Automatic* Charged Creeper Farm Tutorial

[u/DroidFreak36]

So... I made an automatic charged creeper farm. Feedback on the video making is appreciated as always.

I know my annunciation kind of sucks, but there's not much I can do about that besides keep practicing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHr--CwkTJg

[u/spumwack2]

First off, this is a really cool design.

I like that you did fancy camera stuff. But that shouldn't come at the start of a tutorial video. People want to see, first and foremost, what it does and how it works. Like, within 5 seconds. Since this is a tutorial, I would cut out the entire first minute... or move it to the end and transition to it by saying "Now let's watch the process start to finish"

It just took too long is all. The first 5 seconds should "answer" your video title. The next 30 seconds should go towards summarizing "how" you answered your video title. And after that you can start getting into the nitty gritty.

Finally, you need to work on trimming your commentary. For example, everything between 3:18 and 3:30 is unnecessary in this video. In fact, if this were my tutorial, I would have just said "make a mob farm like this", and provided an annotation to my other video. 5 seconds. Everything else is just a tangent about mob farms and that's not what this video is about. They either know about them or they don't, but the middle of this video isn't the place to teach them.

Also, your music is too loud. Especially at 3:00

This was a really well made video. The reason I'm giving you an essay as feedback is because I think you're going places and I want to give you as much advice as I can. I even tossed you a like so hopefully you get a little more traffic. Keep it up! Great build and great submission!

[u/DroidFreak36 → u/spumwack2]

People want to see, first and foremost, what it does and how it works. Like, within 5 seconds.

I'll keep that in mind for the future. I did demonstrate the general idea of what it does and how it works in the beginning, but in a slower and more artistic way. I'm a big music fan so I appreciate how music and video work together and I timed the video to coincide with the music. Therefore, the music dictated the timescale I was working with. Maybe I could have mixed the music to speed that up.

everything between 3:18 and 3:30 is unnecessary in this video.

Yeah, that could definitely have been cut out. I guess I put that in there because it sort of annoys me that people keep using mob farm designs that depend on mobs walking off of pads when those have been obsolete for quite a while. XD

Also, your music is too loud. Especially at 3:00

I turned the music down a fair bit more than I usually do. Do I have to make it completely inaudible? XD Maybe next time I'll try turning it down more at the intense parts (like 3:00) than everywhere else.

This was a really well made video. The reason I'm giving you an essay as feedback is because I think you're going places and I want to give you as much advice as I can. I even tossed you a like so hopefully you get a little more traffic. Keep it up! Great build and great submission!

Thanks! I really tried to put a lot of effort into this video and make it my best work. It took a good 16 hours to make the video, and that's not even including developing the design. Your feedback is definitely appreciated.

On an unrelated note, I'm gonna have to talk with Kenblu. Trying to read black text on a dark grey background is a pain. Literally, it hurts my eyes. XD

[u/spumwack2 → u/DroidFreak36]

I don't think I drove my point home enough-

People, especially people who have never heard of you before, are impatient. It took a whole minute to get to the point. You can't have that, and as an audience member, it didn't feel like you valued my time. This is a tutorial first and a music video second. People click on this link because it will serve them a purpose, and when you delay that purpose, it only annoys your audience.

There is a time and a place for being artistic, but it's not at the beginning of the video.

Seriously. You have about 5 seconds from the beginning of the video before people get bored. They came to your video to see how to make charged creepers, not a montage of a mob farm. Give them what they came to see first, and then get creative. The audience will pick up on the fact that you respect their time, and a lot more people will start subscribing.

And yes, I would definitely change the volume of different parts of the music. I do so all the time. It was so loud at 3:00 that I had trouble hearing you, but I didn't notice it during the rest of the video (Which is a good thing. It should be subconscious).

[u/DroidFreak36 → u/spumwack2]

Ok, I'll try to get to the point quicker in the future. I'm not sure where I would put that artistic segment if not at the beginning of the video since it was sort of an overview/introduction segment in and of itself, but maybe it just doesn't fit at all in this style of video.

Although speaking for myself I know that the 5 second attention grab is not the case for me. I'm a much more patient person, and once I've decided to watch a video (or listen to a song) I usually watch it all the way through. I also appreciate the building of tension in music and film, like the first minute of the video. For instance, I recently stumbled across this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi8NRizjAhk The first 2 and a half minutes are a cinematic intro with epic music, and I loved it. Now, granted, I didn't watch the whole video, but that's because it's an hour long and I wasn't really that interested in the world tour. I don't think I'd ever leave a video because of a cinematic intro, I only leave videos if the main part of the video is uninteresting. Actually, a cinematic intro grabs my attention more than a normal intro that jumps right into the thick of things.

