The Social Media Trap

0:00 The social media trap. Today we're going to talk about social media: how it works, the algorithms and psychology behind how social media keeps attention, and how you need to customize and tailor your social media videos to kind of keep attention, get attention, and then deliver that value. Then production processes, steps that I use when I do a commercial, short film, etc., that can help you in your social media experience. Help you in such a way where you don't have to do all of these production components, but enough so that you're thinking about it while you're developing your reels and you're developing your clips and starting to build an organic social media presence. I'm all about organic traffic first, funneling money into building organic traffic, just like you would

1:07 an attraction, a movie theater or something. You have people, you want people to walk by the movie theater, walk in organically, and not have to pay per person. Especially social media rates, the social media ad tolls are currently extranomical when you want to transfer customers, viewers, into potential prospects and purchasers. In fact, you might be able to do a social media campaign that gets you a lot of emails, get you a lot of numbers, but not a lot of purchases, because most people in social media aren't going to make a purchase right away unless you have specific value add.

2:09 social media. Reddit, all these communities, their whole goal, the number one thing they need, is higher viewership and longer viewing rates. In other words, they want you to be on their platform and their platform only, spend all your time on their platform. They do this because they need to sell advertisers ad dollars. They make money with the more people that come in and the more attractive their platform is to advertisers that are spending thousands and thousands of dollars on social media posts, reels, YouTube ad campaigns, Reddit advertising, all these kinds of components that help feed into it. So the algorithm doesn't care about you as a person. They care what you like, what you dislike, and

3:10 they care, in addition, what's going to keep you attached. So we've all heard about TikTok. We all know that the government has passed a law and they're trying to figure out about selling TikTok. I'm not talking about anything with that. I'm just going to talk about one simple thing: TikTok, right? We have the invention of reels. Okay, so you upload a video and anyone can see it, and the algorithm picks and chooses what's showing up on your For You page, or whatever it's called now. It shows you content based on what it think you're going to watch and what you think you're going to interact with, more or less. It doesn't care if you hit like or comment. It'll hire, prioritize things that you like or comment, unless that comment is negative, then they'll do, prioritize that component. But in Android, or not, sorry, in TikTok, it, it's very ingenious. Okay, here's my video. Instead of, you know,

4:13 clicking on the next video I want to watch or exiting, what it does is a continuous kind of scroll. So you scroll up and you get another video. Well, the actual process of scrolling up and seeing a video you like releases something called dopamine. It's considered, well, before I go there, I need you to like, subscribe, and comment, share this podcast out right now. Hit that subscribe button. That's on Spotify, that's on YouTube, that's on Apple Podcast, pretty much anywhere you can get podcasts. Hit that follow button, share it with a few people, comment "social media trap."

5:18 and memory, movement, motivation, mood, attention, and more can trigger dopamine. Higher levels or lower levels of dopamine are associated with diseases and depression and all that kind of thing. Well, dopamine is supposed to be a reward for work. Doing an action that produces a good result is supposed to be reward like we are actually creatures designed to work, to create, to build, to cultivate the world around us. Not just a nine-to-five, but to do something above and beyond what everyone else would require of us, to create something new, just like our Creator created. He gave us that same ability to create. Imago Dei, we are created in his image. He can think things into existence. He restricted us so that we have our hands and our feet, and we can create something in a brilliant mind that creates universes and imaginations just in your mind to

6:19 begin to understand and cultivate ideas and expand what might be true and try things in your mind, and then start doing research and figuring out how to make it happen. Work is not a, you know, four-letter word that someone says to cuss at you. It's supposed to be a rewarding experience. So that's built into our brain. And so when you scroll on a reel like this and you see something you like instantly, you get that dopamine hit. In fact, it's so bad, it's addictive. In fact, TikTok soared during the isolation of COVID, and at some point in time it went to, like, 10 hours a day, and right now I think the average is around three to six hours a day. People are consuming reels. That's a lot of time that you could be using to invest in your business, to do research, and to understand things. Now, if you're building social media posts and that's where

7:25 your work comes from, that's a whole different story. But you're wasting three to six hours on Instagram and YouTube reels and TikTok just because when you swipe up and you get rewarded with something you like, that dopamine neurotransmitter is fired, and it's actually very addictive, because hey, everyone likes a happiness boost, right? Okay, so that small reward, uh, simple swiping up. Yep. Okay.

8:28 again by doing something small, a dopamine hit every time you get comments, every time you see that view number. That's the number they show you. That's number they want you to be important, because it feels like it's thousands of people that are viewing it, and in reality it could be the same person viewing it three or four times, and so that number is more 200, right? It gets a little bit more complicated, but the idea is TikTok now rewards you, dopamine, whether you're a creator, whether you're, you're a social media person. This is any social media, whether you're a consumer or a creator.

9:30 the trends that are out there, right, that I'm no longer using multiple cameras to cover cuts. Right, it's a pet, it used to be a pet peeve of mine. Now I've kind of gotten used to it, and so I just cut out content that's me rambling, or maybe I need to breathe, or because I still have a cold I have to blow my nose, I'm gonna cut all that out, but I'm not gonna care, I'm just gonna do a quick cut. So production value, and that has decreased.

