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How to make amazing vlogs (content playbook)

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Start with the signal

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Summary

At-a-Glance

  • Verdict: Skim
  • Core thesis: Short-form vlogs can outperform saturated talking-head content when they turn ordinary activity into a clear narrative, economic question, expert field guide, distinctive personality expression, visual object hook, or unusually ambitious concept.
  • Why it matters: The video offers a practical, low-production system for making brand or personal content feel less commoditized: document real work, structure it around a hook and story, and edit mobile footage into dense short-form sequences.
  • Best use: Use it as a content-format and filming SOP for founder/brand-documentary posts, especially around launches, events, facilities, product development, travel, experiments, and behind-the-scenes operations.

Executive Summary

The speaker argues that generic short-form “yapping”—talking directly to camera with familiar hooks—is becoming commoditized, while vlogs retain an advantage because they require real-world activity, footage, narrative construction, and editing. The differentiator is not merely traveling or reviewing a restaurant; it is giving the footage a reason to be watched through a story, financial question, unusual object, expertise, personality, or over-the-top premise.

His most reusable format is the hero’s journey: begin with a concrete problem, give enough context to make it matter, show attempted resolution and setbacks, then land on a breakthrough or unresolved next step. This makes otherwise routine business moments—such as expensive packaging, a product release, a trade show, or a difficult game—feel consequential. He also recommends “math” vlogs, where a fixed budget, cost breakdown, or ROI question creates inherent viewer curiosity.

Operationally, the production advice is deliberately lightweight: choose either a talking-head-plus-B-roll format or an all-voiceover overdub; capture every important subject in close, medium, and wide shots; record short two-to-three-second clips; and cut them into roughly half- to one-second final shots. The speaker frames consistency in documentation, rather than expensive equipment or an extraordinary lifestyle, as the real competitive edge.

For brands, the strongest content inventory is often already present in operations: warehouses, packing, manufacturing, staff activity, product development, trade shows, and customer-facing events. AI can assist with narrative outlining if it is trained on brand context and used to shape a hero’s-journey structure rather than to replace the brand’s voice.

Key Takeaways

  • Claim: Vlogs are a defensible alternative to increasingly saturated talking-head short-form because they combine real activity, visual evidence, story construction, and editing effort that are harder to commoditize. | Evidence: The speaker says his creator growth accelerated after he moved beyond green-screen marketing commentary into China travel/product-development vlogs; he cites those videos as having gone viral and says he still shifts toward travel and vacation content seasonally. | Implication: Ken should treat vlog-style documentation as a higher-moat format for showing real company-building, field work, customer interactions, and product activity rather than relying only on opinion-led talking-head clips. | Caveat: A vlog is not automatically differentiated: basic travel and restaurant vlogs are also becoming repetitive, so the footage needs a distinct narrative or visual hook.
  • Claim: The hero’s journey is the most broadly useful vlog structure because it turns routine events into an unfolding problem-solving narrative. | Evidence: The proposed arc is problem, backstory, attempted solution, failure, epiphany or breakthrough, then a next-stage cliffhanger. Examples include Jack documenting the challenge of guarding a 6'8" player, Bad Hombres confronting packaging costs that could exceed its bank balance, and the speaker’s jellyfish-sting vacation story. | Implication: Frame operational updates around stakes instead of chronology: not “a week at the company,” but “we may have to absorb an unexpected cost,” “we have one chance to make this launch work,” or “this experiment failed and we need a new approach.” | Caveat: The speaker recommends using AI to outline the arc, not to write the entire post; authenticity and the creator’s actual voice remain important.
  • Claim: Adding explicit economics is an efficient way to make ordinary activities compelling because viewers naturally want to know affordability, value, tradeoffs, and results. | Evidence: The speaker’s Greece yacht-charter breakdown received about one million Instagram views plus hundreds of thousands on TikTok and YouTube because the cost was lower than viewers expected. Other examples include a $5,000 apartment search, a $1,000 Universal Studios budget, and the proposed test of what $200 in Meta ads produces. | Implication: Build recurring content around budgets and measurable experiments: cost to deploy a workflow, spend versus output, event economics, software-stack costs, customer acquisition tests, or the real tradeoffs behind a product decision.
  • Claim: Expertise vlogs work when the creator applies a real point of view while physically exploring relevant places, products, or environments; learners can use the same model if transparent about their level. | Evidence: Examples include an interior designer touring stores to identify lighting he would not buy and cosmetics creators assessing products in Sephora or Ulta. The speaker emphasizes that an aspiring practitioner can share observations, learning, and solicit feedback rather than pretend to be an established expert. | Implication: For AI and operations content, Ken can make field-guide posts from real environments—evaluating agent tools, workflow interfaces, AI products, events, or operating practices—rather than delivering abstract commentary from a desk. | Caveat: The format depends on a credible and explicit perspective; presenting beginner opinions as professional authority would undermine it.
  • Claim: A strong vlog can be anchored by either an outsized personality, a visually surprising “shiny object,” or an intentionally extreme concept. | Evidence: The speaker cites hyper-edited creators who make mundane life feel high-energy; visually unusual anchors such as transparent leather, unusual keys, distinctive food, and factory machinery; and premise-led series such as a one-day Egypt trip, a coffee shop giving away its top recipe, or attempting a task after staying awake for 36 hours. | Implication: Prioritize unusual access and visually demonstrable work over manufactured spectacle: labs, customer deployments, hardware, operator dashboards, event floors, workflow artifacts, prototypes, or one well-defined high-stakes experiment. | Caveat: He explicitly warns against relying on recurring luxury purchases as the visual hook because the spending cannot sustainably support the content engine. Extreme personality should also be authentic rather than imitated.
  • Claim: The production system is simple enough for non-editors if capture is designed for short-form editing rather than long continuous footage. | Evidence: The speaker’s “three-capture strategy” records a close, medium, and wide view of each important subject. He records clips for only two to three seconds, keeps the camera static when action is already occurring, and otherwise uses slow push-in or lateral movements. For a 45-second edit, he recommends roughly 45 one-second visual shots. | Implication: A repeatable capture checklist can lower the cost of short-form production: collect wide/context, medium/action, and close/detail footage for every significant moment, then assemble it quickly in a mobile editor. | Caveat: Fast hyper-editing at 0.2–0.3 seconds can differentiate content but is not required; the baseline recommendation is half- to one-second cuts.
  • Claim: Persistent documentation is the primary “cheat code”; access to real-world locations, facilities, operations, or distinctive personal presentation compounds that advantage. | Evidence: The speaker identifies travel, aspirational cities, factories, warehouses, packing operations, commercial kitchens, machine processes, humor, personal style, and editing interest as advantages. He argues that people avoid the work of gathering footage, so a creator willing to document consistently gains an edge over creators who default to easy talking-head posts. | Implication: The scarce resource is not editing software but a disciplined capture habit. Content operations should be embedded into business activity so real moments are recorded before they disappear.

