Hey there,
Since you’re here, I assume you’re interested in Videography or at least the creative space using a camera. As someone who started out with Photography and then later went into Videography I know what a maze it can be. Sometimes it feels like you need a map to figure out the way through it and learn everything.
Personally, I’ve spent countless hours on YouTube to try and figure out not only the basics but all the small things I could do to improve my craft. However, one of the biggest struggles for me was that I didn’t know, what I didn’t know.
Meaning, I didn’t know what to search for when I was stuck or something didn’t work out. Sure, occasionally I might find a video researching another topic that then provided me with keywords or answers that I was looking for. But initially, I didn’t know how to search for it and a lot of the time that’s how I ended up getting my knowledge.
In reality, though, that wasn’t a very efficient way of going about it. And while creative work most of the time doesn’t follow a straight path it doesn’t make it easier, that to find out what to do better, sometimes you have to involve luck or coincidence.
If I could go back in time with a roadmap on exactly what do to or at least what I needed to know, then that would’ve made the process of getting to where I am today, a lot faster!
When I try to put it as simple as possible there are three ingredients to success - not only in the creative space but pretty much anywhere in life.
- You need to know, what you need to know, so you can learn all of it and if possible, in the right order.
- You need to practice A LOT and you need to do the same things over and over again until you’ve become so familiar with it, that you could do it immediately if woken up at 3 am and asked to.
- You need to stay consistent and practice. I know this seems similar to bullet two but consistency is the absolute key. You never see a top athlete who hasn’t done the same thing a million times over and over again to perfect it or a business leader who hasn’t written a million emails to now know exactly how to do it and what works.
Now, the practice and consistency part is something that you have to do yourself. There are no shortcuts to this, the only way to improve is to spend time doing it and learning from your mistakes.
And while we are at it, let’s not put mistakes as something bad but rather see it as a learning opportunity. If you are afraid of making mistakes you are already losing out. Embrace mistakes and as long as you learn from them you’ll improve a lot faster.
So, the one thing that you can get help with; getting to know what you don’t know.
Whether you get a course to get all the bits and pieces of what you need or you go on YouTube to learn there are a ton of resources both for free and paid.
If you are in doubt about whether you should buy something or not you can see it like this: paying for access to knowledge is a bit like a shortcut to the things you don’t know - compared to going about it as I did and figuring it all out by yourself and coincidentally finding the knowledge you need or the keywords for the next thing you need to search for.
There’s nothing wrong with either approach, it’s all about if you pay with time or money and that’s completely up to you. I’ve personally done both, purchasing a handful of courses in the beginning and then researching my way to more narrow topics or investing time when I couldn’t afford a course.
To help you out as much as possible for free, I’ve created a free e-book checklist on the topics and keywords you need to learn videography. It doesn’t provide you with an order of doing so, a game plan if you will but that will come later as a low ticket offer.
But it does help you to figure out the basics of what you need to know and then you can search for it by yourself.
You can check it out here: The Videography Puzzle: Checklist
And with that I’ll just, once again, encourage you to invest time into practicing and embrace making mistakes. If you got the money or can free up a budget for learning, I highly recommend that as a shortcut. Otherwise, I hope at least this free checklist is a helping hand!
Thank you for reading along!
I’ll see you in the next post.
Alex