10:37 it. People don't need splash graphics anymore. You, people don't care if you have perfect typography. Now, if you're a podcast about typography, that's a whole different subject, it's specific to that kind of component. But still, if you're just showing slides and you're talking about it and it's content people want to consume, they don't care about animations, transitions, all of that kind of older way of believing, of trying to keep people's attention through flashy images, through particles and drop shadows and all these things. We've kind of over time dropped off, because I now have literally one to two seconds to catch your attention, because it's all it takes to swipe up. Okay, I swiped up, my eyes have taken a photo of what I've seen, and I'm swiping up. It's literally a second or two. If it's an ad, instantly gone. Some ads have been starting to trick me, because they're going away with the high

11:37 value, and they're using some of the tactics that we're going to talk about in just a moment. So there you're replacing graphics, over-produced or produced edits, and produce cinema for quality content. Again, people don't care how flashy it is. They care about the value you add, the content they want to receive. If you have a problem and I can solve it, you're going to want to tune in, such as now. The problem is you want to grow your social media. You want to find ways to grow your engagements. You want to find ways to get more viewers, to get more traction to both your ads and your organic posts, so you can use this same content for both.

12:40 why. Why are you posting? Why should I care? Why should anyone care? If you need acquisitions, if you need to sell products, if you need to solve problems, that's the why. And a social media post that's hilarious and got people's attention doesn't indicate sponsored, because it may not connect. Okay, so create with purpose, right? Almost all ads are skipped. Swipe takes less than a second, maybe two, for their attention. Make the most of your social media posts. Make the most of your ads. Okay, using this stuff we're talking about now.

13:46 They want you to buy ads and, uh, support their platform, build their user base, help them build new features, pretty much. Personally, I feel social media ads, unless you can make them and fine-tune them, are a waste of money. If you're not ready, if you don't have a social media plan, if you don't have a social media manager, if you're not actively having someone working 40-hour weeks digging into those analytics, building reels, building single works, logging what doesn't work, why something works, what makes work for your industry, for your audience, changing as the algorithm changes and paying attention. Like, I won't say whether Facebook cares about small businesses or not, but I have some questions for them. So, but some of these business profiles will create organic Instagram reel accounts

14:51 and a lot of these can be stories, and, uh, think of it, um, as a way to build brand recognition and a way to get someone's attention and get your brand on their mind and the reason you exist on their mind, and kind of subtly drop hints about your product without having to spend a cent on advertising. You might spend a lot of money on the production. There are some really high-produced stories out there. Um, and of course, you could be a speaker. You start with the first couple seconds is either defining the problem or defining the solution, but you don't give it all away until the end of the reel. "Everyone believes X, but Y is true." And then they cut to the beginning of the interview or the beginning of that clip and talk it through, and then "Y is true because X, Y, and Z" towards the end of that reel. So there are

15:53 four types of posts that will get people's attention within that two-second, remember that two-second reel swipe. Remember, because your eyeball is going to take a visual image, you just swipe from something else, visual image as it plays, because it starts playing the moment you start swiping, visual image, and then you're going to make a decision, yes or no, in mere seconds and swipe up. I mean nanoseconds, microseconds, whatever. Okay, so the four categories.

17:00 instant recognition. Seeing Donald Trump's face or Elon Musk's face or a sports cast or someone you recognize, right? A recognized voice, someone the viewer knows, his credibility. Um, that guy from Shark Tank that appears everywhere, you know, oh, you might stop for a second, and then you might have two or three seconds to get their attention, and you use an additional one of these tactics to keep their attention. Unless, of course, already following this person or they already know this person and they like their content, then they're probably going to listen to 15, 20 seconds, maybe 10 seconds of the reel, and if you can hook them in that time, they'll listen to the rest of the reel, and hopefully you can throw them over to a marketing page for an event or a conference or a product or a service, and you can turn a viewer to a prospect and to a customer.

18:00 up and you hear "Stop!" like a big loud stop, then someone's talking or someone's doing something that'll get your attention instantly, especially when you're scrolling through reels, right, and the volume is pretty consistent and there's no breaks, and all of a sudden you hear "Stop!" and a break, a pause, a dramatic pause. Someone's gonna pay attention a little bit longer. You get five more seconds, three to ten seconds, to keep someone's attention. Of course, after that you're gonna have to build attention, you're gonna have to build value, so someone's gonna stay on that reel. So that's ultimately whatever that reel's purpose is, whether it's brand traction, informative, or actually converting someone into a prospect or a customer and a product or service.

19:08 selling ads through YouTube TV, through Hulu, buying ads through YouTube TV, through Hulu, all those kinds of things, um, even general YouTube ads, reel ads, those kinds of things. This can help. Now, I'm gonna go over this content very quickly, because I don't want to give away all my industry secrets. I want you to call me if you want to make a commercial, right? But this is going to be very helpful. I want to start with this very important saying, Benjamin Franklin: "If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail." Period. I can't tell you how many people walk into a commercial that they kind of have planned and have no idea what people are doing. The people don't know what they're doing, the talent has no idea what they're doing, and it just rolls downhill, and you spent hours and people get billed and all those nine yards.

20:09 Daily social media, okay, maybe you don't follow these steps, maybe you work in the moment, but be informed by these steps. Okay, so let your why inform all of your decisions. Okay, if you need a thousand customers, great. Who's your customer base? What's your demographic? What value can you add to them? And how, and what platform can you find them? You may find that even though you think Instagram or TikTok or Facebook or Google is where your people are, you may find doing something a little bit more local is going to produce and yield better results, might yield better results based on the tendencies of your customers. If your customers are a little bit older, because they have more money, anyone under 40 or under 30 probably don't have money, no offense, they probably have credit, but that's it. Um, everyone else may be more informed by a letter. Letter comes in, you know, they might check it out, they may look at it. They're more likely to check letters, email campaigns. Great, build your email campaign.

