It is always nice to take advantage of the knowledge and skills of fellow tellers. We had a variety of subjects at this year’s Roots and Wings story telling retreat. It’s pleasant to associate with fellow tellers and to enjoy tacos.
The first presentation of the evening was Using technology to promote your storytelling. It was presented by Vance Mellen. Since he has posted a number of videos on YouTube and has had a lot of experience filming as well as taking photographs, he is very qualified to share the knowledge he has. I was frantically taking notes of all the good information he provided and the following are some of the excerpts of his presentation.
If you ever have the opportunity to see his presentation in person, I would recommend it.
Some of the advantages of this presentation is that as tellers we can work on individual stories and tell locally, but we also need to work on our careers. Presenting ourselves on YouTube provides excellent content for your webpage and helps advertise your skills to potential customers. The more professional, you present your material online, the better you present yourself to your customers.
– Your video content needs good sound and good story combination.
– Get of good mic. One that is popular is a 48 killed brick. (Most likely, this is spelled wrong)
– Have two sources sound when recording.
– During recording, some people will clap to mark certain areas throughout the recording. These marks are used later to lineup the audio with a video.
– Watch for content that has blank space. For example, when taken a photo, avoid having too much space above the head.
– When taking a picture. Have them had near the top of the frame.
– Provide nose room: you don’t want the nose and face of your subject to be too close to the objects in the photo. You want to avoid a picture where a person looks like the being crowded by something else in the picture.
– Don’t put people into the center of a photo. Put them slightly to the side about one third away from the edge.
– Backlighting: watch over how your subject in the photo is illuminated. Don’t take a picture of them in front of the window because that causes the face to be put in shadow.
– Take advantage of natural light, and other light sources to help illuminate your subject.
– Always use a tripod. Even though people feel that they won’t shake the camera, they often do.
– Don’t zoom. If you do closer than move closer.
– Look around for background items that may interfere with the subject of your photo. You want to avoid some strange object looking like it’s sticking out of their head.
There was a lot more information that’s what’s been presented here. If you ever have a chance to attend this retreat in the future, I would recommend it. At least you have a little bit of an idea of some of the information that was learned during the weekend.
Now for some of my personal ideas that I came up with while attending this presentation. As I mentally. Brainstorm on how I can improve my own blogs in my own site I came up with the following ideas. I don’t know how many of them are good ideas but brainstorming is the first step. For exposure. I would like to try the idea of titling some of my blog posts to have part of a phrase that is shared by a hot news topic of the day. For example, since there is so much attention on the national debt, maybe I would try a title: managing my home budget is not quite like the national debt. That may be a silly title, but it might be something like that. If you get my drift.
I remember another piece of advice that my nephew gave to me as he was configuring my website. He recommended that I populate my blogs and website with buzzwords that would be frequently used by my intended audience. Since I have a blog dedicated to object lessons that teach Christian values, I will often lead my Monday blogs with. ‘I hope these object lessons will interest youth ministries, family counselors, and be of use for family devotionals and home evenings.”
As I look at my weekly stats. I average about a range between 90-130 visitors a week at the moment. Mondays and Tuesdays seem to be days that are not as popular as the other days of the week. I don’t know. That’s because of the subject matter or even silly because Mondays and Tuesdays are busy days of the week. I may have to ask other people that have analytics run on their sites to see this is a common trait. If Monday and Tuesday blogs are not of interest that I may want to find a different topic.
For different topic, I remember some of blogging advice I heard in a former presentation. Some authors will put up blogs representing the characters of their books. This may be something I will do once I have for my books publishes hardback.
Another important principle that was emphasizes evening was to write from your heart. Maybe my previous blogs are intended to provide information. But I think us or flavoring my articles with some of my personal comments. I have to admit I don’t love anyone would be interested what my opinion is. So usually I do share the opinions of others in the knowledge of others. But to see if I would get more response from readers. I might start adding my personal comments at the bottom of the notes I share.
I was told tonight how I could submit material to the LDS market. And Deseret news. The site is called Deseret connect. So, I’ll try that avenue for my writing.