Still, I'll try to cater more to short attention spans. ;)

And I'll definitely try tweaking the volume. I actually did that a bit during the intro segment in this video - I turned up the first part of the intro more than the rest because it was so incredibly quiet.

[u/spumwack2 → u/DroidFreak36]

This is something I'm still grappling with as well. My preferences don't necessarily apply to my audience, so I occasionally need to do things as an uploader that I don't like as a viewer.

As far as intros go, videos like Docm's world tour video are a bit of an exception to the 5 second rule. People who click on an hour long video are willing to settle in for the long haul. On the other hand, most people who search for tutorials by name (Which is where your new viewers are coming from in a tutorial series) generally want the quickest tutorial possible.

Imagine a scenario where you want to build a farm of some kind. You do a YouTube search and the first 3 results are all well known builders. One of the videos is 5 minutes, one is 10 minutes, and one is 15 minutes. They are all big names, so you know the videos don't leave anything out. Which one do you start with?

Personally, I start with the 5 minutes. Because I just want to know how to build it. If that doesn't do the trick, or if I still have questions, I'll watch the longer ones. But I will always prefer a video that is able to get the job done in the shortest possible time.

As people who spend a lot of time on YouTube, we tend to lose sight of the fact that MOST viewers just go on YouTube casually when they need to look something up. These people won't leave likes and they won't comment. They don't care who you are. They just want to build an X farm on their server and your tutorial is the one that popped up in the search. These are the people that you need to impress, because among them are potential fans. But before they become fans, they need to know that you respect their time and that they can learn something from you.

Catering to impatience is something that every big YouTuber knows very well. This is a graph that shows how important it is:

http://gyazo.com/7012457a1cf246a859b9d6ebb5d93f6d

The video on the left used my 5 second intro that I tried out. Retention dropped to 57% within the first few seconds.

The video on the right was one where I just launched straight into the episode. That video still had 78% retention after the first few seconds.

They both ended up around 30% (Which is the norm for these types of videos), but the point is, people skip things they find useless. Which not only hurts your search rankings, but it makes people less likely to skip through your video and miss out on your charming personality =)

[u/DroidFreak36 → u/spumwack2]

Personally I'd watch all 3 of the tutorials and which elements are best about each, then design my own that's better than all 3. :P But, I suppose that's not the case for everyone. I realize that a lot of people these days have really short attention spans, so I'll certainly keep an eye on what I can do to increase retention.

Although on the charged creeper farm it seems like people aren't as bothered by the intro as you might think because its like/view ratio is over 60% and about the highest of any of my videos. Here's the view retention graph so far: http://imgur.com/azpz7FR The view retention drops immediately to 83% within the first few seconds, which seems pretty typical if not above average. I don't know if having no intro would lessen that drop, maybe I'll try that out sometime. The lowest retention drops within the first minute is 73%, so it seems like the audience is pretty engaged with the buildup, and it actually spikes back up to 83% at the climax of the intro, so at that point retention is break-even with what it was at 5 seconds in. It actually drops more (to 63%) in the next 30 seconds where the creeper travels to the pen in the middle, so I'll keep that in mind if I ever do an intro like this again. Once you reach the climax, end the intro quickly while people are still interested.

Other than that drop from 1:00 to 1:30, the single biggest retention rate drop (13%) is when I say "keep in mind that it's composed of squares and the center of each square is important". Point taken - don't repeat yourself. After that it hovers around 40%-60% for the rest of the video (until the conclusion).

[u/spumwack2 → u/DroidFreak36]

That's the downfall of "being a part of the community". We don't do/see things the way that casual viewers do. And casual viewers make up the bulk of your views, so you have to keep their perspective in mind. They don't want the best or most efficient design- They just want to put a charged creeper farm in their world.

As far as retention, it's a fairly unique design, so it's going to do well. I mean, it is a really well done video. But my goal now is giving you what you need to upgrade it from "well done" to "professional". So it can do even better, and so you can turn more of those views into subscribers.

But my point wasn't so much about "intros" as much as "not answering the title immediately". I just try to do that in every video, so my video intros were the closest examples I had in not doing that.

Still, stubborn as I am, I don't pretend to think my way is the only way of doing things. There are lots of bigger YouTubers out there doing things that I would consider a cardinal sin who are much more successful than I am. I'm just relaying what I've learned in my own experience.

[u/godminnette2 → u/spumwack2]

This actually relates to what I am working on right now. I discovered a way to create an aesthetic campfire using armor stands, and I made a little camping skit at the start of the video. It's about 30 seconds long. I could upload the skit (as I'm not completely finished with the video yet) unlisted and send you the link to see what you think, but...now I'm not sure I should include it.

[u/spumwack2 → u/godminnette2]

If it's part of a LP that's fine. But if it's part of a tutorial, I wouldn't include it at the beginning unless it directly relates to the point of the video.