21:17 If you have a location, a brick and mortar, if you do anything, get people's emails and get authorization to email them. The CAN-SPAM Act is all about being able to identify the original source of an email so that spam is easier identified, because they ain't going to comply with these rules anyway, and B, so that people's inboxes get less cluttered.

22:22 getting up to restaurant week. Great, showcase some of those dishes before restaurant week week or two, three weeks ahead. Stories, post, share some music. Oh, these are creative and all those kinds of things. And then as you get closer to restaurant, where you can say, "This dish is part of the restaurant week menu, and we, you know, and here's our deal," and that kind of thing. But you already got people, like, salivating over that steak or that salmon or the halibut, or why am I listing expensive things that I really wish I knew how to cook? I can cook salmon. I have yet to cook halibut. Gordon Ramsay, please do not challenge me. Um, so brainstorming involves getting key players in your social media management team. Okay, that's you if you're the social media manager. That's you if you're the brand manager. That is not the CEO, that is not the CIO. They got their own jobs to do. Let them do their jobs. Just, they hired you, they trust you. Okay, a information from a CIO is going to be stale on social media.

23:28 Information from a CEO is going to be about execution and strategies that is going to glaze over the eyes of everyone at social media. Any C-suite person, kick them out of your social media planning team. I understand that some companies have rigorous review processes, but I always advise them that the social media team run, if the performance fails, great, still, a social media team run. Maybe you have to change out key players, because maybe they're not a great fit for your business. Let social media run internally. Equip them with, here's strategies, let's plan ad campaigns, let's, here's the launches that are coming up, here's the calendar, here's the events, here, inform them, but don't micromanage your social media team. Okay, that's the hardest thing I've had to learn.

24:35 brand, uh, management company, then it totally, 100 percent should be all over your social media posts, because you're showcasing your work, you're showcasing your why. I can manage your brand and this is how good I can do it. But you have to remember, social media is not about quality or production value or quality of production value, it's about quality of content over production, quickly getting to the content, pulling people in, and getting them to make a decision. Okay, you want, you have a, I think every time I say those, I can, like, combine three theories together, because I feel like they're all, uh, intertwined. Maybe I should talk to you about strategic communication and some of those theories so you understand how to properly, does it say transact a message? Let me put my professor hat. Transact a message, um, but to transact a message is all about knowing your audience, understanding communications are two-way street.

25:38 If social media is turned off because you're overproduced and those posts are being downplayed, okay, great, throw them out, go do something else. Now, you may want to keep that content or delete it. Usually speaking, you'll want to keep the content and only delete it if you're legally obligated to do so, and there are only so many countries that can do that. The point is, there are some things that social media is not going to make sense to CEO, to CIO, even illegal. Now, there's a framework everyone should live in. If a CEO sees something they don't like, okay, great, inform the social media team. Don't chastise them, inform them. Man, I hate them. I'm derailing this conversation. Okay, Simon Sinek tells this story: go to one coffee shop at a hotel, this employee is smiling, happy, excited, "You know what else can I do for you?" Yes, you do. What makes a drink perfect? And, like, you feel that this person values you as a

26:42 customer. Great. You go to another hotel, same coffee or same type of coffees sold, this coffee shop person hates his job, is not giving good customer service, probably making the drink wrong, all those kinds of things. And you know what the difference between the two? It's not that person B cannot make coffee or is not paying attention. It's not, you need to remove the concept that negative people are always negative. If your leadership is negative and looking at problem solving as a fire as opposed to a growth moment or a solution, you need to get rid of them like today, because they're not helping your culture. The difference between coffee shop A with a happy employee and coffee shop B with the unhappy employee was leadership. Simon asked coffee, or employee A, the happy employee, "Hey, what makes you so happy?" "Well, anytime my manager comes

27:48 around, he asks me, what can we do to make your job easier, more efficient? Is there anything you need? Is there anything that we lack? Is there any way that we can help you?" That's a different form of leadership, and that's a leadership that every single person should take. I'm not saying you're not going to have outliers. They're not going to have people who, who are trying to get a paycheck and that's it and walk out. But you can eat in a, in a culture of being supportive to your employees, you can easily weed out those, because you'll tell, they're going to spread negativity, and once an employee spreads negativity, they're gone. Now, if all of the employees are feeling negative, feeling stressed, feeling hurt, whatever it is, more, employee morale should be a quantitative, reportable item that managers are held accountable to, and if, and even the managers should have their morale held accountable to the C-suite

28:52 executives or whoever their upline is, following up. Because if you're breeding a leadership of negativity, you will never solve problems, you'll put out fires. And let me tell you a difference: there will always be fires, there won't always be problems to solve, because once you solve the problems, you, your employees start organic problem solving. And there are a whole lot of businesses, if, if you're one of my clients, I'm not singling you out, but we've had this talk before, what I'm saying, there's a whole lot of people that operate that way, and it usually operates because money gets tight or resources get tight or you've had to close a few operations, and so now you're like, "This department had to close, I had to fire 150 people, I had to downsize here, and I feel like my dream is dying." You know, it's a small, not compared to the grand hole. Sometimes you just gotta let those go, and you've got to reorganize your business, and you've got to make smarter decisions, get the right people involved in the right room. I'm glad some of those

