James: James Schramko, here chatting with my friend Kan from SocialWave.com.au. Hello, Kan.
Kan: Hi James.
James: Kan, you been helping people with their YouTube campaigns, especially, like, super big corporations, and we all consume their products down to the little business owner. So I love the range that you have, the depth and breadth of knowledge is immense. Now, I’ve got a question for you about videos for YouTube.
Kan: Sure.
James: So I was helping someone with their video the other day, and I watched it and it was kind of all in one take, and it was a bit ramble-y. But also there were errors all the way through it. And as I was watching, I was thinking I actually feel like, I would trust this person less, or, they’re not professional. And I just wanted to know, is this one of the reasons why we see those sort of jump cuts on YouTube videos? Is it them chopping mistakes out? Or is it that they’re actually making it more interesting or entertaining to watch, because it seems to be on just about every single video I watch, and doesn’t have any impact on the YouTube algorithm.
Kan: Yeah, that’s right, you make a good point. People who probably can talk very smoothly from start to finish for a lengthy video, you don’t really believe him because it looks really staged. So jump cuts are great, because they keep it pretty raw, they do definitely clean up the mistakes that people make. People probably make multiple cuts as well, meaning they do multiple takes, and then cut that up and take it from different takes. But the other reason is, they should just ’cause the attention spans are short, so if you were to just present it normally, it’d be ramble-y and take too long. So the idea of the jump cut is actually to take away the pauses and keep the momentum of the video to keep engagement high.
James: Just in case we’re listening to this, what is actually a jump cut?
Kan: So a jump cut is basically just a series of some of the best bits or like if you think of it, like, you know, us having a conversation now and we’ve got pauses, we do uhms and ahs, and we make mistakes. So we cut those out. So it’s just a series of the best bits stitched together, that feels really free-flowing as well. And you’ll notice that people sort of jump positions a little bit. And if you listen to an audio, you won’t really notice. But if you’ve watched the videos, they’re slightly changing positions, that sort of stuff, not big, but enough for you to notice that it’s not done in one take.
James: I’ve noticed some people too, they record in high resolution, and they zoom the window in and out. It might be just a single camera take. But they’re just zooming in and out a little bit just to keep that attention. But it’s also the perfect way to cover up a mistake if, you know, obviously might affect you more than me, Kan I’m not sure. Now I’ve already made a bunch of mistakes in this video, but they probably won’t make it to the edited version, because the team will automatically chop it out and jump cut it. And you know, make it catch here and faster, so in terms of recording time, you’re basically best to just lay it down and then hopefully your team can make you look better afterwards.
Kan: Yeah, that’s right. I’m actually terrible in front of camera. I think my team definitely make me look better than I actually am. And you’d, like, use preference sort of punching in, it does two things: it helps to jump cut and also clean up a lot of mess, but also helps to emphasize key points as well. We also do, like, two-camera angles. Sometimes this is not for everyone. But the switching between the two camera angles helps to make things a bit more forgiving. That’s another form of jump cuts as well.
James: And I’ve seen people also do splice in black and white color and some advanced techniques. But going back to this guy who I mentioned about the video, I suggested to him that he looks at a few YouTube videos and sees how they sort of chop out the bad bits and make it punchier. And he redid the video, and it was like 100 times better. And I think he also spliced in what we’d call B-roll. How would you describe B-roll, it’s like not the feature person on the camera?
Kan: It’s more complementary footage to help paint the story. We also do things like animations. So you know, sometimes you can include icons, if you’re really funny, you can include memes and GIFs and moving objects and that sort of stuff. And that helps with keeping engagement high as well. So that’s actually another form of, I guess, jump cutting as well, because it cuts away sometimes to the B-roll, sometimes the animation and so forth. So then it’s just, you know, no one wants to stare at someone’s mug for you know, 20 minutes. It’s always nice to have sort of some variety.
James: I noticed my team too, they’ve been adding little sound effects. If I were to do a karate chop like this, they’d make the sound effects. We’ll do one with the sound effect. So much fun!
Kan, if someone wants to find out more about videos and YouTube marketing in particular, they can check you out: [email protected] Check out your website as well. I appreciate you coming and sharing your tips today.
Kan: Thank you, James. Thanks for having me.
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