Shoot to Make a Killing (with Steve Stockman)

Have you started a new adventure, and didn't know where to start? Writer, director, and producer Steve Stockman creates the ultimate guide in filmmaking fundamentals with his book, How to Shoot Video That Doesn't Suck: Advice to Make Any Amateur Look Like a Pro.

Thanks to our Amazing Guest: Steve Stockman
Website
Buy How to Shoot Video That Doesn't Suck 

Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
Start for FREE

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

0:42

Hello. Welcome. Welcome to another beautiful episode of Grandpa

& Chill, with our beautiful hosts: 0:47

Brandon Fox.*Ooh* Phines Jackson *Ahh* yeah. And above all, Grandpa Bart. Today, our guest is the wonderful, beautiful writer, producer, director, Steve Stockman. Welcome to the show, Steve. Thanks. It's great to be here. I was promised more of a technical snafu than I'm getting. I don't know. We. It's coming. It's coming. Don't worry. Yeah. yeah. You get all the texts. And never starts the beginning. That's too easy. Yeah. Where is home for you? Where are you based out of? I'm based in Los Angeles. cool. Has the city completely changed in the last week from all the strike stuff? Has it changed in the last week? Everybody's, you know, rushing back to work as fast as is humanly possible. I think there was a more immediate change from the ten Freeway shutting down downtown that was a little bit more of a problem for four people. So I think that was a that was a big issue, you know, But where we. Shot the freeway down. They didn't shut it down. Somebody lit a fire under it. And when they lit a fire under it, they caused the buttresses. And the things that support the actual road that people drive across to crack and pop and fall apart. And wow, it caused them to shut it down in order that they might avoid someone falling through the freeway onto the ground below. So, so so that was that was their reasoning, which I can't fault them really, you know. It's sort of like a similar situation we had in Philadelphia. Part of I-95 got shut down because of a fire under the bridge. I can't hear that. Well, Grandpa. Can you turn your volume up? Can you? Is this better? No. Hello? Is it on? More would be better. Hello? Now? I don't know. Yeah, I better scream into the mic. Hello? Can you hear me now? Yeah. It's the fun part. The fun part, Steve, about having a podcast where the host and then some frequent guests are 80 plus is. It's all remote. So every. Every episode, the new Journey. That's great. It's an adventure. Yeah. Important to have that was like that experience, you know? So that's terrific. I'm just teasing. Grandpa. I love you. Can you hear me now? Yeah, I can hear you better. Okay. That's what you're saying about Philly? Yeah. Is there something about bridges? I know. I saw them. And you were saying? Yeah. I just. I. Go ahead. I just said that we had a similar situation in Philadelphia. Truck caught on fire underneath Interstate 95 and shut it down, and they had to rebuild that small section of 95. Yeah, they did it really fast, right? They did? Yeah. Unbelievable. Yeah. Yes, I didn't think much about that. But it makes sense about how bridges are made. If he underneath it would cause some type of issue. I guess. Heat in Pretty cool. Yeah. Generally not. Good to set your bridges on fire. No, I'm no expert in engineering, but. Yeah, Yeah, that's true. Yeah. And the traffic in L.A. is already horrible as it is, right? It's like I've heard. So I've heard. Yeah, I think it's, you know, it. It gets a lot of hype. I mean, I think it's the same traffic jams as everywhere else. It's just that we have eight lanes of them instead of two lanes of them. And so everybody goes, my God, the traffic. But in terms of delay, you know, I've been delayed more in Boston and New York, and I get delayed in Los Angeles most of the time. Yeah. But, yes, there's definitely traffic. I don't know. Born and raised in Los Angeles. I was not I was born and raised in upstate New York. And then I lived in New England for a long time, but I've lived here for 30 years. I kind of like it. I'm very superficial, so I fit right in, you know? good. Yeah, it's easy. Yeah, exactly. Phines is in New York City. I don't know if you've ever. Have you driven in New York City, Phines? I have, yeah. I've driven, actually, way more than I thought I would. yeah. It's pretty hellish. It is? Yeah. I don't have a I don't have enough driver energy to like to to be having that aggression. You know, it's harder on the, like, not the highway. I thought I was more afraid of being on a highway is not that that's that's the scary part. It's like driving on the regular like I don't know, just the regular streets of New York that are, like, way too much for me. People are just like, crossing over lanes. You get places and like, I'm way too passive to be out there with Lane. But it's good, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Good learning lessons was. The. What was the initial day that moved you from New York to L.A.? Is that what you said from Boston? No. And I wanted to do films and television. And this is where they're done. You know, people shoot everywhere, but all the decisions are mostly made here. And I was doing a lot of commercials in Boston, which I really loved, and I love Boston. But if you want to, you know, hang out with other people who are writing scripts or talking about their TV deals, you really have to come here because that's all everybody's doing in Starbucks, you know? And so it was a great motivator because I met a lot of people who were doing what I wanted to do and and kind of developed a network of friends at my level and and grew with them. So that was good. It was a good move. You know, I really love commercials, but there's sort of like the haiku of the film world. You know, they're very short and you have to really tell a ton of story in a really short shot. And that's great training for film and television. I think that directors who come from commercials often have a, you know, a ton of skill from all that practice, really compressing story into a little tiny bit. But if you want to stretch and tell something longer, you need something, you know, a longer medium. So. Did you have that community right when you got out there or that was something that took a little bit in L.A.? I think it takes a it takes a bit to learn. Fortunately, I had small children that were just emerging at the time that we moved here. And so, you know, there's nothing like the school to, you know, where everybody's a producer, director or grip or an actor, you know. And so suddenly you're dropped into it. And also, you know, I've been in show business for a really long time. So when I started my career in show business, I started in radio and I worked a lot with, you know, concerts and artists and national tours and publicity and all that other stuff. So I was pretty tied in from the get go to an extent. And moving here was the big shock to my system and what you did. Did you feel any like, going from commercials to longer storytelling? Did was it like a learning curve to like such a storyline? It was to stretch it out a little bit. AH Well, it's funny because in this, in, in my book and in the video, of course, I just finished, we talk about the kind of the basics of shooting video, which is to think in terms of shots, in