29:57 clients have contacted me and have put me in the room so that I can help them think logically, and, and, and it's not like I come in with, uh, uh, here's, here's the golden tape, here's the easy button. No, no, I come in with a sound voice based off of what I see, first impressions, information you give me to analyze, and I can report to you, okay, this is what's happening, these are my recommendations, it's totally up to you to follow them. Now, if you're having a really bad fiscal quarter, I recommend you follow them all, because it's not going to hurt you unless it's outside of your brain, because there's part of your business where I won't understand your entire business. I won't, I won't get it, but I'm not going to understand, or generically I'm not going to understand your specific business and your specific business practices. You know what works and what doesn't, and you may have years of experience knowing that this one thing that I recommended is a terrible idea. Great, let me know, let me know why it wasn't successful. Okay, great, I can come up with solutions, not fires. Employee B, back to

30:57 that coffee shop manager was constantly like, "You're not meeting your quota, you're not meeting your efficiencies, you need to work harder," always on the employee, causing employee morale, front-facing employee morale, to be low. You need to do whatever you can do to get, equip them, empower them, provide for them. That is essential. It is such, I don't know why I broke into that, I rabbit trail, maybe it'll make the cut, maybe it won't. But the important thing is, if you have front-facing employees, customer-facing employees, do whatever you can do to empower them, because they are exactly connected to the relationship with your paying customers. Your support line should not be automated. Well, call centers are expensive in that technology. Great, don't break it in the first place. Let me text, let me chat, let me non-automated

32:04 things, because I'll tell you, AI is great, but I know that you train that AI to be connected to your policies, and I can tell you as a business owner, sometimes you have to waive those policies. It's an ebb and flow thing. I check with the Holy Spirit and those kinds of things, and the Holy Spirit lead me. Now, I also believe, and especially becoming a corporation, all those kinds of things that you have to deal with, people consistently having a consistent policy helps 100 percent. It helps litigation, helps, it's just, it's from a legal standpoint, from a business standpoint, from a policy standpoint, following policy helps. But there's also a human aspect: grace and mercy sometimes needs to be applied. Late fees can be waived, but sometimes the long-term business relationship with a client is worth more than the $15 late fee that you might attach to an invoice.

33:06 maybe your brand manager sneaks in. Great, maybe they're super creative. If they're not super creative and they're super technical, there are some brand managers that are very technical on implementing brand guidelines they created or they had someone create for them, like rebrand guidelines. If they're very, maybe not, maybe you get the best, best of both worlds, technical and creative. Great, put that person in the room, and you just brainstorm ideas. No idea is a bad idea. Put it on the whiteboard. No idea is a bad idea. I don't care what it is, put it on the whiteboard. And then towards the end of the brainstorming, you're going to find two, three, four, five, no more than five. Simplicity, simple focus on executing minimal components and executing them well will be your success. Attempting to execute lots of things right away without a full team or teams of

34:12 people, whether you can afford it or not, I'm telling you, it's a downfall. It's a downfall. It's a downfall. Burnout is a real thing. Creatives get burned out just because you looked at them wrong. It's true. All of a sudden, I used to be the one of these. It actually took me seven years working as a video editor for a certain non-profit and they're getting used to their review process and not taking it personally. Most creatives consider themselves artists, even though in my opinion, if you're a creative and you're not an artist, you have artist components, which you have to deliver what the client wants. Now, if you are a creative consultant, that's a little different, because you have your artist and you're trying to solve the problem. It's the whole difference between being just a creative and someone that's actually consulting on problem solving an issue. So you can bring those creative people on board into that brainstorm meeting, and you find three to five things that you can take

35:13 you're doing a campaign, great, hone in that campaign. Three or five great ideas, great. Take a screenshot of the whiteboard, clear the whiteboard, list those five things, pros and cons, ideas, additional ideas that are specific to those three to five things, and then hone in to just a couple, one or two. Maybe do A/B testing, maybe A/B/C testing, but don't do any more. Simple focus. Simple focus. Okay, so then, great, if you're doing film, you're doing screenwriting and scripting. Maybe you don't need to do it for social media. Maybe you do. Maybe you want the CEO to be on social media, but the CEO's conversational style sucks. Okay, great, we'll write you copy. Here's your copy, here's your bullet points, here's your card. If we need a prompter, we'll spend a couple hundred bucks, rent gear, here we go. I mean, it does happen, because CEOs get hyper-focused on their business and what makes their

36:19 business succeed, and sometimes you get the CEO that's not very conversational, and all Tim Cooks. Okay, um, so screenwriting and scripting, previs and storyboarding. Okay, if you're doing a commercial, I recommend you do this. In fact, when I go to a client site and we're doing a commercial, I do storyboarding. I have them sign off on the storyboard as approved, and if they need pre-visualization, I'll do that. So storyboard is just shot for shot, edit for edit, this is the concept that we're going to film. Okay, and they have to sign off on it, and any change to that storyboard from that moment forward is considered chargeable, unless I can fit it in. If I can fit it in, I can fit it in. If it's small, it's small. But at that moment, I have a cinematographer, I might have an audio engineer, I might have grips, key grips, and just when you start paying people, you can't wait if they paying yourself. Okay, maybe, you know, but even then you shouldn't. Remember, consistent policies, but also

37:25 grace and mercy. Grace and mercy shall follow you all the days of your life. Shouldn't you also provide grace and mercy? The same measure you meet, same measure you measure by, measure to you, measure by grace and mercy. So that was great. Okay, but also don't get run over, but that's a whole other topic.

