Tom Reissmann here today.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my smartphone video tips this week and seen how easy and fun it can be to begin filming on your phone. If you missed my earlier lessons, you can find them here:
1. Day 1 – Film your first clip
2. Day 2 – Tell a story
3. Day 3 – Add people
Now on to my favorite part—editing your video and watching it come together to create a story.
If it sounds like a lot of work, I have a surprise for you… We’re going to use Magisto—a free app that edits your video for you.
Magisto is a great video editing app for those who don’t have prior video editing experience. It combines video clips, photos, music, text, video effects, and video filters to help you make an excellent video without much effort or technical knowledge.
All you do is upload your videos, select music, and voila—your video is done! You can then share your video directly on Facebook, Instagram or YouTube.
Ready to try it? Grab your phone and download Magisto (again, it’s free) from your app store.
Christina in the GEP office has been following along this week and used Magisto to put her baking video together. It took her about 5 minutes to put it all together.
Here’s her finished video:
Did you feel your mouth watering, and a sudden craving for lava cakes?
If so, then she did her job perfectly!
Christina did an amazing job of capturing a simple (and delicious) story—that of creating chocolate lava cake from scratch. She showed us how she mixed all of the ingredients, divided the mixture among four custard cups, put them in the oven, added ice cream, and finally showed her husband enjoying the delicious end product.
She also framed her shots really well and kept her phone steady, so we can really take in the action.
The Magisto editor selected the most interesting shots and added them all together into one smooth video sequence.
Here are a few tips for how she could make it even better:
• Keep it simple. Magisto adds colors and effects, and, in this case, I found them somewhat distracting, taking attention away from the lava cakes. Magisto allows you to choose different styles, so you can always go back and try out different editing styles if you’re not happy with the one you selected.
• Get closer. I loved Christina’s shot of the finished lava cake as her husband broke the crust with a spoon. Getting just a little bit closer would have been even more satisfying and mouth-watering because we can really appreciate the details of the warm chocolate center, flowing out like lava.
• Add more of a human element. Also, I would have loved to see a shot of her husband’s face reacting to the sensation of the warm chocolate hitting his palette. This kind of shot adds a human element to the story and allows us to imagine how our relatives might react to us baking a chocolate lava cake.
Overall, I am very impressed with Christina’s first video and how well the automatic editing software selects individual shots to create a complete video with text, music, and effects.
I hope you’ve enjoyed following along this week. And now that you’ve seen the simple steps of creating videos, you can begin filming your own on a regular basis—and more importantly, learn how to turn these simple videos into income.
Good luck and happy filming!
[Editor’s Note: Learn more about how you can fund your travels and make an extra income with photography, travel writing, blogging, and more in our free online newsletter The Right Way to Travel. Sign up here today and we’ll send you a new report, Five Fun Ways To Get Paid To Travel: A Quick-Start Guide, completely FREE.]