To be original – is the most important key to success for a vlog on Youtube but you must also be genuine and tell a worthwhile story in a thought-provoking style. To share your journey and inspire others to take action and improve their lives and/or the lives of others around them. This is the desired result, the purpose and the best reason to go to the effort to design and produce a vlog but can only happen with great story-telling – therein lays the challenge.
In order to tell a story that never ends, you need a vlog design which is somewhat of a format combined with an editorial calendar. The idea here is to create a cohesive story-strategy, where each new episode connects to the next but throughout the course of a month, several activities would repeat on certain days of the week. For example; Sunday’s on the bike in the Park, a weekly update with a media partner, in my case; “Peace Revolution” and one day per week in the studio, another example; “A day at the bookstore”.
As for each episode of the vlog, the best on Youtube all have a format. Some use time-lapse, almost all good vlogs have music tracks and most have custom graphics and make use of what are called “call-outs”, which is large text blocks, often made into bullet points. The trend is to provide as much added information to as many frames as possible, often sound effects are synced to match the graphics. The production quality of the very best vlog is on par with Television and/or film because many of the vloggers are using the same, or almost equivalent film editing software as the leading film studios. Many of the best vlogs are created by expert film makers, but most are people who are self-taught.
As for cameras and technology, this is what is most amazing, in many cases mobile phones are the cameras and almost any computer that can download film editing software will do. Microsoft includes a film editing software on most computers, or it’s a matter of minutes to download one of several that will do the job. You just need to know what you’re doing and that’s the tough issue because these types of software have a very steep learning curve, although there are lot’s of good tutorials and how-to guides,
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