38:28 image, or here's, you know, here's a character who's saying this dialogue. Maybe you hire someone like a comic strip artist or something like that to storyboard, depending how much money you have, or maybe you use Photoshop, or maybe you're taking photos on location. I use a beautiful app and I recommend this app, Cadrage, is that how you pronounce it? It's a director's viewfinder. So if anyone knows what that is, it's a little eyepiece that you can adjust the lens and the focal points and such, so you can kind of visually see where a shot goes. When I do on-location storyboarding or location scouting, I will use this, and I can plug in what type of cameras, RED, Sony, whatever it is, and the type of lens, and I get an image from the iPad or the iPhone that's close enough to visually understand what a shot might look

39:28 like. It might have the same cinematic profile, that kind of thing, and it really enables me to pull these items, part of the storyboard, describe it, share it with clients so that they know, okay, this is the location I'm using, this is the possible shot, this is, you know, here are some options and variations, and so that they can jump into the creative process with you. And I've gotten close to what the final might look like. Problem with storyboarding, the problem with anything you do in pre-production, is when you start production, sometimes you just throw it away, and it's, it seems like you're starting from scratch. But any planning, any planning is extraordinarily helpful. You will be surprised how much faster you'll be able to execute production, quickly answer questions, provide, providing a storyboard with the script, with, you know, script supervised notes to talent, you know, you know, maybe that will help them understand. They'll be able to write their context, they'll be able to ask the questions: why am I here,

40:33 why am I on the screen, why are the people around me, and be able to build that subtext that helps something be believable.

41:37 could be plus or minus depending on the approved storyboard, and I bring all those numbers in with a storyboard and we make decisions. Okay, we can't, we're not going to shoot here, because it's going to put us in day four, and all those kinds of things. And then of course scheduling. Sometimes in your pre-production work you have to approve the storyboard before you get into scheduling, and sometimes scheduling conflicts happen. You might think you can do three 10-hour days, and the reality is you have to do six half days, but maybe the cinematographer only charges a full day. Well, I've got bad news, we may have a half day, right, and they get charged a full day, right? I still have charge a full day rate to you. That's how it is, it's business. Or, and you know, generally speaking there are other great industry-standard ones, but then you have to learn what's above the line, under the line, here are all the accounting categories or all the codes. And just for smaller production, sometimes it's just go Excel,

42:41 make it make sense for you and your client. Simple. If you're doing film, hire yourself a film accountant, just, okay.

43:43 it's a comedy or something, and you know, three months down the line, you didn't have a release form for them at the time you record it, not just after, it has to be before, and you might, three months later, might be social backlash, and they're suing you for defamation, they're suing you for misuse of their likeness, they're suing you for all these things, and you didn't have a release form, and there was no consideration, there was no, you know, there was no contract, so there's no protection for you. Every, every member of talent that I put on film has to sign a release form, and it's a general release. It's a worldwide, uh, perpetuity release form, that means forever, for all projects known and unknown, and just generally everything. And I tell them that, this, hey, your release, when you're participating in this event, you're participating in this film, just want you to know, because we're producing it, not

44:43 someone else, it could be stored indefinitely, could be reused, could be, you know, client could ask for edits, someone else could ask for edits, whatever it is, we might use it for above and beyond what you think. So you're gonna do a general lease to protect me, to protect the client and the producers and so forth, that kind of thing. It seems old, seems out of date, but you can take a one-page paper in a small binder everywhere you go and be like, "Hey, we'd like to shoot you, is that okay? Great, sign here," and make it, make it simple. The, the one we use at The Universe is not simple, because I like protecting all sides of my legal backside. So, but there are more simplistic versions that, you know, they can opt in to, just check box, yes, it's okay, here's my name, I'm releasing, this isn't this simple, easy. Always consult your lawyer.

45:45 Don't just think that you're going to be able to film quickly. Comedy, comedy is all about timing and reactions and responses. At proper edits work wonders, but the comedic effect is amplified when you have someone else in the room that reacts to it and sells it. Think of The Office. No one in there is smiling, they're fighting that smile, and sometimes you can see it, right? Because you know the comedy was great, but you have that reaction, and you can only do that when you have rehearsal. I won't say how many times people are like, "Okay, let's start filming it," great, and then the whole crew bust off laughing, and you can't use that shot because it has to be scrapped, or you have to do some quick edits and things of that nature, and sometimes that joke or that punchline isn't hitting as much as you need it to do. So just do a quick rehearsal. For social media, quick rehearsal, just be like, "Okay, I'm gonna do this, I want to do this, okay." So yeah, and maybe you record those rehearsals

46:51 in case you get great content and you'd be like, "Oh, that was great, perfect," and I'm like, "This is just a rehearsal," and be like, "It was perfect, I'm good to go." Hey, you save yourself time, it's efficient, but you leave yourself room for that rehearsal for that.