Detailed Brief

Recommended format selection and scripting workflow

  • Claims: The speaker defines six vlog formats: hero’s journey, math, niche guide with expertise, insane personality, shiny object, and insane concept.; A brand can post fewer but stronger narrative vlogs; the speaker suggests a well-made weekly episode may outperform a daily posting treadmill because audiences follow the journey.; For scripting, the speaker distinguishes three broader marketing copy styles in his HubSpot-sponsored framework: story-led, evidence-driven, and direct-response.
  • Evidence: He suggests giving a brand-context AI project details about the business, product, personas, and current event, then requesting a 60- to 90-second hero’s-journey outline.; Suggested inputs include a trade show, first consumer event, product release, or a meaningful development in the business that week.; The desired output is an outline such as: establish problem, intensify it, and propose the solution—not generic fully written copy.
  • Caveats: The AI/brand-voice portion is tied to a sponsored HubSpot resource and should be assessed as a general workflow idea rather than a validated product recommendation.; Not every business event merits an “insane concept”; that format is inherently episodic and likely unsuitable for daily output.
  • Implications: Maintain a running inventory of business events and operational tensions that can become 60- to 90-second narrative posts.; Separate durable recurring formats—such as math, expert field guides, and operational documentation—from occasional campaign-level spectacle.

Editing, organization, and on-location capture details

  • Claims: There are two baseline edit structures: “talk and edit,” which retains on-camera narration and overlays B-roll, and “overdub,” which uses voiceover over footage without showing the speaker talking.; The talk-and-edit approach is recommended for people comfortable on camera because it reduces the amount of B-roll needed.; The speaker recommends easy editing tools rather than professional post-production software.
  • Evidence: He edits approximately 90% of this content in CapCut on phone or desktop and also names Instagram’s Edits app as suitable.; For organization, he creates a folder for each trip or activity and favorites potential opening visuals, such as a striking location, unusual encounter, or visually distinctive object.; If the creator is the subject, he recommends capturing at least five shots of them in the vlog. A Bluetooth tripod/remote or a compact DJI Osmo can make self-shot footage easier and less conspicuous.
  • Caveats: The recommendation to keep every final shot at half a second to one second is a stylistic heuristic, not a universal storytelling rule; moments requiring explanation or emotional weight may need longer holds.
  • Implications: Create a dedicated media-folder convention and a “hook selects” process so editing begins with the strongest opening image rather than reviewing an unstructured camera roll.; Standardize a lightweight field kit for self-documentation when operator footage is required.

Notable Concepts & Terms

  • Hero’s journey vlog: A compressed narrative of problem, context, failed attempts, breakthrough, and continuation; presented as the most adaptable format for creator and brand updates.
  • Math vlog: A vlog built around cost, budget, value, affordability, or measurable return, designed to trigger curiosity about tradeoffs and outcomes.
  • Niche guide with expertise: A field-based vlog in which a practitioner evaluates real objects or places through a specific professional or learning lens.
  • Shiny object: A visually unfamiliar, striking, or curiosity-inducing object that can anchor the opening hook and give a vlog immediate visual appeal.
  • Insane personality / insane concept: Two differentiation levers: exaggerated but authentic personal energy, or a deliberately outsized one-off premise that makes an event worth following.
  • Talk and edit: An editing structure that alternates or combines direct-to-camera narration with B-roll, reducing the need for continuous visual coverage.
  • Overdub: A voiceover-only vlog structure in which visuals carry the entire piece without on-camera speaking.
  • Three-capture strategy: For each subject or moment, capture close, medium, and wide angles to create sufficient optionality for dense short-form edits.

Operator Notes / Why Ken Should Care

  • Create a reusable event-content brief for launches, customer visits, demos, travel, conferences, and experiments: define the tension, the economic question if relevant, the hook shot, the likely resolution, and the required close/medium/wide footage.
  • Pilot a weekly founder/operator vlog series built around one real operational problem or experiment rather than daily generic commentary.
  • Require each field shoot to generate a “hook selects” folder and at least five founder/operator presence shots when a personal through line is needed.
  • Test a recurring transparent-economics format, such as the time, cost, model usage, or business result of a real AI workflow, while avoiding disclosure of sensitive vendor, customer, or internal financial data.
  • Use AI only for narrative outlining after supplying approved brand context; retain human review for factual accuracy, claims substantiation, and voice.

Source/Metadata

  • Title: How to make amazing vlogs (content playbook)
  • Transcript words: 12042
  • Duration seconds: 1459
  • Timestamp note: No timestamps or chapters were provided. The transcript contains a substantial repeated passage covering much of the video, so the unique substantive content is shorter than the stated word count.
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Full transcript 6073 words · 53 min read
0:00

In this video, we are going to talk about how to make vlogs on short form, which overall will teach you about storytelling, about creating content, about editing, and making something compelling and different. And thank you to HubSpot for sponsoring this video.

0:05

So there are a lot of content types out there. We have yapping, obviously the most popular right now. I did a full video guide on how to do that, just talking to camera. It is extremely commoditized. Everyone is teaching or making content about it. There's way too much of it. There's green screen content, what I got popular making, where you're talking over imagery. There's produced edits and hyper edits where you're talking and you have all kinds of graphics and things going in and out of it. You have podcast clips, you have carousels, the full video breaking down strategy on that too. You have short one-shot and 10-shot content. And you have vlogs where you tell a complete story with someone talking over and around footage.

0:10

So eventually I will make videos on all of these content types because not only have I personally figured out how to succeed with all of them, you can see, go to my pages. I rip on every single type of these contents. Not only have I cracked that code, I've taught thousands of people to do it inside of Cut30 and worked on hundreds and hundreds of high-performing ads for that with brands in my work at Darkroom.

0:14

So in this video, we are going to cover six types of vlogs that work and have a range of production quality and strategy that you can base on what kind of creator you want to make or what kind of content you want to make for your brand. This is just as relevant for brands as it is personal brands. Then I'm going to talk about editing styles and give you the basics of how to shoot and edit for these so you have a toolkit to go capture your first vlogs. And then I'm going to talk about the cheat codes, what the things are that, if you have them in your life or in your workflow, will make this really easy for you. Let's lock in.

0:19

So first, you probably noticed content starting to look the same. Yap after yap, people talking to the screen, people are using the same hooks: 10 out of 10 habits of a dangerous man, books to read for X performance. We are saturated with the same stuff all the time. And yapping in particular, the idea of talking to camera with little to no graphics or effects, is particularly saturated because there's been so much talk about it and so many courses that only focus on it. There's a wealth of that content out there. And the more type of content there is, the less it performs over time. People get tired of a certain consumption type. And we're already seeing the beginning of that shift. And it doesn't mean it goes away entirely, but it no longer becomes an advantage.

0:24

Now, I want to do vlogs today because vlogs will always be an advantage, because vlogs require you to actually do interesting things and/or document them in an interesting way. So you have to think, you have to write, you have to get footage, you have to edit. And none of those things individually are particularly hard, but all put together, it's intimidating for a lot of people. We're going to break that all down today.

0:29

And look, this happened to me. Vlogs were a big part of why I skyrocketed as a creator because I began to notice. I became really popular making green screen content about marketing and branding. And all of a sudden there were hundreds of other creators doing the same thing. And I was like, what can I do? This is always your thought when you are influential in a space or you have a leading brand, is how do we stay ahead of what everyone else is doing? And I was like, what can I do that others can't? And I had, at the time, a very interesting life. I was flying to China to work on product all the time. I was being brought out to speak and do workshops in all of these places, whether it's Paris, Dubai, Australia. And so I said, I'm going to learn how to make vlog content around that.

0:33

And so I did a series going to China where I created vlogs around that, all the places that people never would have seen, just the unearthing hidden gems that designers would love. And it went wildly viral. And even today is a consistent part of my toolkit. You will see every summer, I have this theory that content is very seasonal in terms of what people want to consume. In the summer, no one wants your optimization, deep business content. So I always make a decent amount of vacation and travel content. And just the other week, I had a million-view video doing the math of my trip to Greece.