terms of short units of time that when cut together, create a story so amateurs, you know, turn on their camera and they point it. And then when something else happens, they go over here and put that over there. And then they point that over there and they leave it run for like 20 minutes, and then they look at it and go, Why is this boring? But professionals work in short shots and they know those are going to be cut together, or you can just shoot them that way in the camera and get a much better video just to start with. So the principles of video are all the same. So whether you're doing a YouTube video now or you're doing a commercial or you're doing a movie, the principle that you want to use shots, that you want to keep people's visual interest, that you want to develop a storyline that that holds them in is interesting to them. Those principles are all the same. What's the surprising difference if you're going from a commercial to a half hour show, which was my first big step up in production, is the amount of work and the number of people you need to do it. So, so doing a commercial, I can work with one editor and one effects guy, and then I have a crew of 50 people. But once the shooting is done, it becomes a very small process. Then it only takes a few weeks to finish off. If you're doing if you go from a 32nd commercial to six half hours for the Food Network, suddenly you've got eight editors and a whole bunch of effects people and you've got story people and you've got like a giant office full of people working on that show. And it takes eight weeks to ten weeks to finish and you have to talk to the network. And so it just the amount of work is gigantic compared to the amount of work to doing a commercial. And then when you step up to an hour, you know, and you're delivering a bunch of our shows for NBC Universal, that's like way more work. And so that's always a surprise, you know, that that growth from place to place. But it's mostly about management and workflow because you got a big army of people doing stuff and the bigger the job is, the more time it consumes, the bigger the army. And so that that was the surprise. But in principle they should be the same. But in practice it's a lot harder to do a long piece. I've noticed that commercials are very good quality, they're excellent. The quality of the quality of of the video. I had experience I worked for a a commercial film company several years ago in Los Angeles called Wakeford Orloff. I don't know if you ever heard of them, but they may not be anymore. Why they hired me, I'll never know as a stage manager, because I knew nothing about what I was doing. But this goes way back. We did Revlon, Afro Sheen, Honda, various as. Well. So the great thing about commercials is you get to play with a lot of toys over a very short period of time. So, you know, on a commercial that you might, you know, have a half a million dollar budget to crank out a commercial and you'd have 12 hours to do it in the equivalent feature. You know, if you look at half a million dollars for 30 seconds, the equivalent feature was somewhere in the hundred million dollar range, you know, because you are sorry, that's not right. Hang on. 3200 is. Yeah, that's it. It gets really expensive. I'm doing the math in my head as I talk to you and it's like, wait a minute, 30 seconds, That's $1,000,000 a minute. And at 120 minutes. Yeah, that's right.$120 million if you're spending at that rate. So that's a pretty big movie. And that takes a really long time to do. But commercials, you know, you can because you're working with an advertiser with a big budget and they're going to spend a ton of money on TV. They'll they'll spend a lot of money to get stuff done really fast. And you get to play with all the new toys and you get to try cool shots and you get to do a lot of stuff that you don't get to do on your very first feature, which is not $120 million feature. It's more like a $3 million feature. So you have a lot less money to spend over a longer period of time, if that makes sense. We had on many episodes ago the creator producer for Diners, Drive-Ins and Drives, and we were we were shocked at just like the the vastness that, you know, because it's shot so simply and we're like, it's probably just a dude with a camera and going, but no, like hundreds and hundreds of people. Yeah. Yeah. Especially, especially the more episodes you're doing at once, you know, the more the hundreds and hundreds of people pile up because you're shooting one while you're planning another one, while you're editing another one, while you're writing another one while you're talking to the network about next season. And all that takes just a huge amount of time. Yeah, you got a bright shine to your brand and what's got you so excited about the topic? What about I know you and I now know. yeah, whatever I'm talking about. You seem like I know you're an actor and you like film, but I'm interested. Yeah. Tell us why you're so what. We're talking about before. So my grandpa, five years ago, I don't know what it was, but his two later in life, hobbies and passions have become video recording and audio recording. So he's done a lot of really high quality videos or audio stuff and has a really nice camera. And I was really excited to come on because I'm shooting my first like just micro short with some a few friends. Literally. This weekend. So like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was going through the tips and stuff. It's very cool. Cool. good. Good luck. Yeah. What's it about? I will need it. I will need it. The plot of the short, it's basically just a a person in Georgia who's struggling with a drug problem, and it's the last time he ever used it was pretty much so. Yeah. Very low grade material. Very light material. For full of laughs. But that's great. I look forward to seeing it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. No, no, no, no, no, no. Brandon, please. I actually. I was just going to say that Grandpa has gotten very good in his old age with audio and all of that kind of stuff. It's very hard, very. Technical, primarily audio. I tried video with some Sony equipped it and found that it's a lot different from audio. There's a lot to know and which I don't know. And once in a while a musician or group will ask to have a video. But I do the most simple one camera you know video and it's it's a complicated very different. From you know what's interesting is that this thing this this phone this this shoots better footage than Alfred Hitchcock could shoot in 1953. You know, I mean the the you needed like a crew of 100 just to get the lighting that this phone does all by itself. So it's funny because one of the things that I try to talk about is it's like equipment is not the most important thing When you're thinking about video, it's really what you're going to shoot, why you're going to shoot it. So it's where you point the camera and where you turn it on. But I can get, you know, 24 frames a second 4K footage exactly like I will get from a super fancy camera that I'll use on a commercial out of this thing. And it's got a couple of lenses and and you can adjust those and then you can correct the footage later and you can cut it and looks great. So I think the I think one of the things to think about is if the camera's kind of a pain and it's confusing or it's got a lot