47:51 They do well, great, get them. They don't, move on to the next person. The CEO may not be your solution. Any C-suite person may not be a solution. Executive, corporate offices, that executive assistant that you think looks great but can't act for life of her, can't, move on. It's simple. No offense to anyone, this is not targeted to you, these are all random examples, non-targeted examples. Okay, then you move to production, right? You get on set. You don't immediately film. Two, three, four, five hours before production starts, you're moving an equipment, you're checking camera angles. Okay, set up the camera, camera angle, then light it, then check the sound, find the perfect spot, record it, check the movements, do the full movements. If you've got a dolly, run the full length of the dolly. If you've got a drone shot,

48:54 run the full length of the drone shot. Pay attention to small details. If there's a trash bin that looks like it got hit by a bulldozer, get it off the set. Should not be there. Water bottles, get them off the flipping set, please, for the love of my pretend ADHD, please get rid of water bottles from the set. If it's, if it's a stage or it's a sound studio, there will be a table outside sound studio with food, everything, great, great, probably by the dressing rooms, probably somewhere else, general location, but there's gonna be someone that's watching you, and if you walk in with a water bottle, they're gonna probably knock you out, take the water bottle from your knocked-out corpse, and move on. Why? Because you would not be surprised. Cables, I had to move cables that were right here. Cable management, move it. I hate this, and I had no creative ideas on how to fix this. This little, like, like I want it to be

50:02 perfect, like that, and it's like bowing like that. Yes, my internal ADHD, or tell you what it really is, it's the three wisdoms of God. It's a Sonius, Phronius, and Sophia anointing, and one of them is the anointing of small details, recognizing that things shouldn't be in your shot. I just, I tell all of my students this, and yes, I'm gonna wrap up, praise God, hallelujah. I tell all of my media students this, I tell everyone that works with me, hey, anything that is not intentional is probably a distraction.

51:10 splashes of green, because you ain't gonna hide that, everyone's gonna see it, and immediately it's a distraction. And things like cables and things like water bottles and stuff, they just diminish your authenticity, they diminish your view, like the opinion that they have of you and your product, they diminish your brand, they diminish you. Just upgrading a little bit, paying attention to small details, using high-quality audio, paying for high-quality audio. Like, here's the reality, I'll tell you the truth, you can use an iPhone to your blue in the face, I'll never recommend it. Always recommend something Sony, if it's a film, you know, maybe RED, you know, whatever. Okay, so but I don't care what you use, use your iPhone 16 Pro Plus, whatever, don't care, but focus on your audio. Bad audio is security footage. 60, if not more,

52:17 percent of your experience is audio, not visual. Try to watch movie muted. Try to watch movie muted. Now turn the movie on and just listen to it. I bet you could still be captivated a little bit by listening to it than you could by not see it. Why? Good quality audio. One of the things that irks me beyond any belief, God bless Angel Studios for solving this problem. Christian television, Christian movies, oh, it could be good quality content, could be good things they say, but man, the noise in the corner, the buzz, the popping, the echoes, the extra reverb, that all this, because they didn't do something called ADR. And ADR, whether it's automatic or manual, is either automated dialogue replacement or adaptive dialogue replacement. Okay, and it pretty much means after the film

53:25 is filmed and you have the audio, you're gonna actually not use any of that. You might use some of the background sounds and stuff, but in fact, in all movies it's rebuilt from scratch, and the sound that you recorded in person is used as a reference, and you bring all of the actors into a VO booth using special mics, may match the sound or match the original area, and that's why it sounds so crisp and dialogue sounds so clear. Now, they're using effects, not, they're using plugins, they brought all the actors back in for six months and they recorded the dialogue over again. They just played it back over and over and over again, and usually if you've done enough rehearsals and you just came from production, you can record that, no problem. It'll sound very close to original, and then you just have to use an algorithm, AI or manually, you can adapt the waveform to match so the lip sync looks on par, which is

54:26 why you may see some films where the lip sync is a little off, you're here or there, and you really, really paid attention. But the quality of the audio, and being able to control explosions, the sound of how were the explosions, the level of where they are, the dynamic range between the actors and the background noises and the music and the sound effects, and being able to adapt and grow and expand, which you can't do in television, God bless the FCC. But this dynamic range cannot be created if you're in a world where you got an air conditioning blast blasting, or you got, uh, people digging coffee cups, and you know, someone drops a plate in the middle of a conversation, you can't do that. These mics can only pick up so much, and you can't walk around with a lav mic like this and be like, "Okay, let's go record everyone," because A, I hate it, it covers most of my face. I know I keep hitting it, and I try so hard

55:29 not to do that. I don't like covering my face. That's why I moved the camera a little bit to the left, so you see. The point is, this is the quality you want when you hear dialogue, and then being able to control where it feels, and then you can then split all that audio, because it's already re-recorded all your tracks, and you can do Dolby Atmos. You cannot do Dolby Atmos by using normal audio. You can't, no matter how much you want, it sucks, it's not pleasant, because you have components of it, especially if you have a high noise floor and all these things that sometimes you may have prepared for and this may have planned for. And so it's usually easier to try to get a good audio capture. Decent, doesn't have to be great, doesn't be perfect, but good, good enough, so I, the actors can hear their dialogue separate from the explosions and everything happening. Great, and then they go in the video booth, you play it back with time code. Okay, here we go, um, exterior 42, and Joe Smith, the line, whatever,