0:37

But even with vlogs, you'll notice the basics of someone traveling to a place or doing a restaurant view has all started to look the same. So how do you make stuff that stands out? So the first and the most useful is what I'm going to call the hero's journey, hero's journey content. So a great example of this, you saw me do a collab with a creator the other week for Luma. It's got Jack, and he has an awesome channel about his journey to be basically a pro, an aging pro basketball player, where he documents his basketball journey. And you will notice every one of these videos runs through a condensed version of this narrative thing called the hero's journey.

0:48

So you will see it starts with a problem. Does my protein suck? I scored zero points in my first pro basketball game. I'm going against this 6'8 monster. Someone quit our team. He creates a narrative out of the things that he's doing and takes people on a journey around them. I did this as well. I tried this on my Greece trip where I talked about my son getting stung by a jellyfish and going through a vacation and having to deal with that. And perhaps my favorite is the brand Bad Hombres. They are a frozen bean and cheese burrito brand that tells the story of them working through things. And so in this video, for instance, they tell their story and how they're going to have to spend so much on packaging, it's basically going to take all the money, if not far more, in their bank accounts, an issue they're dealing with.

0:53

What is hero's journey content, and why does it work in the vlog format? So people are naturally attracted to narrative arcs. They see a problem. They get some backstory on why the problem exists. They see the person try to solve the problem. They see them fail at solving the problem. They see them have an epiphany and then make a breakthrough trying to solve it again, and then get to a next stage where there's a cliffhanger for what happens next. This is an arc that you will see in all kinds, whether it's TV episodes, YouTubes, short form, and it works just as well inside this content.

0:57

And it works just as well for basically anything interesting you're doing. So everyone's always like, my life or my content or my business isn't interesting enough to make content about. And for a lot of people, I think they actually underestimate how interesting it is if they put it in the hero's journey context. So for instance, if Jack was just making content talking about him as a basketball player and what happened in the game, it's significantly less interesting than someone saying, I have to go defend this 6'8 huge basketball player. Same thing if they're just talking about, oh, this is what happened, a week in our frozen bean and cheese burrito business is a lot less exciting than we're going to go bankrupt paying for this packaging.

1:02

How can you take those moments, even if they seem insignificant, and run through that hero's journey arc? And don't forget, at the end, we will talk through how to shoot these and capture these so you can get all those moments to create something like this. But that is style one of a vlog.

1:07

And what's great about that style of content, one of the great reasons vlogs are awesome in general, is that you don't have to create them constantly. For a lot of creators, a lot of brands, you need to create content every day to succeed, or at least multiple times a week, to really get that velocity involved in you. But if you have a great storytelling vlog, a lot of those brands, I think Bad Hombres does one a week, you can have less of a content posting velocity and see more efficacy because people are literally following your journey, even though it takes longer to make. And so for a lot of people who don't want to be in that constant grindstone of getting one out every day, they may be better off trying to work on their vlog masterpiece every week.

1:12

Now, the second vlog category I want to talk through is math. Math is one that I use all the time. So this is my viral video in Greece. This has a million views on Instagram, hundreds of thousands on TikTok and YouTube, where I talk about the cost to charter a yacht in Greece. And I'm doing this in a vlog format. I'm showing my entire trip. I'm showing that footage. I'm talking a bit over it. I'm breaking down the economics. Now, this is a really effective thing as well, because people love math. Same thing here,

1:18

because people are literally following your journey, even though it takes longer to make. And so, for a lot of people who don't want to be in that constant grindstone of getting one out every day, they may be better off trying to work on their vlog masterpiece every week.

1:22

Now, the second vlog category I want to talk through is math. Math is one that I use all the time. So this is my viral video in Greece. This has a million views on Instagram, hundreds of thousands on TikTok and YouTube, where I talk about the cost to charter a yacht in Greece. And I'm doing this in a vlog format. I'm showing my entire trip. I'm showing that footage. I'm talking a bit over it. I'm breaking down the economics.

1:27

Now, this is a really effective thing as well, because people love math. Same thing here: you will see my friend Rai. He has an awesome account. He's breaking down the math of finding an apartment. I love his content because he has very normal day-to-day content. Again, for anyone who's like, my life isn't interesting enough, go watch his. He's literally turning his apartment hunt into an amazing content series. And yeah, this apartment is $5,000. That's part of the appeal. It might be unaffordable for him. He's looking at things that are in his range or out of his range. He can talk about how terrible the apartment he can afford is. You can talk about how cool the apartment he can afford is and do it in a narrative. But that math component gets people intrinsically interested. If it's expensive, how can this person afford it? Or is it actually worth the money? Is it cheap? Is it worth the money?

1:31

That Greek charter video I did did really well because it was unexpectedly cheap. People would think that chartering a yacht for a week would be significantly more than what it actually breaks down to when you do the math.

1:36

And another one from Rai, who's kind of a master of these: $1,000 budget, going and doing a thing. He takes $1,000 to Universal Studios. How far does that get him? Now, you could have that same thing with how far does $100 get me at Air One? I'm spending $200 on meta ads. What are the results going to be? Just tracking the use of money. And so I would highly encourage you to think about vlog formats. How do you get your story to stand out? Can there be that fiscal component? Can you be using a set amount of money to test something? Or are you spending an amount of money on a thing in your life that you can review and break down inside this vlog format?

1:42

Number three is a niche guide with expertise. This is from Julia. Julia makes amazing vlogs. She does a hyper-edit style, which means she's editing every 0.2 to 0.3 seconds. We'll talk about that in the editing. You don't have to do this, but it definitely helps your content stand out. It's unlike other people's. But this video is literally her guide to how I stopped being a little bitch. She is someone who's always active, on the move. She's making content. She has her business. And she's showing you how she does it. She's showing you her expertise while creating a vlog around it.

1:47

This is Phoenix. And he's doing a vlog inside a store: lighting I would never buy as an interior designer. But he is in a vlog format. He is inside. He went to wherever this is. I know he goes to HomeGoods and stuff like that a lot. And he will provide his expertise in an out-and-about format. And I cannot state enough that getting out in the real world is an absolute cheat code for content. When so many people are yapping in their car or talking in their house or on a green screen, if you are out there in the world, showing the world and adding your expertise or whatever you're learning, right, you've heard me say it a hundred times, you may not be a—he's an interior design expert. You might be an interior design learner. You can be going, sharing what you think, trying to find out more, soliciting opinions as you try to learn. That is just as viable a strategy. Whatever perspective you're coming from, just be authentic about it.

1:53

Same thing when he has what I would avoid as an interior designer. He goes to the stores and highlights things. You see this a lot in cosmetics too. People will go to Alta or Sephora and hold up products: what I would avoid or not, what I like or not. Then you're literally looking at it almost like a talking video. You're just in the real world, so you can capture some B-roll. Again, we'll hit that in the editing section. That's an awesome third content type you can use for vlogs.

1:58

One of the questions you may ask as you put this together is, man, if I'm going to make a lot of content like this, how do I write these? How do I come up with it? Especially if you're a brand and you're trying to apply these things to what's happening day to day in your business. So for the majority of content, I highly encourage people to write in their own voice and do their own writing. For Hero's Journey content, I know a lot of brands that run their content through ChatGPT to help them with the narrative arc. Not to write their entire content, but that narrative arc in particular. I think Jack has actually posted content about how he does that on his basketball videos.