of stuff that you don't really want to know is just use your phone because they make tripods for the phone, you can have five people with phones shooting footage at the same time and then cut it together for for a music video or something. And it's really about what you shoot where you point the camera, not what camera you're using. It's really the quality of an area or read an. It isn't because it's a little more compressed or a little bit more. It's kind of jacked. They've got algorithms in these in these phones that, you know, make your sunsets beautiful and they adjust for what they think people want to see. So it's not as flexible or as precise as those cameras. But yeah, the 4K and an iPhone and the 4K and some of these other like a black magic, they're going to, with those exceptions, the algorithmic adjustments and stuff, they're going to look pretty damn good. And most of the stuff online is still in 1080 HD, you know, So you're going to dumb it down to put it on YouTube anyway. And so the practical difference, it's like people get hung up on equipment, but equipment is not the big problem. The big problem is people have no idea how to shoot a video that someone will actually want to watch. Yeah, and it's a damn complicated shooting. I know. Yeah. You have to really think about how people think about video, you know, and how and what they want to watch and what you're trying to get across. And those are the hard parts. So I would say if you're if you're having trouble with, you know, the fancy camera, dumb it down a little bit, shoot with, you know, your best phone and you know, you'll have that great audio and you'll kick butt with it. Really good. I got rid of it. Sony Effect six. I don't know if you're familiar with that but it's pretty good camera and are just too much for me to learn. So yes so it just yeah just use your phone or bring in a couple of kids and let them use their phones then take all the footage and, and because you have music playing in the background, if you're doing a music video and you can just cut their footage to the sink of the music that's playing and it'll look great. Yeah, this kind of takes me to my next question. For. People doing that are like people who play around with the camera like me. Are Brandon making his first microfilm? Are anybody really just kind of playing around? Well, what if, what experience advice would you give someone that's brand new are just getting their feet wet? Could also say to watch what you're talking about, I'm not a director or do anything with film, but I like storytelling. I love comics and I read about comics and I read about comic theory and I love that storytelling aspect and all that stuff that just saying reminds me of. And when I'm reading about comic theory, I'm like, This reminds me. It sounds, looks like someone's making a movie. So like, yeah, like, is there anything that you if you could start off as like if you go back to young Steve first, starting off, what advice would you give them to go first? Don't be hard on yourself because your first videos are going to be terrible. But my first videos were terrible and I'm sure Steven Spielberg's first videos were terrible. And it just takes some practice and you have to figure out what you're doing. The only way to get better is to shoot your first micro production, you know, and shoot stuff around the family and shoot exercises and things to get better at what you're doing. But that aside, the first thing that I always tell people to look at when they're there, they're looking at creating video, is that video is told in shots. So if you if you watch TV, you are never going to see a 20 minute shot unless it's a special fancy effects thing on a big budget shoot, like the end of Children of Men, which looks like one shot for an hour. But it isn't. But it looks like it. And but normally a shot is like one second to 10 seconds long, maybe 15 seconds, and it contains one person doing one thing. So if you think about your even a home video of your daughter's birthday party, instead of just waving the camera around, what you want to do is find one person doing one thing that you want to remember. So your daughter tasting her first birthday cake when she's one and taking that first bite of chocolate cake, or your daughter later smearing chocolate cake on her face. You know, these are short shots. And if you go through that birthday party and you find the short shots, someone opening a present to people hugging that haven't seen each other in a while, a short conversation on the couch about the birthday girl, you know, her opening her presence and then playing with the boxes and leaving the presence on the floor. These are all short little things, but when you edit them together, or really you don't know enough to edit them, you just dump them out together into one movie. And whatever free editing program you have, it's going to look much more like a watchable piece of television or film than what you were doing before. So you know what? I'm sorry, I'm jumping, but it kind of reminds me like how my phone will be like, here's a snapshot of last year and they like, have some music playing. And then there's a bunch of like random pictures from that. You know, you took a thousand pictures from that party, but they, they they pick like a couple of them. And then, you know, they get the whole year. Is that it? I mean I mean, there's more to it, of course, than like that. That's kind of like weird. Which is the truth is that if you just if you go into a birthday party and you just shoot short shots of people doing stuff and then you dump them out into an editing program and make a three minute movie out of it. Yes, it actually will look way better than what you're probably shooting if you haven't done that. But once you understand how shots work, then you have to start to think about the story that you're telling with those shots. So what actions are you going to shoot? Right? So if you're going to if you're going to point your camera at your daughter, you're going to shoot her doing something like taking the bite of cake, then you're going to stop your camera and you're going to move to something else that you find interesting. So now we go from the first kind of automatic, if you shoot short shots that look much better, which is true, then we go to war. Which short shots do you want to shoot? And that means that you look around the room and you see what's going on and you see what's interesting. And you see Aunt Sally over here on her third beer. And you see you know, your mother in law coming in and I'm cleaning around the countertop like she always does. And you find those things that you find amusing or interesting or that tell the story of the birthday party and you go shoot those. So step one is think in shots and only shoot short bits of video. But step two is think about where you are and what story you want to tell and which short shots of video you want to shoot. So that's where you start to step up from the computer, automatically assembling a movie or a slideshow for you. You're blowing my mind because I'm really I mean, because I'm putting it towards like, my drawings are like that, But it does kind of make sense what he's saying. Like of I have a hard time telling stories, are trying to even get anything, even started telling the stories. So I like you're giving me some very good