So in this, the first episode of GDTTR (Girl Director To The Rescue!) we start with the first step of any video shoot, which is PLANNING YOUR VIDEOS. Planning your story, planning your shots and what you’re going to say, even for simple blogs, it’s going to make them much more professional and effective every time. And the more fun you make them, the more compelling they will be, so enjoy the process!
You’ll also find out all about Paul and Danielle and their remarkable story that got them making videos for their business Urban Dog Training. Danielle’s whole attitude to life is simply amazing! They got in contact with us to get some help with their videos, so off we went to Brisbane for the day…
What to get help with video in your business? Request a Video Planning Session with us Now!
Transcript:
Here we are on our way to “Bris Vegas” and we’re gonna be catching up with Paul and Danielle, and finding out what they need help with when they’re shooting for their dog business.
We’re here at Paul and Danielle’s house for Urban Dog Training and apparently they’ve got a video problem, so let’s check it out.
Hi, how are you going? Nice to meet you Danielle and Paul how are you? Nice to meet you. So, I hear you’ve got a bit of video problem. We sure do. Thank goodness you’re here. Really? OK, shall we take a look? Yup. Alright.
This is all the gear, this is everything that I got. I love photography but when it comes to video. I got mountains of stuff. I’m stuck. I’m not getting anywhere with anything. We’ve spent thousands of dollars on millions of different pieces of equipment. Paul keeps assuring me with each new piece of equipment that we buy that this will help us and this time we gonna get good videos and unfortunately we’re stuck. We don’t even know how to start a good video, we don’t know how to plan,we don’t know how to edit, we don’t know how to shoot them properly. But as you can see we’ve got all the gear. Did you know Danielle that you have that much stuff. No. Please help.
So tell me about your business and what’s been happening? So we got a busy little dog training business and we train pet dogs essentially. Everything from puppies right to aggressive dogs and we work with sort of dogs with all sorts of problem and we train about 30 classes a week. It was just myself at first. Myself and Stevie. Stevie is all snoring. Yeah, Stevie is our resident snorer.
Tell me how video started in the business? What happened. Three years ago, I was diagnosed with cancer and given three months to live and at the time the one thing I wanted to do was make sure that the business was ready for me to die for Paul to take over. And so we thought it was important to get started to get some videos done and we realized quickly it was a lot harder than we thought. And so now that things are looking good cancer-wise and I’m not gonna die, that was three years ago. We certainly do wanna do more videos.
I’ve noticed you’ve tried some videos. How’s that gone and what kind of things did you learn from the experience? We really struggled a lot. Yeah, we struggled. They just didn’t look right, it didn’t flow right. The graphic concept we planned look really naff and we were just very. It just didn’t look right. It just looks like. And we struggled for it to feel natural. Yeah,it didn’t look natural at all. It looked like we were reading everything that we were doing, and we were, that’s right, yeah, badly sometimes.
What did you learn from that though? Not to do that.If there was an inspirational video that you could make, what would that be? We’d like to teach people about dog body language. Especially, in play as well, you know. Yeah, dog body language and play for sure. So, it’s really important for people to understand the dog’s body language cause that’s the way they’re communicating to us and they understand that language so well and we’re supposed to be the ones with the bigger brains and so you know, it makes sense for us to learn their language rather than keeping on insisting that they learn ours. So now is the time to get stuck into video and you got so much gear there that you absolutely got all the stock. I got the gear, she’s got lots of information.
First thing that we wanna do is cause you got all the gear, you got the stuff, it’s about planning. So, let’s start with something simple. I think most elementary thing of dog training is to mark a signal which is a signal that tells the dog whether it’s done something right or not and why it turned to reward. Excellent. And now what we wanna do is to break it down on paper. So, write down the steps, thinking about the shots that you wanna create. So, getting a master shot and getting some cut aways, things like that. So, video one would do an establishing shot using your handy cam, grab an establishing shot. Starting wide, Dani will introduce in a clicker and you wanna do three takes of that, so that you’ve got some stuff to edit with. So do a medium close up and then a close up and a medium close up there’s come a lot where you use your head and shoulders and a close up just with the head. Next shots you wanna do are more creative cut away shots. So, you wanna do shots with Stevie, accepting the traits, shots of the actual device working, shots of you communicating, just different types of creative shots that you..yeah. You’ll find that the more you do the more you have preferred angles and preferred sides as well. So, taking shots of what you’ve taken on the wider shot in the first place. That’s right, and that’s it. Ok, so you know Paul how on the plan we wrote down all the actions for the click trick? Yup. Well now, the important thing is to tick off everything on that plan and the best thing is to do a wide shot and a medium shot and a close-up of the action. So, over to you Danielle and we’ll grab some action.
Ok, so today we’re gonna talk about introducing a dog to a marker signal. We don’t wanna give a dog any indication. And so every time we click we give the dog a treat. I’m Danielle, this is Stevie and we’re very passionate about teaching you how to communicate better with your dogs so you can achieve much better training results. All right guys, do you know what to do now when making your video? Yeah, so much more than we did, yeah. Excellent. So what video are you gonna make? I think we’ll do teaching a dog to sit next.
Excellent, and thank you to the star, Stevie! Thanks again for all your help, we really appreciate it. No problem.