2:03

So there's a guide I developed with HubSpot called Teach AI Your Brand Voice. And inside this Teach AI Your Brand Voice guide I did with HubSpot, we actually teach you how to put that together and how to use different writing styles on top of it. So in this guide, it's like a copy machine for you to be able to generate things like landing pages, blogs, copy for ads, descriptions, product detail pages you can test. And the key thing about this guide is we introduce copy frameworks. There's three frameworks in there for story-led, evidence-driven, and more direct-response copy, which are three very important types of marketing copy. We show you how to build the project and apply those copy styles to do different things.

2:09

I'm going to add on a copy style specific to this video. If you have your brand information, your product information, your personas, all the stuff that you put inside this ChatGPT project, the cheat code is using it to make vlog content. It's to take whatever happened. Take what happened inside the brand's arc. Some ideas are really helpful: hey, we're going to a trade show. We have our first consumer event. We're doing a product release. Put them inside wherever you have the brand voice project, and then ask it for Hero's Journey narrative ideas for this. Specifically, I want an outline for a 60- to 90-second video following a Hero's Journey arc about what's happening in our business this week. Here's what's going on currently, and provide as much context as you can. What you'll find is you will get a very direct breakdown of start with this problem, agitate this problem, propose a solution, right? Asking for that Hero's Journey arc will give you an exact recipe to follow as you go write a vlog for your brand. For people that don't think like that, right, you're probably not a screenwriter. You're not trained to do that. Use tools like this to help you. You can find the brand voice project template and the full toolkit I put together with HubSpot in the description. And thanks so much to them for sponsoring this video.

2:14

All right, we have three more vlog topics to go through. Then we're going to get into editing styles. Then we're going to get into cheat codes. Let's go.

2:19

So this next style is what I call an insane personality style. So this is a Russian vlogger who is making, again, she's doing an ultra-hyper edit. Her edits move extremely fast. They are extremely chaotic. And she is willing to go document her life in this way. And even though it is obviously this one, she's on a vacation or whatever, she does a lot of very casual documentation as well, where she's willing to take her life with her friends and edit it to be as exciting as possible by really, even these are dizzying levels of editing. This is what we call an insane personality vlog. If you're the kind of person who's like, I want to just go all in. I'm artistic like this. I have some really unique ideas for editing styles. I would really embrace that because something unique really stands out in the modern algorithm feed. Note she's not even doing vertical content there.

2:23

Another example of this, if you have a really normal life, it's a really aggressive version of it. So this creator is incredible. So she does these extremely aggressive vlogs, right? Everything is, instead of walking, she's crawling along the floor. Instead of walking down the hallway, she's running down the hallway. Instead of being in her Uber, she's yelling in her Uber driver's ear, singing Taylor Swift or whatever it is. So everything is done at intense volume. Now,

2:28

dizzying levels of editing was what we call an insane personality vlog. If you're the kind of person who's, I want to just go all in. I'm artistic like this. I have some really unique ideas for editing styles. I would really embrace that because something unique really stands out in the modern algorithm feed. Note she's not even doing vertical content there. Another example of this, if you have a really normal life, it's a really aggressive version of it. So this creator is incredible. She does these extremely aggressive vlogs, right? Everything is, instead of walking, she's crawling along the floor. Instead of walking down the hallway, she's running down the hallway. Instead of being in her Uber, she's yelling in her Uber driver's ear, singing Taylor Swift or whatever it is. So everything is done at intense volume. Now, not everyone has an insane personality. I do not have this personality. You may not. But if you are the kind of person who sees this and goes, yes, then this is something I would 100% lean into. Don't be afraid to go completely overboard. Because if you have a relatively simple life, or you're doing relatively normal things, adding that aggressive level of personality on top of it is a really exciting way to do it. You've seen this the opposite way too, with things like Hub's Life and accounts like that, where they'll take something so boring and just document it extremely thoroughly. That's kind of the opposite arc of this. The most interesting is the shiny object vlog. Easy win. If you want to incorporate this in your other content, you don't want to only vlog. So this is mine, one of the ones I did that went viral in China, where I'm talking about the craziest fabric market in the world. And you'll see now, I've done this video, I think, twice. And you've seen people have replicated this video all up and down the internet. They've gone here. It's become a pilgrimage from how popular this video got. But what I mean by shiny object: going to something that people haven't seen before, or having something people haven't seen before, or are really curious visually about. This is my friend, Yah. He has this transparent leather. This is a shiny object vlog. He's just walking through the concept of this leather, but it looks so cool. And this, again, that shot right there is the money shot, the hand going in and being transparent. He knows what he's doing. And it's like, what can you get or have access to that's really cool or interesting looking? And it doesn't have to be necessarily something crazy innovative or expensive. This first class jerk, who does amazing vlogs as well about travel, he's basically telling the arc about this really fun dog inside this vacation spot that they have. But he's basically found the object inside the story that can anchor it. Really crazy-looking food is another easy one. All these amazing things they ate. I'm excited just looking at those ones that they came out there with. This is another great one. I like to call this one out where people are like, what is this hideous key? And people are just holding up a normal key, and then they go to a locksmith that makes crazier, more vintage keys. And so I want to talk about this concept for a few because people get overwhelmed by this concept because they think it requires lots of money. Because you'll see a lot of creators be like, my new Goyard bag. They'll basically use money as leverage for this as a pit. You never want to get into that. You never want to be unboxing some crazy luxury thing, even relatively frequently, because that money is not going to catch up. You want to say, how can I take interesting or relatively normal things, or things in my work, and do this? We had a blacksmith in Cut30 the other month, and that was an amazing one where I saw it. Oh, they have a facility full of just crazy machines, and they're now in their content using them to crush cans and things like that, and open bottles, actually showing them in process. That's an amazing one, right? If you have any kind of production facility, we'll talk about that in cheat codes. But it's like, what are those things you have around you that are interesting and visual and graphic enough? And that can work with food, that can work with locations. But shiny object vlogs are great whenever you do get your hands on something interesting like that. And a great way to anchor trade show content or going to places is finding the most exciting things there. And the last one we're going to cover is what I call insane concept. One that's gotten really popular is this guy, Kevin, who does day trips. He will do a, I'm going to Egypt for one day. Now, again, this is a, and he will break down how this is not as expensive as you'd think, which I think is a key component of that. Like, hey, actually, guess what? If you go economy and you fly at this really weird time, the flight is $670 or whatever. Another example of the insane concept is this coffee shop. What happens when you give your best recipes away for free? This coffee shop had a really popular drink, and they made a whole series around, we're going to let the whole internet build it. We're going to elicit all these other coffee shops to be able to make the same one. And we're going to tell the story of how we shared this really popular recipe. It took a lot of work, but a really cool concept. And this is the only look at where you probably can't do this every week or every day, but if you are doing something, you're like, all right, yeah, cool. I'm going to go on my spring break, or I'm building this thing for my business. I'm going to try and finish this by staying up for 36 hours straight. Let's document it. How do you add that kind of insane, over-the-top variable on it to make it exciting? Those are your six vlog concepts. We're going to talk about how to capture them. Just a reminder: hero's journey. How do you take something that's happening and build a narrative around it? Math. How do you break down the costs or use costs as a lever on things to make the story interesting? Niche guide with expertise. What can you go out to in the world and talk about? If an interior designer was going to talk about the home that I'm in right now, or an architect, if you're an aspiring chef and you talk about the pans in the kitchen, whatever it is, go out in the world and share your expertise of the world. Insane personality, shiny object, and insane concept. Let's talk about editing. There's two editing styles. The first one, we call it talk and edit. This is what I did on my Grease one, where I'm going to talk like I do to the camera. I'll be standing up or wherever I am, and you're overlaying footage over it, but you also have your talking footage. This also could be if you are in a place and you're talking while you're in the place. This is useful because it means you don't have to have footage for every second of your vlog. You can fill in some of that with you talking. You will see people take this up a notch by taking different parts of their script in different places. So, for instance, I could intro it here. I could be down the hill in a different place, and I could do another segment. It's not required to do that level of production. For instance, my Grease one is a million views, and I'm standing in one place in my house. But that is an editing style. We call it the talking vlog. Then there is an overdub. This is when you purely cut the audio, and you just fill in footage underneath it, and you are not talking on camera at all. This is also a really common style. So you have to choose which of those two styles you do. If you're comfortable being on camera, I recommend the first one just because it can be a little easier for you to edit. If you'd rather not talk on camera and you just want to be on camera, you can use the second, or you're documenting other people, that kind of thing. How do I actually capture all this footage? So I use what's called a three-capture strategy for everything. This would be teaching Cut30. Anytime I'm filming a thing, I film three ways. So if I was here right now and I had my phone out and I was going to take footage of it, literally just do it. I would film the close-up. I would film a close of this coffee cup, literally right here. Maybe get the microphone inside of it. That would be my close shot. Then I would get a medium shot, maybe a shot of me sitting with the coffee shop and the microphone. And then I would get a wide shot, literally just 0.5 on my phone where it's showing this whole expansive A-frame that I'm in right now. And literally do that with everything. So if you are going to a restaurant, you would capture,