advice of of where to go. A little hangups I have, which is like I have a bunch of drawings but don't really know what to like, where to go with them, or, you know, like a. Some story is a story confuses people because this big buzz word in the and in the business world, you know, everybody has to tell a story about their business and they have to have a story about their mission and all this other stuff. And then there's all the the Joseph Campbell and the the big storytelling books that that tell you the science of storytelling. You can buy self-help books, but story at its essence is super simple. So here it is that maybe this will help you. The the story is about a hero, a human being, right? Who has something that happens to them or something that they do better still with a beginning, middle and an end. So if you think of it that simply and you're really disciplined about it all your video stuff and probably you're drawing stuff will get better. So the question you want to ask at the birthday party is who's the hero? What's the beginning, What's the middle and what's the end? Right? So if the hero is if you decide that the hero of this video you're doing, the birthday party is going to be your one year old daughter, then you're going to be down on her level and you're going to be shooting what she does and you're going to be focused on how people interact with her. Right. And that's going to be your three minute video and you're going to look at the beginning, which kind of. It's the event, right? The beginning is she is, you know, excited that people are coming to see her and saying hi to her. And the middle is, you know, she is getting cake and eating it. And at the end, she's falling asleep in a pile of wrapping paper. Right. So that's your beginning, middle and end. The hero's your daughter. Now you've told a coherent story, right? But if you shift that point of view and you make the hero, your grandmother, your daughter's great grandmother who hasn't met your daughter yet, then the story might start at the door where you open the door and great grandma comes in and sees your daughter for the first time and how they relate to each other for that first time. And then it might be great grandma sitting down next to the birthday girl and giving her some cake and then it might be great Grandma in the bathtub getting the cake off the daughter, you know, and cleaning her up for the night and then reading her story and putting her to bed. That's a different story with a different hero. But it also has a beginning where they meet the middle, where they do the birthday stuff and the and where they get ready for bed. So what I would say is whenever you look at a home movie situation or documentary movie situation, or for that matter of, you know, this is what we look at in film scripts that we write, what's the who's the hero? Who is this really about? What's the beginning of the story? What's the middle of the story and what's the end of the story? And if you can do those three simple things, your stuff will just get light years better. Like it's like magic. Wow. Do you do that for film also per scene, or is that just the overarching script itself? Yes, Yes, yes. Per scene in fact, you can do it in a shot, right. So beginning with one. Yeah. So so. So if you think here are beginning, middle and end are we all familiar with Star Wars. Yeah. The movie. great. So in Star Wars, the hero of the movie is Luke Skywalker. And at the beginning, he wants to get off the planet, right? And in and he meets this weird guy who takes him off planet This Obi-Wan Kenobi. Right? And then in the middle, he hooks up with these other guys and becomes part of the rebel alliance. And then at the end, he kills the Death Star. So that's the big movie's beginning, middle and end. The hero is Luke Skywalker. Inside that movie, there are sequence is. So a sequence might be Obi-Wan Kenobi and Han Solo negotiating for a flight on the Millennium Falcon. Millennium Falcon. Right. So they're in the bar and they're meeting for the first time. So the sequence is at the beginning. They meet in the middle, they negotiate, and at the end they they run away and get on the Millennium Falcon and take off. And that's a sequence right inside that sequence, there are scenes. So one scene is the bar where the weird animals are playing, and one scene is the negotiation that takes place at the table with Han Solo. And another scene is Obi-Wan Kenobi, getting into the city and and telling the guards, These are not the droids you're looking for. These are all scenes, right? There consist of multiple shots. But then if you go down even more to a shot, a shot has a hero, a beginning, middle and end as well. So a shot could be Obi-Wan Kenobi way back, waving his hand at a guard to kind of convince them that these aren't the droids they're looking for. Just that shot. The hero is Obi-Wan Kenobi. And the beginning is he looks at a guard and the middle is he waves his hand. And the end is they drive through and that's one shot. So you actually can apply it at every single level of of film storytelling. And I would say comic book storytelling as well. And for that shot level, is that a you can or you should for the big like having. Well, there's no rules in art, right? But I would certainly say you should. Yes. And I would also say that the better you do it, the the better your film will be. Right. So when you're doing a commercial and I have some examples in my in my video course of I break down a sort of a commercial that I wrote I didn't write actually, they wrote it, gave it to me. I shot it sort of as a mattress company that makes really great mattresses that you order online. So each each single shot and that 32nd commercial has a hero, a beginning, middle and an end. Right? So the hero might be somebody's hand going like this, but it's still the hero's the hand the action is comes into frame snaps goes out of frame. Right. So, yeah, we break it down to that level of detail to make commercial because they're really short commercials and some shots are like two and a half seconds long. Right. So you got to get it in there. And if you, if you're not shooting an action, you might as well take a still photograph. Right? So you got to really think about that, right. Steve, as a business idea, without the business aspect of it, what is the issues with doing a video of, say, I'm sure you're familiar with QVC? Of of doing something like that. You know, in a small setup, it setting up with a with a film, with a TV company to to broadcast it and. To do your own to make your own QVC. Basically. Yes. But in a very, very small scale. Yeah. I mean. Yeah, I'm not unfortunately, as a director, that's doesn't really fall into my area of expertise. I have always liked QVC as a concept, but I don't I don't know a lot about their business model, so it's hard for me to comment on that. But I would say, you know, one of the interesting things about them, if you want to relate it to the story example, is that they're constantly telling stories about the products they sell and the and they only I do know this from talking to my book publisher about being on QVC, which they sometimes were able to finagle, is that they'll bring you in if you can tell a great story and keep people listening and paying attention and that stories about your great product and that, you know, works to