56:43 you know, here you go, and the dialogue. And it's even better if you're in a room with all of the actors in that scene and you're playing that scene again, because then it's like you're in rehearsal with it and you're feeding back off of people's energy, and that is brilliant. Same thing I said with comedy, feeding back people's energy is brilliant. For social media, you don't need to do that. For an ad campaign, maybe. For a short film, probably. For a full-length film, absolutely, freaking, literally, because you're already spending atrocious amount of money on a feature film. So do your audio right. Do your audio right. Get a lav. Social media does not care to see the lav. Okay, position it properly. The lav has got a point at the person's mouth. Okay, if it's here and you're recording all the time, all you're going to hear is this, and this is not great quality audio, because I can pod this up as much as I want and I can tell you there, it'll still sound far away versus this,

57:50 which is a properly positioned mic. Even though I'm moving left or right, it's the properly positioned mic, I can hear it, and they're just pointing it right at their lips. Boom mic, point at their lips. Far away, point at their lips. And then buy the right type of mic depending on the environment. Condensers, this is not a production film, this is just to help you make better social media campaigns, commercials, films, all those kinds of things. Um, gonna be on set workflow. We're not gonna, oh, at the end of every shoot day, if you're doing commercial, social media, before you dismiss anyone, check the footage. Check, check

58:53 record it. Always double, triple check your recordings. Now, if you have a high-quality broadcast industry professional recording device, like a VTR or something like that, a tape deck, even though they're not called, I don't know, hyperlink or whatever you want to call it. Okay, great, you can scan through it. Here you have audio, scan through three minutes, you got audio, scans, okay, great, and check it. But still check every clip. Every time you break tape, check it. Just play it. Make sure, if you're check if time code is being synced, check time code, check video, check the audio. If it's social media, great, take your earpods out of your ear, turn your volume up, and push play and let everyone hear it and see it. So you'll hear louder things, that kind of thing, and be able to pay more attention, and you'll see lip sync issues, those kinds of things. Now, lip sync can be fixed in editing and all that kind of stuff, but not with CapCut or your TikTok editor anyway. I digress. Um, safety stuff, we're gonna skip over.

1:00:01 Post-production. I recommend at the end of every shoot day you're backing up the content. Back it up to a secure cloud, back it up to two hard drives, and then the one you're working off of. "Oh, that sounds so complicated, I just want to put the SD card in and work off it." Great. That SD card can get corrupted, that data can be lost, and let me tell you, $10,000 in repair later, the data is still lost. Backup, backup, back. It costs nothing. It costs 200 bucks for two terabyte, four terabyte hard drives. Great, it's cheap. Backing up, one hard drive dies, I got the backup. SD card dies, backup. Also, if it's a larger production, don't ever erase SD cards. Treat them like footage. Lock them, label them, back up to a secondary SD card if the camera has the output. If not, and you're using an

1:01:04 external recorder, it will have it. Back up the original, back up the files to the hard drives, multiple, back up to an ass if it's an internal film, and send one copy of the SD cards to a fireproof vault in a random city, random state somewhere. Sounds stupid, but if, God forbid, an explosion happens, an accident happens, you lose all this equipment that's on the truck and all this kinds of stuff, you've sent those SD cards two weeks ago to this vault. You just drive over to the vault, fireproof, open it, take those SD cards, back them up again, start the whole process, and now you've got your data, because you spent millions and millions and millions of dollars. In fact, you'll spend almost a thousand times what you'd spend in pre-production in production. That depends if you're using LED wall and advanced techniques, but anyway.

1:02:10 first. Do that in pre-production. Test them first. Don't ever assume they're going to work. Don't ever assume they're going to work. Don't ever do it. Always test. Always test. Always test. Always test.

1:03:17 client says, "We want XYZ." Hey, I can't do XYZ, but I can hire someone that can. Here's our contact. "And well, we just want to go through you." I was like, well, if you go through me, there's going to be an upcharge. You'll have to do in business, and you know, review and all those kinds of things. Like, "Yeah, yeah, we want your opinion on it, and you know, if you hire them, they do it, and just, we just work with you. We know you, we trust you, we trust your company, we trust The Universe." Okay, great. Okay, person starts project, person edits project, person sends me the project, and then tells me, because it was a quick turnaround, tells me they have no more availability to, to work on the project. The export had digital distortion, green flashes, text was misspelled. It looked like a shattered digital rendering, which, thank God for Apple Silicon

1:04:26 and embedded H.264 and HEVC and pro processors, because this is really made exports much more stable. But this person never checked their export, and all they had to do was check their export, restart their machine, and do a new export, and probably worked. But because they're on a time crunch, they didn't see it, they sent it, they sent it to me. Well, here's the truth: because I gave my words to the client, I stayed up for an ungodly amount of hours, did it myself, sent it. You best believe if I had given that to the client, like, in fact, I have someone, a contractor that I use solely for the sole purpose of checking every communication I send out, checking every single video or piece of brand and press kits and newsletters and anything that The Universe creates. This one person goes through and does

1:05:30 three things: creative review, content review, and spelling and grammar. I can't tell, a typo should never ever appear on anything you do, but you best believe I use Grammarly. I use, uh, an internal spell check system, and I read everything I post, and I rework everything I do. I spend legit an hour or two working on any text and copy that exists, just this podcast, and same for anyone, like, the whole goal is I send this to this person and then give me a thumbs up. That's never going to happen. There's usually three problems, three mistakes, you know, especially the larger issue, and that's not because I'm not doing my job. It's because when you build a project, you get my nopic vision, you focus on the executing that project, and you, and you might skip over a small detail and not see something. And plus Paul says it this way: we see in a mirror darkly. Prophetically speaking, he was saying