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How do I actually capture all this footage? So I use what's called a three capture strategy for everything. This would be teaching cut 30. Anytime I'm filming a thing, I film three ways. So if I was here right now and I had my phone out and I was going to take footage of it, literally just do it. I would film the close-up. I would film a close of this coffee cup, literally right here. Maybe get the microphone inside of it. That would be my close shot. Then I would get a medium shot, maybe a shot of me sitting with the coffee shop and the microphone. And then I would get a wide shot, literally just 0.5 on my phone where it's showing this whole expansive A-frame that I'm in right now. And literally do that with everything. So if you are going to a restaurant, you would capture, say you're getting up to the door, a big wide shot showing where it is on the street, a closer shot of you walking up to the door, a close shot of you grabbing the handle. Same thing once you get the coffee inside, the shot of everything, the shot of someone handing it to you, the shot of just the coffee. Capturing three of everything gives you max footage.

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So then how long do you capture? Every single clip you will find on my phone is two to three seconds. Do not capture these long clips moving through it. It's about having lots of little clips you can easily add on a timeline. When you capture them, what do you do? The key to good clips is you either make them static. If something is moving in the shot, so if someone's walking by or a car is going or someone's handing something to you, shoot static. Don't move your phone at all. Use the motion inside what's happening in the shot as your dynamic. If nothing is moving and you're just somewhere, I would use slow motions. How do we do it? Take the phone, you push in. That's slow motion number one. Very, very slowly move in. Or side. Very, very slowly to the side. Having that motion in there really helps get those clips. So two to three clips pushing in, pushing to the side, or capturing motion you see. And you do this all the time. Usually if I go to a place, a museum, a coffee shop, whatever, I will have my activity, and I will run back through at the end once I know everything that's in there and take about five minutes to capture those three angles of 10 or 12 things. That way it's less interrupting. Some people like to shoot as they go. It really depends on you, your flow, the people you're with. Bluetooth tripod also helps. I have one of those from Amazon. You just literally search Bluetooth tripod. The Bluetooth connects to my phone, and I can just start the camera from there. That's how a lot of people get shots of themselves walking in and by. They'll have a little remote in their hands.

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How do you organize this on your phone? I do a folder for each trip. I'm in Idlewild right now. I'm going to have an Idlewild folder. And then I will favorite my hook shots. So hook shots is the concept of what is going to lead off your video. What is the most exciting shot? And think about that. Okay. The shiny object things are a really cool thing that I can show while we're here. A cool building, a cool place, me holding something interesting, me meeting somebody. The mayor of Idlewild is a dog. That's a good hook shot. If I'm literally meeting the mayor and he's a dog, that's a concept you could have, right? You have to think about what are those really good first couple shots you can use to anchor people in your video. And there's capturing enough shots of yourself. I would say if you are the focus of this, I would try to have at least five shots of you inside this vlog, if not some more. So how do you do that? You have your shots you can do in selfie mode or side mode. That's an easy way to capture it. You can put it on the tripod and do your talking and intro. You can put it on a tripod and walk by or hold something up or do something. I love the DJI Osmo for a lot of this because I can just put it down on a shelf in a store and easily shoot, and it's very nondescript. But you and your involvement, you being in the video, is a bit of a through line. So it's good to capture that video of yourself. And really the cheat code is finding a good angle where you can hold your phone out quickly like this or hold your phone like that and hold something up or throw the peace sign or just walk around or do something. It's an easy way to work through it.

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So now we're going to end with the cheat codes. What are the cheat codes? Where should you definitely be vlogging if you have these things? First, just in general, getting out in the world is a cheat code. If you travel for work, if you go on a lot of vacations, if you do interesting places, if you live in a city like New York or LA where everything is tight and people aspire to live there, Tokyo, international, if anyone is fantasizing about living where you are, you have a distinct advantage. Use it. Two, having a facility is a cheat code. If your brand ever has a warehouse or has machines or packs their own shipping, people love to see that. Pack orders with me. We're going to pack 50 orders right now. Here's everything going out the door. Here's all the people that work in our commercial kitchen. Here's the blacksmith stuff getting made. Capture machines, capture people in action. It is just excellent content. If you have a personality, you're extremely extroverted, you're funny, you're particularly good-looking, or you have a really unique sense of personal style, another cheat code. You can be making normal vlogs, but if you're really dressed to the nines in a lot of them, you can stand out. Same thing if you're relatively funny. You can be making vlogs in Des Moines. If you have the jokes right, you're going to make it work. See, if you love to make content, you like to edit, you see those edit ideas where it's like, oh, it's all 0.2 seconds, et cetera, that is a cheat code too.

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Actually, let me go back to editing for one second before I do the last cheat code. We talked about capturing. I didn't talk about editing. So I edit 90% of this in CapCut on phone or on desktop. CapCut is just easy. You can use Edits app from Instagram. It's also great. Whatever you like, but those are easy apps. Use easy apps. Don't overthink it. And your goal for all this content: half-second and one-second shots. Every shot across your entire video should be half a second or one second long, never longer than that. If you want to go shorter and do quicker clips, you know what you're doing. Great. But if not, I would just focus on, I'm doing a 45-second video. I recorded this 45-second voiceover. I'm going to have 45 one-second shots inside of it. That is going to be the cheat code where you do that. You find a good point in your motion. Since all two- to three-second clips, it becomes really easy to cut them down inside those editors. You put your audio in, you drop in your clips, and then you move them around in order and cut them down to have your vlog. It is quite literally that easy. I cannot describe to you how easy CapCut and Edits is versus doing anything in Premiere or DaVinci, et cetera. If you are not an editor, anyone can do this stuff.

