's videos is immediately Blown Away by the film making one of the biggest keys for filming alone is effort when you don't have others to help you have to work harder to get the same results and you can
tell Nicholas puts in the effort filming during sunrise and sunset for amazing Landscapes using slow motion for emphasis and flying fpb drones for camera movement because of this amazing b-roll it's really easy to get sucked in 4 hours and 17 minutes had gone by before I noticed my retinas were burning but while my eyes recovered I realized it wasn't just the flashy b-roll that made his content so good in fact sort of the opposite take a look at this sequence from his last 7 Days to Live video throughout the hike Gabriel and I reflected on
the last years of our lives and whether or not we live those up to our own expectations so I got to admit that throughout the last couple of days I haven't really been thinking about death at all but now that I only have three more days left to live this experiment actually starts to become kind of real it's a lot of effort If I Only Had 7 Days to Live I'm probably just going to binge eat on the couch and watch reruns of the office instead we have it all the mountains the water the slow
motion but mixed in with all those clips a simple handheld shot anyone can do because he's often the only character in his videos he uses these to talk about his struggles or emotions or whatever he's trying to accomplish and intercuts it with amazing b-roll of him doing those things and it's the combination of the two that creates visual contrast that causes you to constantly pay attention not every shot has to be amazing great so maybe focus on getting a few really great shots and then for the others a contrasting style that's much easier to film
by yourself and for for an extra tip here there's something I noticed missing at times from that amazing b-roll or should I say someone Nicholas just because you're filming by yourself doesn't mean every frame has to have you in it use objects or your environment to enhance your story so you can occasionally stay behind the camera and get a more Dynamic shot this next YouTuber redefines what it means to be cinematic because he doesn't rely on scripting fancy editing or color grades yet his videos still seem like many movies he's made a lot of them
over 1,00 well let's be honest of course I didn't watch all of them the first thing I noticed about Casey's old videos is that they're not polished there are certainly seeds of what's to come but a lot of these first videos are pretty amateur this should hopefully be inspiring because everyone starts at the beginning and as long as you keep at it and try to improve you will a few hundred videos into his channel and you can see that as his style solidifies there are tons of filming Hallmarks that he does well like composition sound
design 3x structure storytelling and a whole bunch more it honestly deserves an entire video on its own but day after day of watching his content one thing repeatedly stuck out I remember seeing this interview with Casey where he said this I fing hate camera movement it really does as his videos went on there was less and less camera movement if you're filming by yourself this is great news because a tripod's a man's best friend like a three-legged dog but always using a tripod results in a lot of static shots and that can get boring so
how are Casey's videos rarely if ever boring while the camera may not be moving something in the frame almost always is I think this is my favorite tip because when you're filming by yourself this is way easier to do instead of shaking the camera Shake something in front of the camera instead of a camera tilt tilt your body instead of a rack focus focus on a rack actually don't do that last one this last YouTuber makes works of art both on canvas and online I covered a number of his techniques in my last video but
there's a lot more to discuss in fact recently he was interviewed about his film making process and there were some great insights like to film that I used a SE stand yeah for to get a top down shot and then I used two skateboards to move it which shows it's important to use whatever you have to get the job done and I think that's a pretty good tip on its own but more importantly it's just a small part of something much bigger the majority of ga's videos are shot entirely by himself in his bedroom and
no they're not for only fans I think for a lot of us shooting by yourself in a bedroom would be pretty limiting and uninspiring but his videos are quite the the opposite in fact if I had to sum him up in one word it would be creative he's so creative it kind of feels Untouchable but if you start at the beginning of his channel and watch every video you can see all the strides he's made not just in film making like Casey but in creativity and I think it's those very limitations that's grown his creativity
so just be creative right no problem okay not quite but the good news is it's a skill that can we learn with time and practice so for me what I do is just let my mind wander and try to think of the biggest or coolest way to film a scene and then when I have something I like I shave it down until there's something I think I can actually do if you've ever started a sentence with wouldn't it be cool it's probably a good idea write it down it's easy to make excuses but instead of
thinking of all the reasons you can't instead think how can I make this more interesting because of my limitations if you haven't guessed already what all these YouTubers have in common it's pretty simple they all do every one of these tips and a lot more because creating videos by yourself is hard and yeah it could drive you a little crazy I get it every frame of this entire channel has been done by just me but when I finish a video I'm like wow I did that all by myself and it makes it worth it although
sometimes it's nice to have a friend oh and if you want to learn more about how to create videos like ox click here
