Videos

A few people asked me, when I first started doing a monthly video on youtube, if it helped me get bookings... how would I know?  I had just started!

After having done it for a while now, I can definitely say, yes.  It gives people a chance to "meet" my character before hiring me if they haven't seen me perform before.  It gives a snippet of what my show is like.  It has made a difference, without a doubt.  The month that I had posted little clips from my "stage" shows at Colasanti's Tropical Gardens, I got calls/emails from 4 separate companies booking stage shows.  That's just the most obvious result, it's hard to measure other months.

How to do it?  It depends a little bit on what kind of video camera you have available and what kind of computer software you use.  I had a better video camera when I first started, but it was stolen when someone broke into our house last fall... But you don't need a fantastic camera for something like this, youtube compresses it for streaming so much that the super quality is kind of lost anyway.  You need good audio and pretty good video, but most importantly, you need content.  That's actually the hardest part when you do it regularly.  Finding something interesting and new to record every month can be hard, especially in the winter months when you don't have as many public appearances going on.  But it is important that your videos be relatively consistent or you may fall off of making them at all.  Give yourself a deadline for each of them.  I really try to get mine done before the 15th, no later than the 20th of each month and I apologize profusely if it ever gets published later than that.

Editing is the next part and depends a lot on what kind of computer and/or software you have available to you.  I have a mac, so the obvious and easiest choice is iMovie because it comes with the computer.  It is a great program for an amateur videographer because it is easy to use but makes very effective transitions, titles and will upload the movie directly to youtube or make a quicktime video or whatever format you are looking for.  If you are using Windows, you may need to search a little bit to find easy and affordable video editing software.  It's been a long time since I've done any video stuff on Windows and I don't even know if "movie maker" still exists. LOL

Once you have your video up on youtube, you can try to get people subscribing to your channel, but your best bet is probably to embed it into your website.  I have mine in the same spot on my index page all the time.  It is easier to edit the code that way and it keeps my site consistent.  The embed code is easy to find on youtube and once you find the right spot to insert it into your html code, it's a simple matter of pasting the code in the same place every time.

Feel free to subscribe to my youtube channel! http://www.youtube.com/user/PerryNoiatheClown?feature=mhum

Keep Smiling! :oD
Perry Noia the Scaredy Clown