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And last, what I'll end with here is the final cheat code. If you are willing to painstakingly document your life, if you're willing to get those shots and just put in the time, if you have no other advantage but the fact that you're willing to just take the time to shoot with your phone, capture those angles, and do the stuff, that's a cheat code because people hate to work and they want to make easy content and they're going to keep yapping. And if you painstakingly document, you will have an advantage versus lazier creators. I'm going to put all of this into a vlog guide that you can grab. We'll have all of the reference links and the breakdown of this we had here. That will be linked below. As always, if you want to learn this with us in over 30 days, the next cut 30 will be coming soon. We run those every six weeks where you can do 30 days working with us on this specifically. Let me know if you want podcasts, one shots, 10 shots, other stuff coming up soon. I'm going to do one of these every few months, just like I did yapping a few months ago. Thank y'all so much for watching.

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leading brand is how do we stay ahead of what everyone else is doing? And I was like, what can I do that others can't? And I had at the time a very interesting life. I was flying to China to work on product all the time. I was being brought out to speak and do workshops in all of these places, whether it's Paris, Dubai, Australia. And so I said, I'm going to learn how to make vlog content around that. And so I did a series going to China where I created vlogs around that. All the places that people never would have seen, just the unearthing hidden gems that designers would love.

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And it went wildly viral. And even today is a consistent part of my toolkit. You will see every summer, I have this theory that content is very seasonal in terms of what people want to consume. In the summer, no one wants your optimization, deep business content. So I always make a decent amount of vacation and travel content. And just the other week, I had a million view video doing the math of my trip to Greece. But even with vlogs, you'll notice the basics of someone traveling to a place or doing a restaurant view has all started to look the same. So how do you make stuff that stands out? So the first and the most useful is what I'm going to call the hero's journey,

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hero's journey content. So a great example of this, you saw me do a collab with a creator the other week for Luma. It's got Jack and he has an awesome channel about his journey to be a basically a pro, an aging pro basketball player, where he documents his basketball journey. And you will notice every one of these videos runs through a condensed version of this narrative thing called the hero's journey. So you will see it starts with a problem. Does my protein suck? I scored zero points of my first pro basketball game. I'm going against this 6'8 monster. Someone quit our team. He creates

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a narrative out of the things that he's doing and takes people on a journey around them. I did this as well. I tried this on my Greece trip where I talked about my son getting stung by a jellyfish and going through a vacation and having to deal with that. And perhaps my favorite is the brand Bad Hombres. They are a frozen bean and cheese burrito brand that tells the story of them working through things. And so in this video, for instance, they tell their story and how they're going to have to spend so much on packaging. It's basically going to take all the money, if not far more in their bank accounts,

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an issue they're dealing with. What is hero's journey content and why does it work in the vlog format? So people are naturally attracted to narrative arcs. Basically, they see a problem. They get some backstory on why the problem exists. They see the person try to solve the problem. They see them fail at solving the problem. They see them have an epiphany and then make a breakthrough trying to solve it again and then get to a next stage where there's a cliffhanger for what happens next. This is an arc that you will see in all kinds, whether it's TV episodes, YouTubes, short form, and it works just as well

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inside this content. And it works just as well for basically anything interesting you're doing. So everyone's always like, my life or my content or my business isn't interesting enough to make content about. And for a lot of people, I think they actually underestimate how interesting it is if they put in the hero's journey context. So for instance, if Jack was just making content, talking about him as a basketball player and what happened in the game, it's significantly less interesting than someone saying, I have to go defend this 6'8 huge basketball player. Same thing if they're just talking about, oh, this is what happened a week

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in our frozen bean and cheese burrito business is a lot less exciting than we're going to go bankrupt paying for this packaging. How can you take those moments, even if they seem insignificant, and run through that hero's journey arc? And don't forget, at the end, we will talk through how to shoot these and capture these so you can get all those moments to create something like this. But that is style one of a vlog. And what's great about that style of content, one of the great reasons vlogs are awesome in general is that you don't have to create them constantly. For a lot of creators, a lot of brands,

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you need to create content every day to succeed, or at least multiple times a week to really get that velocity involved in you. But you have a great storytelling vlog. A lot of those brands, I think Bad Ombres does one a week, you can have less of a content posting velocity and see more efficacy because people are literally following your journey, even though it takes longer to make. And so for a lot of people who don't want to be in that constant grindstone of getting one out every day, they may be better off trying to work on their vlog masterpiece every week. Now, the second vlog category,

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I want to talk through is math. Math is one that I use all the time. So this is my viral video in Greece. This has a million views on Instagram, hundreds of thousands on TikTok and YouTube, where I talk about the cost to charter a yacht in Greece. And I'm doing this in a vlog format. I'm showing my entire trip. I'm showing that footage. I'm talking a bit over it. I'm breaking down the economics. Now, this is a really effective thing as well, because people love math. Same thing here, you will see my friend Rai, he has an awesome account. He's breaking down the math of finding an

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apartment. I love his content because he has very normal day to day content. Again, for anyone who's like, my life isn't interesting enough, go watch his. He's literally turning his apartment hunt into an amazing content series. And yeah, this apartment is $5,000. That's part of the appeal. It might be unaffordable for him. He's looking at things that are in his range or out of his range. He can talk about how terrible the apartment he can afford is. You can talk about how cool the apartment he can is and do it in a narrative. But that math component gets people intrinsically interested. If it's

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expensive, how can this person afford it? Or is it actually worth the money? Is it cheap? Is it worth the money? That Greek charter video I did did really well because it was unexpectedly cheap. People would think that chartering a yacht for a week would be significantly more than what it actually breaks down to when you do the math. And another one from Rai, who's kind of a master of these, $1,000 budget going and doing a thing. He takes $1,000 to Universal Studios. How far does that get him? Now, you could have that same thing with how far does $100 get me at Air One? I'm spending $200 on meta ads. What are the

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results going to be? Just tracking the use of money. And so I would highly encourage you to think about vlog formats. How do you get your story to stand out? Can there be that fiscal component? Can you be using a set amount of money to test something? Or are you spending an amount of money on a thing in your life that you can review and break down inside this vlog format? Number three is a niche guide with expertise. This is from Julia. Julia makes amazing vlogs. She does like a hyper edit style, which means she's editing like every 0.2 to 0.3 seconds. We'll talk about that in the editing. You

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don't have to do this, but definitely helps your content stand out. It's like other people's. But this video is literally her guide to how I stopped being a little bitch. She is someone who's always active on the move. She's making content. She has her business. And she's showing you how it does. She's showing you her expertise when creating a vlog around it. This is Phoenix. And he's doing a vlog inside a store. Lighting I would never buy as an interior designer. But he is in a vlog format. He is inside. He like went to wherever this is. I know he goes to home goods and stuff like that a lot. And he

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will provide his expertise in a out and about format. And I cannot state enough that getting out in the real world is an absolute cheat code for content. When so many people are yapping in their car or talking in their house or on a green screen, if you are out there in the world, showing the world and adding your expertise or whatever you're learning, right? You've heard me say it a hundred times. You may not be a, he's an interior design expert. You might be an interior design learner. You can be going, sharing what you think, trying to find out more, soliciting opinions as you try to

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learn is just as viable a strategy. Whatever perspective you're coming from, just be authentic about it. Same thing that when he has what I would avoid as an interior designer, he goes to the stores, and highlights things he has. You see this a lot in cosmetics too. People will go to Alta or Sephora and basically hold up products, what I would avoid or not, what I like or not. It's then you're literally looking at it almost like a talking video. You're just in the real world. So you can capture some B-roll. Again, we'll hit that in the editing section. That's an awesome third content type

