Behind the Scenes - Making a Tutorial for Patreon. (Patreon)

Hi everyone,

I hope you had a fabulous weekend. Dom and I were busy house painting again. I think we'll be still going with it this time next year. 😳

I need a break from video editing for a little while so I thought you'd like to see my videoing set up and learn a little bit about how I make the tutorials for you. 

You've seen this room above before. It's my painting room which was once my older son's bedroom. There's plenty of light and I can shut the door on my mess.

To the left of the Gardenia painting here is my 'Magic Arm.' You can see it better in the photo below. It's clamped to my painting desk and it holds my iPhone in it above the painting that I'm working on. I use my iPhone to make the tutorials. I like to try and paint in normal daylight so I don't get any nasty shadows when I'm filming. Sometimes it might be overcast and then I have no choice but to put my little LED light on to film.  The LED light in the background  (the rectangular one) is Nanguang. My younger son bought it for me for my birthday. He's a videographer and works for a TV channel in Sydney so he knows all about getting the lighting correct.

The photo below shows you the magic arm/phone holder from above. The brand of the magic arm is 'Tethertools' and I bought it from a camera shop in Sydney. It's brilliant but I wish it was a little longer so I could film up a bit higher with it. If I need higher shots I've got to take it off my table and clamp it to a tripod.

I spend anywhere from 2 to 5 days or so working on a painting and I film everything. I end up with anywhere from 100 to 200 short videos from 1 minute to 5 minutes long for each painting. 

Then when I'm finished painting I head upstairs to our office where my computer is.

That's my computer on the left. Dom's computer/workspace is on the right. That cupboard in the middle of our desks holds our printers and my scanner.

When I get upstairs I get all the video footage off my phone and I store it in one of the three hard drives in the photo below. I have so much video footage that I had to get it off my computer. It took up way too much space and my poor computer couldn't cope.

I edit all the footage in Premier Pro. For each tutorial, I have to import all the little videos and start working my way through them. I cut out the bits where my hand isn't in the footage and I splice them all together. That takes me a few days to go through it all and make the cuts. Then when I have put it all together I have to do the voiceover. I do the voiceover after rather than while I'm painting for two reasons. The first is that I can't talk when I'm painting. My mind goes all mushy and no words can come out. I think it must be the right brain/left brain thing.  When I paint I'm in full right brain mode. The right side of the brain is supposed to be the creative side whereas the left side handles speech and analytical thinking, so they say. The second reason I do the voiceover after, is because I don't want you to hear all my 'ums and ers'. I want my instructions to be as clear and concise as I can make them. The voiceover usually takes me a day or two. 

I use a Blue Microphone with a pop filter mounted to it to minimize the 'p' spiking when I talk. The microphone is sitting in a portable sound booth to stop it sounding too 'echoey.' We have no carpet here in our house so there's nothing to absorb the sound.

Once I've done the voice over I then have to add all the transitions between the video cuts, add the titles (that's text and anything where I've got to draw your attention to stuff). I also add the little introduction with the music. 

Once that's all done, sometimes I might film an introduction where I'm talking to the camera. If I do that then I have to add that to the start of the video. Then I spend the next few days checking the video and the sound. That involves sitting at my computer watching the video. I listen to the sound and take out any background noises that are annoying, I check that the transitions are working well and I make any adjustments I need to make. 

Then it's a case of exporting the video to my hard drive which takes a few hours. When it's exporting I make up the supplies lists, the line drawing, and the thumbnail for the video. Once it's exported I upload it to YouTube as an unlisted/private video and I make a post for Patreon so all of you can have access to it.

Today, I've finished all the voiceover for the Gardenia painting 🤪. I've divided it into three videos because it's about 110 minutes long. I will have it ready for you later in the week. I have to check it all first.

I hope you enjoyed this look behind the scenes. One day I hope to hire an editor that will take care of all this stuff that I do at my computer. The editor can get it all ready for me and then all I'll have to do is the voiceover. Then I can escape back downstairs to my painting room and get on with what I love doing the most.

💜