How To Make A Video That Can Make You Standout
Hi I am Greg. I have worked with computers my whole life and in many domains and tech stacks. Most recently in Human Resources with Williams Sonoma.
That ended in June. Been trying very hard to get a new job ever since. As you undoubtedly know, the pandemic has caused a tremendous number of problems including laying off so many people who are trying to get hired, me among them.
So with so many people out of work you need a way to distinguish yourself. One way to do that is to make a video of your qualifications. In my case, that includes making a video of an app I wrote called Feline Finder which I use as my calling card so to speak to showcase my skills as an iOS developer. Here it is.
I have this on my website www.gregsiosapps.com and my LinkedIn.
Anyways, here is how I created.
- I thought about what I was going to say and the intended audience and made an outline
- I turned the outline into a script and filled it in. Adding the exact words and directions on what would be displayed.
- Iterated and reworked it until I was satisfied.
- Used Apple’s Keynote and added a slide for each of the key points.
- Recorded the use of the app using QuickTime Player. I attached my iPhone to my laptop and choose “New Movie” from the File Menu. Then when the screen opened up choose iPhone as my video source and started recording.
- Recorded one movie for each applicable slide in the Keynote presentation.
- Added each video to the appropriate slide in Keynote. I did this by selecting choose from the media drop down on the toolbar.
- Placed the appropriate part of my script as speaker notes to the presentation.
- I clicked the mouse once to see the next slide and twice to start the video.
- I tried recording the presentation using my voice but did not like the sound of my voice.
- So, I looked at Fiverr to see if a professional narrator was within my shoe string budget but they were not.
- So I looked at other sources.
- The source I found I think is really amazing. At WellSaidLabs website I found a cool service where you can create a text to speech recording for fairly cheap just around $50 a month including commercial rights. I tried out the trial version which does not include commercial rights and it sounded extremely close to a human voice. For me, it even crossed the uncanny valley of voice.
- They only give you like 250 recordings a month in the basic plan so I added as much of the script as I could in the 1000 character limit at a time, produced the files and downloaded them.
- I used a sound editing program to divide the mp3s into segments which matched with what I wanted said on each slide and selected choose from Keynote’s media menu. Don’t worry about the buttons added to the slides with the speaker on them. They don’t show up in the presentation.
- I then turned the microphone to zero volume in system preferences so that the narration would not echo during the presentation.
- I recorded the presentation from Keynote. When recording you have to click once to go to the next slide then click again for the video to start and once more for the narration to start. After the video and narration stopped for each slide I clicked again to go the next slide. Adding the script I created in the speaker notes help me keep track of when the narration would end.
- I recorded the presentation and then iterated on it until I was happy with the results.
- Then I exported the presentation to a mp4 file and uploaded it to YouTube.
- It was then ready to be placed on my website and LinkedIn profile.
It took around a day from start of the script to finished video but much of that was trying to figure out the process which you have read in the 20 steps. I hope this helps someone. I uploaded my video last Friday from the time I wrote this video. So, it is hard to tell if it will be successful as of yet. I will write a follow up article and tell you what happened once I know. So, stay tuned.
PS I would be interested to know if you can tell the narrator of the video is not human.