1:06:32 you see prophetically, as if in a mirror darkly, like I see that there's something God's, you know, leading you this way, or whatever it is, right? That's what Paul said. I use that also to interpret. We need to partner with each other. You need to find yourself creative people. Could be your employees, could be a brand manager, maybe it is the CEO, you're a small business, if you're not, hopefully it's not the CEO, someone that can review those three components, and the best is to have three people check the MP4 on the device that people are going to use. So if you spend a lot of time in a studio and you have a color-calibrated HDR display that you spent thousand dollars on, great, throw it up there. Okay, great, the colors match, great. Okay, put on an iPhone, play it back, how's it sound? Because how people can receive it. Play them all the way through. Don't skip them. I understand the need and desire to

1:07:33 skip them if you're sampling it and you're sending it to someone else because you trust yourself as an editor. I've got plenty, some odd experiences editing and creating stories and commercials and things of nature. I can tell you I don't trust myself to not have a typo. I watch the whole thing from the top of the timeline all the way up. Now, I can trust the computer that the export is going to, as long as the export is perfect to the timeline, which 99.9 percent of the time it is, we're fine to do a scrub. But I'm sending it to someone else who's going to watch it, who's going to check it, who's going to give me time code, who's going to verify it, all those kinds of things.

1:08:35 using Grammarly. Let's do them to start using a spell check. Here's a dictionary, good luck. Um, the point is, it's okay for people to make mistakes. Talk about it in community, see people fix their mistakes. Some people repeat their mistakes multiple times, but after a couple weeks you'll see improvement, and if you don't, those are the people you can be like, "Hey, we need to trim budget, this person can go, this person can go." I mean, it depends on your team, but in my opinion, if collaborative meetings don't grow an individual, they've gotten stagnant, and that's probably not the place for them to grow and accomplish everything God has for them. Sometimes they just need a kick, the right foot of fellowship, sorry about your luck, but sometimes that sparks them to pursue the actual gifting and plan that God has for them. And I know a lot of people are constantly searching

1:09:36 for destiny. Just walk in it. Pray about it. God doesn't answer you, whatever you do to your, whatever you put your hands and your feet will prosper. So if you're social media director and you're believing to be a minister, great, minister in social media. If you want to be a brand manager and you're some copywriter, okay, great, elevate copywriting, work with the band, brand manager, knock on her office and be like, "Hey, I would like to check this against our brand guidelines, and I'd like to make some suggestions and some," and build a relationship that excels you and propels you. And if you don't know who you are, whatever you're doing today, be fully invested into it. Will you pray and seek God for direction or figure out what your career is. If you're not saved, although I strongly recommend, the biggest exploit to life is the Holy Spirit. He'll direct you, he'll save you from car crashes, he'll prevent your luggage from getting destroyed. God works miracles for me every day. I, I've actually seen people's

1:10:46 headaches go. I've, I've seen someone's leg grow. But there's also real-world miracles, like walking up to a flight attendant asking for pre-board and they usually don't give it, like, "Yeah, sure, why not?" Oh, well, let's, well, I'm carrying media equipment and I lost my media pad. Of course. All of this to say, social media is designed to trap customers through that dopamine fix, and so if you get someone's attention and you provide content to them that sparks to that dopamine, they'll stop and listen. You can use the algorithm to your benefit. Now, I'm hoping that the algorithm changes a little bit. There's some legislations to help decrease the amount of screen time that everyone is using, because the amount of screen time people are using right now is abnormal. Like I said, three to six hours a day on reels, that's a waste of the watch my reels, that's a waste. You know, but it used to be TV,

1:11:46 people. We used to spend three to six hours on TV, three to six hours on Netflix, three, six hours on, like, all these things, and now we move to social media, micro stories, and you know, small attentions. Used to be you have built a website, 15, 30 second attention span, now you're lucky if it's three seconds. If your content doesn't load when they hit enter or click on your link, they're gone. Anyway, this has been a great podcast. If you like any of this content, like, comment, subscribe. I know I haven't, I've been breaking the gold moral rule and not been telling you to subscribe to this podcast. So subscribe to this podcast anywhere you can. See it on YouTube, you can see it on Spotify, you can see it on Apple, everywhere that podcasts are found, give or take. Um, so yeah, like, comment, share, let me know what you think. If I said something that's wrong, comment, let me know. I'm not gonna let your comment on unless you cuss me out,

1:12:48 then I might have to ask you to repost it. But, um, let's grow, let's learn together, let's build a community, work together. We see in a mirror darkly, I see a portion, you see a portion, we come together, we can solve any problem. We come together, we can solve any problem. Sounds cheesy, don't it, but it's true. I pray that you be at peace in everything that you do. I pray that the Lord guide you as you begin to plan and begin to prepare and be excited about the ability to receive feedback and to check your work and to be able to develop high-quality work. This may not be high-quality production value, but reaching those customers. And I pray that you pursue that purpose and that gifting God has for you, and if you don't know what that is, I pray that everything you put your hands to shall prosper. That scripture, I believe that. In Jesus' mighty name, amen.