sell it so. Well, that's helpful. That says a lot. Yeah. Speaking of the book, what was your inspiration for going from film scripts and all of this directing to wanting to create something to sort of give back or help out? I have I'm the president of the Board of trustees of this thing called Summer Start, the Summer Stars Foundation, and Summer Stars does a camp every summer 450 12 to 17 year old underserved kids in the Boston and New York area. So they get to come for free to this overnight performing arts boot camp that teaches them through the performing arts how to succeed, how to really work for the team, how to take risks all that creativity stuff. So I started teaching video 20 plus years ago there. And as video became more popular, more and because people knew I was a director, they started asking my advice on stuff. It was like being a doctor, except when you go to the party, nobody would say to you, Hey, could you look at this pimple on my neck? They would say, Hey, I got a video. Could you watch this for me and tell me what's wrong with it? And what I found is it was always the same problems and it was the problems that I was teaching kids in this music video course where they learned how to shoot music videos, which we we put up in the in the show at the end of the week. And so I had developed this curriculum and I really like to teach and video was not getting any smaller, you know, it was getting gigantic. So I wrote the book in order to kind of share that curriculum with with everybody who's interested. And there's a the audio book surprisingly sells quite well also, because you don't really need to see what I'm talking about to understand it. And now the video series for people who would prefer to see examples and all that is also doing great. So you do all of that, you read it, you do the videos. I did. I didn't. I, I, I was a talent on the video, which I don't normally do. I've snuck myself into a couple of things I've shot over the years, but normally I'm behind the scenes. So so that was kind of a trip, but I think it came out all right. But yes, so my production company made that. I mean, I didn't personally shoot it. That's the thing about being a director, mostly you just. Point can you drop one or two products that you've done, videos that you're proud of something that A for. For like commercials and stuff, right? I've done commercials for Microsoft, for Disney, for sort of for Bravo, which is appliance, you know, like a kitchen appliance company. I've done them for. Those are some of the big ones. Nokia, I mean, just trying to think of who who the larger companies are. But yeah, I've done commercials for all those guys and I've done I've sold 12 shows to television, of which six actually made it to the air, which is pretty good. And so some of those show called the The Devil's Ride, which ran on Discovery for three years, and Blue Dogs that ran on NBC, Universal for four, three seasons and a bunch of other ones. And then I did a film called Two Weeks with Sally Field, Glenn Howerton and Julianne Nicholson and Ben Chaplin, which plays on Showtime quite a lot, which was kind of fun. Also. Does it feel like because I know you said there's no rules, it's all art, but when you're in pre-production and production, you're sort of like pride in a specific project. Does that feel like luck? Like when you get to the final cut, you're like, Whoa, okay, we're here, or do you sort of know as you're going through based on the amount of work that's put in and all that kind of stuff. Where it will end up? Yeah, Yeah. Like how you feel about the final product or. One of the things I've learned as I've done this more is to take the advice of a friend of mine who's primarily a feature writer. And he said to me once when we were hiking, he said, You know, I try never to take on a project that I wouldn't buy a ticket to go see. And I thought that was great advice. And so one of the things I've tried to do with my career is to not work on things that I didn't think were interesting and where my vision of how it was going to come out didn't match the vision of the people who were putting up the money. So so that's the the short the long answer to your question kind of, which is if you're doing a project that's well-suited to your talents and you love it and really work hard on it and you kind of know what you're capable of, then more often than not as you go, it comes out the way you wanted it to come out early on when you're still trying to figure out what you like and and you're a little less certain on the set and you're more likely to listen to other people who may take you a little bit off track. And also, you may work with people you don't like as much because you feel like you need the business. That's when it gets a little iffy. But ideally, you get to that point where you're a great match for the project and you really know what to do with it. Yeah, you probably have incredible leadership and diplomacy skills, I'm guessing, having directed so much, right? It's not. If you ask my wife and kids, but but yeah, on the set I'm pretty good at knowing what's going on. Yeah, it's cool. And are you still applying? Because the, the tips that I were looking of was looking at and we can go through them are very sort of some are like obvious but I'm like I've never done that before or I wouldn't even think, you know, just focusing on the whites of the eyes and that kind of thing. Right? Are you thinking about those specific things or is it just second nature when you're like on a film set? I think that that currently at my level of experience, I don't consciously spend time on those. But what those are like, don't shoot too. You see, the whites of their eyes is a reminder that if you stand too far back from the action you can't see. People's faces and faces are what interest us in a story for the most part. I mean, most videos are and I think most videos should be about humans doing something. That's the story that we're interested in. Even in a home video. If you go to the Grand Canyon with your kids, you know, the Grand Canyon, it's kind of been there for several millennia, right. And it's not likely to change anytime soon. And you can Google it. But the the part about the Grand Canyon and the trip with your kids that you really want to shoot is your kids with the Grand Canyon as the background because they're going to change and they're going to the things you want to remember and they're going to be the the people who are telling you the interesting story or acting the interesting story. So I like to keep people focused on that. And don't shoot till you see the whites of their eyes. Is advice to remind you to stay close enough to people that you can see their faces and their eyes because you know they're with it. The eyes are the windows to the soul, as they say. I think that's, you know, absolutely true. We see so much in people's eyes that if you're hanging back on the other side of the room and just randomly pointing your camera, you're not going to get any of that. And then in 20 years, you're going to wish you had better video of your kid when she was five, you know? Yeah. You wish you had that, Grandpa? Yes. