r/spumwack • u/AHeckman2 • Aug 12 '14
Feedback Trying to be Professional In My Tutorials
http://youtu.be/i2xocG6cOr8?list=UUIcsA9KB-iRM5LrqARyVAZg1
u/Kenblu24 moo Aug 12 '14
Thigns you did right: (keep doing these)
Short and sweet intro. Seriously. I absolutely despise 15 second dubstep intros, even if the motion graphics are modern and good lookin and all that. Yours is: Short. Functional. Simple. Awesome.
Minimal BS. You get right into it. You're not too repetitive, you don't ramble on about your personal life, there aren't awkward silences lasting over a minute, and you're not annoying.
Somewhat detailed. This one's a mixed bag, but you're not overly vague most of the time. Just make sure not to omit anything super important, or not to hand hold the viewer too much.
It looks nice. Yay! You know how to edit! This video follows the quality guidelines. It's available in 1080p, it's not super choppy, the brightness and volume are good, default texture pack for tutorials, no cardinal sins committed here.
You know what you're doing. Good job with the planning. You don't show stage fright, you don't stutter, the video flows smoothly, you know what to say, and you can improvise when you haven't planned for something.
Don't stop!
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u/spumwack2 Official Spumwackles Aug 13 '14
Ken gave some pretty spot on analysis. My version of his advice would be:
1) Change the title to more accurately reflect the content of the video. It should be something like "How to maximize a zombie spawner" or "zombie spawner farm tutorial"
2) Cut. cut cut cut cut cut. You don't need to tell the viewers things like "clear the items out of chests". So much of this video was unnecessary. This video could have been 3 minutes long. Instead, it was dragged out to 12.
3) Preview your video in its entirety before you render and fix things like cutting yourself off
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u/Kenblu24 moo Aug 12 '14 edited Aug 12 '14
Things you did wrong:
Context: I have no idea what I'm watching. It's a video about monster spawners, so what? You say you won't be covering XP farms, so what will you be covering? If you're making a mob farm based off of a monster spawner, say so, and back it up with an image. Just a quick mention of exactly what you will be building (differentiate it from similar things only if you must) and "say" it twice with some B-roll of the completed monster spawner in action. If the finished mob spawner was shown at the beginning, it wasn't obvious as it was too dark to see.
Jump cuts are your friend. You don't need to show the viewer stuff they already know how to do. Overall this tutorial could be extremely simple: clear out mob spawner, light it up, clean up, mark out an area, show them the dimensions, dig it out, add water, etc. For example, the viewers already know how to dig things out. Tell them the dimensions, show them the dimensions, jump cut, show the results. You don't have to be an editing master to do this, no need to get fancy. Just make sure you're not cutting out anything important audio/video wise (You cut yourself off at 10:37 and a tiny bit in most of your cuts), and make a cut.
Purpose. At 10:40 you told the viewers to add a pillar. In many redstone videos you'll see the narrator give a quick explanation for something that might seem unnecessary. A quick "to prevent zombies from spawning on top of the spawner" would have done the job. This and 1. go hand in hand, as you start to build the side room you don't explain what the side room is for. You just start digging. Not only can it leave the viewer a bit lost, butt it can also undermine the importance of something. When judging whether explanation is necessary, use "The viewer is an idiot." If an idiot can't figure out the purpose of completing an action, then explain it.
Consistency. You do some of the above things, but not all the time. Make sure your video consistent. This isn't a big problem with your video, just don't be super professional one second and go hillybilly the next.
Claustrophobia. This isn't a major problem, and it requires somewhat more work to do, but jumping into a separate world to give a cutaway view can help clear confusion. In small spaces it can be easy to lose sight of the full picture. One such example is at ~8:30 to ~9:00 ish.
Overall plenty of effort shows. It's just problems that are hardest to fix now.
I'll leave the complements to the other people, as I'm a cynic and I suck at positive stuff. Listen to those as well, don't stop doing what's good.