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you can use for vlogs. It's one of the questions you may ask as you put this together is, man, if I'm going to make a lot of content like this, how do I write these? How do I come up with it? Especially if you're a brand and you're trying to apply these things to what's happening day to day in your business. So for the majority of content, I highly encourage people to write in their own voice and do their own writing. For Hero's Journey content, I know a lot of brands that run their content through ChatGPT to help them with the narrative arc. Not to write their entire content, but that

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narrative arc in particular. I think Jack has actually posted content about how he does that on his basketball videos. So there's a guide I developed with HubSpot called Teach AI Your Brand Voice. And inside this Teach AI Your Brand Voice guide, I did with HubSpot, we actually teach you how to put that together and how to use different writing styles on top of it. So in this guide, it's like a copy machine for you to be able to generate things like landing pages, blogs, copy for ads, descriptions, product detail pages you can test. And the key thing about this guide is we introduce

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copy frameworks. There's three frameworks in there for story-led, evidence-driven, and more direct response copy, which are three very important types of marketing copies. We show you how to build the project and apply those copy styles to do different things. I'm going to add on a copy style specific to this video. If you have your brand information, your product information, your personas, all the stuff that you put inside this ChatGPT project, the cheat code is using it to make vlog content. It's to take whatever happened. Take what happened inside the brand's arc. Some ideas are really helpful.

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Hey, we're going to a trade show. We have our first consumer event. We're doing a product release. Put them inside wherever you have the brand voice project. And then ask them for a hero's journey narrative ideas for this. Specifically, I want an outline for a 60 to 90 second video following a hero's journey arc about what's happening in our business this week. Here's what's going on currently and provides much context as you can. What you'll find is you will get a very direct breakdown of start with this problem, agitate this problem, propose a solution, right? Asking for that

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hero's journey arc will give you an exact recipe to follow as you go write a vlog for your brand. For people that don't think like that, right? You're probably not a screenwriter. You're not trained to do that. Use tools like this to help you. You can find the brand voice project template and the full toolkit I put together with HubSpot in the description. And thanks so much to them for sponsoring this video. All right, we have three more vlog topics to go through. Then we're going to get into editing styles. Then we're going to get into cheat codes. Let's go. So this next style is what I call

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an insane personality style. So this is a Russian vlogger who is making again, she's doing an ultra hyper edit. Her edits move extremely fast. They are extremely chaotic. And she is willing to go document her life in this way. And even though it is like obviously this one, she's like on a vacation or whatever, but she does a lot of very casual documentation as well, where she's willing to take her life with her friends and edit it to be as exciting as possible by really even these are like dizzying levels of editing was what we call an insane personality vlog. If you're the kind of person

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who's like, you know what, I want to just go all in. I'm artistic like this. I have some really unique ideas for editing styles. I would really embrace that because something unique really stands out in the modern kind of algorithm feed. Note she's not even doing vertical content there. Another example of this, if you have a really normal life, it's a really aggressive version of it. So this creator is incredible. So she does these extremely aggressive vlogs, right? Everything is, you know, instead of walking, she's crawling along the floor. Instead of walking down the hallway,

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she's running down the hallway. Instead of being in her Uber, she's yelling in her Uber driver's ear, singing Taylor Swift or whatever it is. So everything is done at intense volume. Now, not everyone has an insane personality. I do not have this personality. You may not. But if you are the kind of person who sees this and goes, yes, then this is a something I would 100% lean into. Don't be afraid to go completely overboard. Because right, if you have a relatively simple life, or you're doing relatively normal things, adding that aggressive level of personality on top of it

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is a really exciting way to do it. You've seen this the opposite way too, with things like Hub's Life and accounts like that, where they'll take something so boring and just document it extremely thoroughly. That's kind of the opposite arc of this. The most interesting is the shiny object vlog. Easy win. If you want to incorporate this in your other content, you don't want to only vlog. So this is mine. One of the ones I did viral that I did in China, where I'm talking about basically the craziest fabric market in the world. And you'll see now, I've done this video, I think twice. And

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you've seen people have replicated this video all up and down the internet. They've gone here. It's become a pilgrimage from how popular this video got. But what I mean by shiny object, going to something that people haven't seen before, or having something people haven't seen before, or are really curious visually about. This is my friend, Yah. He has this transparent leather. This is a shiny object vlog. He's just walking through the concept of this leather, but it looks so cool. And this again, that shot right there is the money shot. The hand going in and being transparent. He

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knows what he's doing. And it's like, what can you get or have access to that's really cool or interesting looking? And it doesn't have to be necessarily something crazy innovative or expensive. This first class jerk who does amazing vlogs as well about travel, he's basically telling the arc about this really fun dog inside this vacation spot that they have. But he's basically found the object inside the story that can anchor it. Really crazy looking food is another easy one. Like all this amazing things they ate. I'm excited just looking at those ones that they came out there

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with. This is another great one. I like to call this one out where people are like, what is this hideous key? And people are just holding up a normal key. And then they go to a locksmith that makes crazier, more vintage keys. And so I want to talk about this concept for a few because people get overwhelmed by this concept because they think it requires lots of money. Because you'll see a lot of creators be like, my new Goyard bag. They'll basically use money as a leverage for this as a pit. You never want to get into that. You never want to be unboxing some crazy luxury thing, even relatively frequently,

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because that money is not going to catch up. You want to say, how can I take interesting or relatively normal things or things in my work and do this? We had a blacksmith in Cut30 the other month. And that was an amazing one where I saw it. Oh, they have a facility full of just crazy machines. And they're now in their content using them to like crush cans and things like that. And like, open bottles, actually showing them in process. That's an amazing one, right? If you have any kind of production facility, we'll talk about that in cheat codes. But it's like, what are those things you have around you that are interesting and visual and graphic enough? And that can work

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with food, that can work with locations. But shiny object vlogs are great whenever you do get your hands on something interesting like that. And a great way to anchor trade show content or going to places is finding the most exciting things there. And the last one we're going to cover is what I call insane concept. So one's gotten really popular is this guy, Kevin, who does day trips. He will do a, I'm going to Egypt for one day. Now, again, this is a, and he will break down how this is not as expensive as you'd think, which I think is a key component of that. Like, Hey, actually, guess

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what? If you go economy and you fly at this really weird time, the flight is $670 or whatever. Another example of the insane concept is this coffee shop. What happens when you give your best recipes away for free? This coffee shop had a really popular drink and they made a whole series around, we're going to let the whole internet build it. We're going to elicit all these other coffee shops to be able to make the same one. And we're going to tell the story of how we shared this really popular recipe took a lot of work, but a really cool concept. And this is the only look at where

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you probably can't do this every week or every day, but if you are doing something, you're like, all right, yeah, cool. I'm going to go on my spring break, or I'm building this thing for my business. I'm going to try and finish this by staying up for 36 hours straight. Let's document it. How do you add that kind of insane over the top variable on it to make it exciting? Those are your six vlog concepts. We're going to talk about how to capture them. Just a reminder, hero's journey. How do you take something that's happening and build a narrative around it? Math. How do you break down the costs

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or use costs as a lever on things to make the story interesting? Niche guide with expertise. What can you go out to in the world and talk about? If an interior designer was going to talk about the home that I'm in right now, or an architect, if you're an aspiring chef and you talk about the pans in the kitchen, whatever it is, go out in the world and share your expertise of the world. Insane personality, shiny object, and insane concept. Let's talk about editing. There's two editing styles. The first one we call it talk and edit. This is what I did on my grease one, where I'm going to talk