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not too late to see you. Still enjoy acting. Do I enjoy acting? You said. Yeah. You said you were in a in one of your shoots or more than one. Yeah. So I, I because I was teaching in the new video version of how to shoot video that doesn't suck that I just did the I ended up, you know as a spokesman a demonstrator for that and I've always acted but not generally on camera so I've done a lot of improv around the Los Angeles area and I do a lot of stage stuff. But but I don't have a lot of on camera acting experience. So this was kind of a treat for me and it was fun. Little nerve wracking, but fun. What's the what's the difference? You work with a lot of theater actors in your film. Like, do you notice a stylistic difference? Not any more. I mean, in the in the olden days, like 50 years ago, I think not everybody understood acting for film versus acting for theater, but they've gotten substantially closer together because now theater is all miked and lit like television. And and, you know, in television, people understand that they have to really tone it way down and they can't project to the back wall of the theater when you're on camera. So. So and everybody also, it used to be that you were a theater actor or a television actor or a film actor. And now everybody does everything. So those barriers have kind of fallen away. Yeah, I've seen Taylor Swift recently of like a Verizon Atlas. I think it was Verizon, I'm not sure. But it amazes me that somebody like her, which I know she must make very big money, would do something like that. But I guess. I think she was in Cats, too. Was she? I heard a movie everyone's heard of and no one's seen. I saw. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you think? It was the last movie I saw before COVID happened. So my bad. The day cause it. Maybe it was. Taylor Swift was in that, right? She was in it. Jason Derulo and his bold were in it everybody James Corden was in it. Big name. And there was just. Pulled your glasses out. Graham And that's she's our mascot. She's the bird who's on the poster of the podcast, so. very nice. I'm sorry to bring a bird. I don't have one. You have me back in a bird first. It really only works if your bird also has some homicidal tendencies. That's kind of her thing. You know? Been more like a raptor than it is bloodthirsty. Yeah. Steve, did you say you have children? I do. I have two. And would you encourage them to go in the same profession? Ah, I actually, I'm just finishing a script with my daughter right now. However, she's applying to medical school, so I don't think that that's the career she wants. But she's a very good writer and she did do a lot of screenwriting in college and also newspaper writing. So so it's really fun to write with her. But we'll see. You know, Michael Crichton was a doctor and he had a long career. And, you know, in in films and television as well. So maybe I can talk her back into the film business and get this one old. We'll see how it goes. I see lots of popular tech talkers that are nurses and doctors and nurses. So maybe so. But all time it's Tik tok money. yeah. I believe there. That kind of gets me to my next question. Ah, I guess the leading question is because media and film recording and everyone has a phone and everyone has this really fancy phone that they take with $1,000,000,000 back in the day, your skill set that you're teaching seems like it's valuable for everyone, right? Is it, is it a valuable thing that everyone should teach? Should I be teaching young people? Should everyone be taking your course in your classes. Because we're all we're all starting to care. How the cameras should be required. You should not be able to get past nine years old without taking my video course, however. So. So the real answer is I think that video literacy is a subject whose time is about to come. You know, if you think about video the way I do, you realize that it's a language, right? It's not any different than English or French or Spanish. And we teach kids in school to talk about to to learn English. So that one they can get what they need to get done, done with the English language so they can read and make sense of signs, and also so that they can, you know, so that they can communicate in English. But the side effect of teaching someone how to write and read and study essays and short stories and stuff like that is that they learn how they're made and constructed and they learn what's credible and believable and what isn't. And I think that as we get into more of an AI era and as more and more people make video, it's important for us to understand how the language of video works and how you generate emotion using video and how things outside the frame in video may or may not exist or in what you're seeing may or may not be exactly what you think you're seeing. So you have to look very carefully at how things are constructed and what people are trying to create in you emotionally with a piece of video. I think it's as much self-defense then as much important to our future as a society as. Learning English is and learning how to write. And where we are now is we all watch video and we've been watching it since we were born, Right? But we don't speak it very well. And I think if we learn to speak it better, we will also learn to understand it and its effects. The way that we understand English, which will be good for us. Are our videos as effective for the student as a live presentation? It just depends, you know, it really depends on what it is you're watching in video and what the point of the presentation is. So if you're thinking in classroom, probably not. And the reason probably not is because the professor is probably standing there lecturing and she's doing her conversation with the class that's physically present and there's probably only one camera and it's deadly dull to watch. You know, you'd probably be better off listening to it. So and having a teacher that you can interact with and ask questions of is obviously better than having someone prerecorded. So so I think not. However, there's a lot of work going on with educational training in video and people who are learning how to use video better in order to teach. And so I think, you know, there's a possibility that that will that will pan out. And I know they're doing, you know, lessons on lessons on video are great for for people who can't get somewhere else. In the case of my video series, the we worked really hard to use all the principles that we understand about how to make video watchable, to make it watchable. And then there's also a lot of demos and exercises and things that you can see. So it's not a lecture of one guy standing there for two and a half hours. It's it's like short five minute bins, lots of apples and a lot of cutaways and a lot of graphics and things that will keep you visually involved while you go through the material. What what are what is the name of your video program? The series is called How to Shoot Video That Doesn't Suck, and it's based on my book of the same name and the book has been the bestselling how to video book in the world for about ten years. So it's out in nine languages. Then there's an audio version and the video series you can get on my website. Steve Stockman, dot com. What do you think you've learned in the last ten years that maybe you'd want to insert into the latest edition of the book? That's a great question. So the latest edition of the book is actually only about five years old, so most of it is in there. And I