20 Mar Behind The Stream: 3 Smart Ways to Create Videos for Your Online Course
Ever thought about turning your in-person workshop into an online course? We’ve been helping clients do
just that- and the results have been amazing. From taking small in-person workshops and turning them into online experiences with a wider reach, to bringing live training to life with high-production value, we’ve seen a range of approaches work. But it’s so much more than just hitting ‘record’ – you still have to create an experience that truly connects with your audience, no matter the format. Want to see how we did it? Check out this week’s #BehindTheStream to see our process in action!
Beth: If you have a workshop and you’re thinking about turning it into an online course, we would love to help, and we have done it a lot of different ways, but we’re talking about more recently some of our projects, because we like to talk about our recent project and our recent case studies.
Beth: We did three online courses, and they were three different ways of approaching them. So the first one that we created was for Attachment Nerd. So Attachment Nerd has a very special place in our hearts– She’s a dear friend and she has a massive, massive, following on Instagram and TikTok. In fact, I’ve known her for a very long time, and I never really thought she’d need my help with videos because she’s creating a video every day, sometimes several videos a day. So good on camera, so amazing.
But she wanted a different way to connect with her audience. She’s a parenting expert, and she had put together a workshop where I think at that point somewhere– it was a smaller group, like 50 people and it was amazing. She got 50 people. She had room capacity, she had to get a location, she had to get a date. All of those things made the amount of people that could get this message limited. So she hired us to film it and we took that content and actually created it in her home. We shot in her home. You guys wanna talk about the production on that and kind of how you set up the shot.
Steph: She shoots most of her TikTok type video, well, some of them in her house, a lot of them are outside too, but, so she had spots in her house that she knew would look good on camera, and so we chose one of those spots.
Beth: But also you weren’t choosing the kitchen where she does a lot of her stuff. You weren’t choosing–
Steph: That’s right, we chose one that we thought was appropriate for the course with some books behind her.
Beth: You know, like, this is a expert teacher. It’s a different vibe. It’s a different visual.
Steph: She Had six modules, basically. They were about a half hour each, and we knew that she was right on time-wise, and she was amazing on camera. She’s a unicorn. We’ve only encountered a few people that can do what she did. She was great.
Beth: So, CEI was another one of our clients, they had done an in-person conference; It was a conference or some sort of summit learning– training, that’s a better word! And they knew that this training, again, was super powerful and if people couldn’t meet in that time and place, they wanted to get the information out.
Steph: So there were three presenters and they each had a module, and the modules were about half-hour to an hour long. Usually they were presenting these in front of a live audience, and they had a PowerPoint that they were working with. So they knew they didn’t want it to just look like a Zoom PowerPoint, right? We wanted a little more production value to it. We had them sitting at a desk with their computer so you see them with their laptop, and then we pop in the slides, kind of bring them down to the corner so they’re still on screen, but you can see what they’re talking about. Bring ’em full when we need to, when they are making a point. It’s just a way to add a little more production value.
Erica: And I remember with filming– because we had them sitting at a table and their computer was facing them, just for reference, we set up a second camera that was just a reference camera for us internally to see what slide they were on, so that way it was easier to match up the PowerPoint slide with the video meant we had the timing set.
Beth: And those little details will make you way more efficient in the edit as well as, you know, getting to market sooner. Another type of online course that we created was, again, the goal was to transcend time and space, but this one was a little bit different because the company that hired us actually had hired another company to do a training. They wanted the experience live to be the most important thing, so that changed our production goals a little bit because it wasn’t, you know, get the best shot; It was being as least disruptive as possible and being more of a fly on the wall. So they wanted us to film it, but those goals were important to production decisions. So talk a little bit more about that too.
Steph: Well, normally, you know, we all bring in the lights, we’ll bring in… in this case, we wanted to be in the smallest footprint as possible for a couple of reasons. They didn’t wanna take away from the live training of it, but also some of the people were giving real life examples, which, you know, we were cognizant of. It was a space for them to be able to be vulnerable, and so we didn’t want cameras in their faces when they’re trying to be vulnerable. So we’re focused on the person who’s doing the training.
Erica; It was a very interactive presentation, so, even though I was in the back on a tripod, I needed to like stay with her, so that, it was a very engaging shoot, I would say, as opposed to let it sit and just hit record. And I also wanna say that for those kind of shoots, it’s really important to schedule so that way we can get in the room early, run cables if we need to, to try to make the audience experience as least intrusive as possible. We don’t want to be doing that stuff as they’re arriving for, for this day.
Beth: So, two of those videos we were making, the video production the most important thing, one was just the opposite. Both a great opportunity to get in front of more people, and that is what one of the things that makes videos so incredible. So online trainings, any in-person trainings that you’re doing, if you want help bringing them online, we have a lot of different ways we can do it.