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like I do to the camera. I'll be standing up or wherever I am. And you're overlaying footage over it, but you also have your talking footage. This also could be if you are in a place and you're talking while you're in the place. This is useful because it means you don't have to have footage for every second of your vlog. You can fill in some of that with you talking. You will see people take this up a notch by taking different parts of their script in different places. So for instance, I could intro it here. I could be down the hill in a different place and I could do another segment. It's not required to do

17:47

that level of production. For instance, my grease one is a million views and I'm standing in one place in my house. But that is an editing style. We call it the talking vlog. Then there is an overdub. This is when you purely, you do, you cut the audio and you just fill in footage underneath it and you are not talking on camera at all. This is also a really common style. So you have to choose which of those two styles you do. If you're comfortable being on camera, I recommend the first one just because it can be a little easier for you to edit. If you rather not talk on camera and you're

18:10

just want to be on camera, you can use the second or you're documenting other people, that kind of thing. How do I actually capture all this footage? So I use what's called a three capture strategy for everything. This would be teaching cut 30. Anytime I'm filming a thing, I film three ways. So if I was here right now and I was, you know, have my phone out and I was going to take footage of it, literally just do it. I would film the close up. I would film a close of this coffee cup, literally right here. Maybe get the microphone inside of it. That would be my close shot. Then I would get a medium shot,

18:37

maybe a shot of me sitting with the coffee shop and the microphone. And then I would get a wide shot, literally just 0.5 on my phone where it's showing this whole expansive A-frame that I'm in right now. And literally do that with everything. So if you are going to a restaurant, you would capture, say you're getting up to the door, big wide shot showing where it is on the street, closer shot of you walking up to the door, close shot of you grabbing the handle. Same thing once you get the coffee inside, you know, the shot of everything, the shot of someone handing it to you, the shot of just the coffee. Capturing three of everything basically gives you max footage.

19:05

So then how long do you capture? Every single clip you will find on my phone is two to three seconds. Do not capture these long clips moving through it. It's about having lots of little clips you can easily add on a timeline. When you capture them, what do you do? The key to good clips is you either make them static. If something is moving in the shot, so if someone's walking by or a car is going or someone's handing something to you, shoot static. Don't move your phone at all. Use the motion inside what's happening in the shot as your dynamic. If nothing is moving and you're just somewhere,

19:30

I would use slow motions. How do we do it? Take the phone, you push in. That's slow motion number one. Very, very slowly move in. Or side. Very, very slowly to the side. Having that motion in there really helps get those clips. So two to three clips pushing in, pushing the side, or capturing motion you see. And you do this all the time. Usually if I go to a place, a museum, a coffee shop, whatever, I will go have my activity and I will run back through at the end once I know everything that's in there and take about five minutes to capture those three angles of 10 or 12 things.

19:57

That way it's less interrupting. Some people like to shoot as they go. It really depends on you, your flow, the people you're with. Bluetooth tripod also helps. I have one of those from Amazon. You just literally search Bluetooth tripod. The Bluetooth connects to my phone and I can just start the camera from there. That's how a lot of people get shots of themselves walking in and by. They'll have a little remote in their hands. How do you organize this on your phone? I do a folder for each trip. I'm in Idlewild right now. I'm going to have an Idlewild folder. And then I will favorite my hook

20:20

shots. So hook shots is the concept of what is going to lead off your video. What is the most exciting shot? And think about that. Okay. The shiny object things are a really cool thing that I can show from while we're here. A cool building, a cool place, me holding something interesting, me meeting somebody. The mayor of Idlewild is a dog. That's a good hook shot. If I'm literally meeting the mayor and he's a dog, that's a concept you could have, right? You have to think about what are those really good first couple shots you can use to anchor people in your video. And there's capturing

20:44

enough shots of yourself. I would say if you are the focus of this, I would try to have at least five shots of you inside this vlog, if not some more. So how do you do that? You have your shots you can do in selfie mode or side mode is an easy way to capture it. You can put it on the tripod and do your talking and intro. You can put it on a tripod and walk by or hold something up or do something. I love the DJI Osmo for a lot of this because I can just put it down on like a shelf in a store and easily shoot and it's very nondescript. But you and your involvement, you being in the video, is a bit of

21:10

a through line. So it's good to capture that video of yourself. And really the cheat code is like finding a good angle where you can hold your phone out quickly like this or hold your phone like that and hold something up or throw the peace sign or just kind of walk around or do something is an easy way to work through it. So now we're going to end with the cheat codes. What are the cheat codes? Where should you definitely be vlogging if you have these things? First, just in general, getting out in the world is a cheat code. If you travel for work, if you go on a lot of vacations, if you do interesting

21:32

places, if you live in a city like New York or LA where everything is tight and people aspire to live there, Tokyo, International, if anyone is fantasizing about living where you are, you have a distinct advantage. Use it. Two, having a facility is a cheat code. If your brand ever has a warehouse or has machines or does or packs their own shipping, people love to see that. Pack orders with me. We're going to pack 50 orders right now. Here's everything going out the door. Here's all the people that work in our commercial kitchen. Here's the blacksmith stuff getting made. Capture machines, capture people and action. It is just excellent content. If you have a personality,

22:05

you're extremely extroverted, you're funny, you're particularly good looking, or you have a really unique sense of personal style, another cheat code. You can be making normal vlogs, but if you're really dressed to the nines and a lot of them, you can stand out. Same thing if you're relatively funny. You can be making vlogs in Des Moines. If you have the jokes are right, you're going to make it work. See, if you love to make content, you like to edit, you see those edits ideas where it's like, oh, it's all 0.2 seconds, et cetera. That is a cheat code too. Actually, you know what? Let me go back to

22:29

editing for one second before I do the last cheat code. We talked about capturing. I didn't talk about editing. So I added 90% of this in CapCut on phone or in desktop. CapCut is just easy. You can use edits app from Instagram. It's also great. Whatever you like, but those are easy apps. Use easy apps. Don't overthink it. And your goal for all this content, half second and one second shots. Every shot across your entire video should be half a second or one second long. Never longer than that. If you want to go shorter and do quicker clips, you know what you're doing. Great. But if not,

22:54

I would just focus on, I'm doing a 45 second video. I recorded this 45 second voiceover. I'm going to have 45 one second shots inside of it. That is going to be the cheat code where you do that. You find a good point in your motion. Swab and I said all two to three second clips, it becomes really easy to cut them down inside those editors. You put your audio in, you drop in your clips, and then you kind of move them around in order and cut them down to have your vlog. It is quite literally that easy. I cannot describe to you how easy CapCut and edits is versus doing anything in like Premiere or DaVinci, et cetera. If you are not an editor,

23:24

anyone can do this stuff. And last, what I'll end with here is the final cheat code. If you are willing to painstakingly document your life, if you're willing to get those shots and just put in the time, if you have no other advantage, but the fact that you're willing to just take the time to shoot with your phone, capture those angles and do the stuff, that's a cheat code because people hate to work and they want to make easy content and they're going to keep yapping. And if you painstakingly document, you will have an advantage versus lazier creators. I'm going to put all of

23:48

this into a vlog guide that you can grab. We'll have all of the reference links and the breakdown of this we had here. That will be linked below. As always, if you want to learn this with us in over 30 days, the next cut 30 will be coming soon. We run those every six weeks where you can do 30 days working with us on this specifically. Let me know if you want podcasts, one shots, 10 shots, other stuff coming up soon. I'm going to do one of these every few months, just like I did yapping a few months ago. Thank y'all so much for watching.

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