don't talk about equipment much as we discussed earlier. So so it's not like it's loaded with, you know, old equipment references. I think people are getting a little bit of the stuff that maybe I went through earlier, but it was kind of intended as a basic course. So I think it still works pretty well in the in the video. Of course, though, I use different examples and and I, I got more into marketing video, for example. So if you have a store or if you're a real estate agent or you're in a business where want to be making marketing video for your website or for sending to your customers or for for advertising online, I think you'll get a lot more of this course than is presently in the books. So that's something I probably will update, although I'm toying with the idea of doing a whole book just on marketing video. That's pretty, pretty deep subject. How would you, let's say, convince the people to vote for particular a particular part political party? How would you convince them? I think that if you're going to use video to convince them, you first have to understand who you're going after, right? So who exactly is that you're talking to? That's one of the first most important things for any video project, right? So if you're doing a home video, for example, you know that you're really making this video for yourself and your family to look at five years from now. If you're doing a marketing video, you want to kind of keep in mind your best customer. You know, who who thinks you're fantastic already and what do they love about you and what do you want to tell those people? And so I think the same thing goes for political advertising, which is, you know, if you're doing a positive political ad for your candidate, your first question is, well, what's magical about this candidate? What do people already love about them? What do people feel about them that is important to them? And want to tell stories around those things that are most important, you know, so that it's not just a formulaic passion of your opponent or he loves America, you know, which is not particularly convincing to anybody who's seen 800,000 political ads. But basically and maybe I misunderstood you, but you're talking about speaking to the people that already agree with the politics that you're that you're pushing. I'm talking about trying to change the minds of people that think differently, that are on a different the different other people. Right. So so yeah, no, I may have mixed up the way I answered it, but I actually did mean that. So the best way to convince someone about your benefits as a politician is to understand what people already love about you so that you can use your commercial and your advertising to get that message to more people who don't already know you. Because the best, easiest way to find an audience for any product is to find the people who already love you and look for more people like that. Right? So it's not it's not almost it's almost never the case that a politician has 100% name recognition in a market similar to the fact that, you know, if I am advertising my video, of course not, 100% of the people in the United States have ever heard of it or heard of me. Right. But if I know what people like about the book and know what they like about me as a teacher, those are the things I want to get across to more people. So similarly, if you're a politician and you really understand what people love about you, you want to get that message in that story out to those people. Or if you have a pizza shop, same thing. What do they love about your pizza now? What do they think is okay about it? But what do they love about it? And those are the messages that you want to lead with when you're taking your advertising out into the world. How about if there's nothing to love about them? Whatever. And you should find another line of work or close your pizza shop for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's probably been very interesting or cool for you is in the last 510 years. YouTube shorts, Instagram reels. Tik Tok has completely opened up this new generation of people obsessed with video content. Probably have no training in it at all, right. Yeah. No. Or. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think the good ones. The good ones are really good. I mean, they're super entertaining, but I don't think the. Yeah, well, you know, it's like I don't know if you're, if you're old enough to remember when computers first came out, I might have in the nineties desktop publishing was all the rage and it was suddenly the case that you could you could make a page of stuff and print it that you know, with type styles and other things that you know, and graphics and all that stuff. And you could do that and get it out there and everybody was all excited because desktop publishing was going to revolutionize the world because it brought publishing to the people. The problem is none of the people know how to publish something that looks interesting, right? So who is? And so I I'm trying to remember who the TV director was. Jim Burrows. I think I was listening to a podcast last week who directed Frasier and directed like Cheers and these other historic shows. And he said, you know, that there's in my day, there were there were three networks and there were 30 great comedy writers. Now there's 300 networks and there's still 30 great comedy writers. And and I think he's he's right about that. It's like just because we can do it doesn't mean there's more people who are great at it than there used to be. And so I think so it's nice that people some people recognize that and want the training and the and the and the help getting better. Do you think that's an innate just something you're born with or like just a skill set that some people don't work towards in the same way. Being able to shoot video. Yeah. Or the comedy writing or whatever it is, you know. I think you're either funny or not, but translating that into a medium for others to consume is partly a craft. So you need to learn how to actually do it well, and that just takes practice. So if you're if you're already kind of funny, you can learn how to write funny or shoot funny or do standup comedy funny, right? If you're not funny at all, probably you should go into another line of work, right? Yeah. Yeah. We watch a lot of Tik tok or Instagram reels of just for 4 hours. We can sit them. A lot of current stuff out there. Yes, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. that starts. Yeah. Tons thoughts. I guess what I've been thinking about the most as of late. What you said was when you're talking about literacy for people with technology, I mean, with the video coming out and you're talking about early about perspective and, you know, art and all that jazz, well, it makes me think like I. I don't know that it seems really important to get literacy because, like, say, I'm like a 13 year old bully and I'm giving my perspective of someone on their social media. I should probably have some understanding because, you know, social media is such a big deal. And, you know, I don't know, young teens are so big on fitting in and whatnot. It seems like it'd be a good idea for people to have some literacy on this types of stuff before you ruin kids lives. I guess, or something or people's perspective. Anyway, that's it. That's kind of what I've been daydreaming about of one of those things you've been saying, but just that what you're doing is really important. I really. And just that, that the video literacy is important and it's going to get more important. So I can't unless what I just been there now don't really have any questions just just want to learn more myself, actually, more than anything. Great. Well on the I have I think probably 300 articles about video on the website that you can read for free. And then I have the new course and the book is, you know, available wherever people buy books. So. So I hope you'll take a look and send me what tell me what you think you know, send some comments along. Yeah. No, I can't I can't tell the story. So centers are probably be really raggedy and great. I'll come up with a red pen and send it back. I've actually never Grandpa's concert videos. He's probably been hiding them. Or check out. Just be frank. Just be. Frank. Googling just what you needed. How did your how do your filming turn out? I haven't done much filming at all. I really haven't. You know, I tried a little bit of audio. The camera was too darn complicated for me to start learning the Essex Sony. So I bought a very high end Nikon camera, which is a good camera, but maybe not quite as good, but it's still darn good and maybe I'll get a little experience with it. But I really haven't done much video at all. I'm going to be doing a video next month with the same cellist I've been working with and and a concert pianist. But other than that, I don't really do much What? As I know, we only have like 2 minutes left. But it's a big question, Steve. But what got you interested? Like, what made you want to get into film? Were you into something beforehand? Is this like, have you been on the straight and narrow the whole time or did you jump careers? Well, I've always liked entertainment, so I started in radio and then I went into commercials and then I went into film and television. It's just a, Hey, I guess I was born that way. I'm not really sure. Nobody else in my family does it, although there's a bunch of writers in the family. So and that's really where I start with all my stuff. So. All right. And what tips would you give Grandpa for his upcoming filming? The first. I would say find a camera that you like and can handle. And I'd start with the phone because they shoot amazing video. They're easy to work and, you know, just remember to hold it like this and not like this. Okay, So you want to hold it the wide way and that way you'll get something that looks really great on YouTube. And if you there are programs out that will live, which a bunch of phones into like so what I mean like if you're watching a football game, they've got 20 cameras going and there's a director in a truck who's pushing the button that shows which camera you're going to see on your TV screen at home. Right? There's software like that that's really inexpensive for for home use where you can take a whole bunch of phones, iOS phones, and you can cause them to be controlled by an iPad and you can have your own switcher at home. So if you take three cameras on, put them on tripods and use that little switch or program, which is called Switcher Studio is one of them that I like to use. No paid endorsement there. I just happen to like it. If you use Switcher Studio, you can run a video with three iPhones at once and you can do that while you're recording your great audio for your cello performance. And there'll be movement and you'll be able to go close up on stuff on the screen so you can see the fingers and you can see a wide shot when you want it, or a face that's intently concentrating and your video will look way better than if you are just using one single Sony effects that you don't understand how to use. What about sound quality? I would not rely on the question. It's funny that you asked that without your microphone in front of your mouth. I know. That's great. So so the question would sound quality. The answer is always use an external recording device or a microphone. So don't ever rely on an iPhone camera for recording or or an Android camera for recording sound. If you're farther than two feet away and you really need to hear what somebody's saying or doing because they'll pick up, you know, the air conditioning and the computer fan and, you know, cat meowing and all that other stuff, and you don't want any of that. So so set up your mike separately, which it sounds like you're doing anyway And you are using. Yeah. And you can just sync. To condensers that are the high end Norman's ArcGIS. Yeah. In pro video we shoot the sound in the video separately all the time, every time. Sometimes we have multiple recordings of the same audio going on at once. So you're on a set. Well then you sync them in post-production, right? You sync. Correct? Yeah. Yeah. But sound is so important. You know, you're absolutely right to focus on that because bad sound, you know, makes people want to kill themselves instead of watching your video. You know, that's really awful. But on a set with actors, you know, where if you're shooting a movie or commercial, we'll have the actors or where a lot of their mics, really high quality mics that'll that'll be wirelessly fed into an audio recorder. And then we'll also have somebody running a boom above them. So if one of the two of them fails or if one doesn't sound great because of wind or something, we can flip back and forth or we can combine them in the mix so that we get great audio every time. Do you miss not doing radio work? I get to be on podcasts, so no, I did love I love radio. I just went to the Radio Hall of Fame last week because a friend of mine was being inducted. My friend Bob Rivers is now induct an inductee in the Radio Hall of Fame. So I was in New York for that party last week and it was nice to see all the people that I grew up with. But, you know, I, I, I did radio enough to know that I wanted to do video and television. So video. Q The rating. There out for for a for a micro film for what I'm doing on Saturday 2 minutes of quick advice or what what is the number one thing you'd recommend. I would recommend is it's scripted. Yes. Yes. Okay. I would recommend planning your shots carefully. So in the in both the book and the the video course, I have a full chapter on shot lists. So when I'm doing a commercial, I will sit down and go through every single line of the script and go, Well, how do I want shoot this? Do I want to be in a drone above? Do I want to be in a hole in the ground? Do I want to be looking through the refrigerator? Do you know what kind of lens are we talking about? How close up do we want to be? What's the action in this shot and do I need to capture it wide and tight and super tight? Do I want an alternate to this shot for my edit room? So all of those are questions that I think about for several weeks before I shoot a commercial and I make a big long list of all the shots I could possibly want until I have enough shots to shoot for an entire week and a 32nd commercial. But since I only have a day, I then go through and cut all the shots that I don't really want. And I think about how they're going to go together and I think about which ones are exciting. And then I think about, well, if I'm going to run out of time, which ones do I want to dump and which ones can I absolutely not leave the set without getting because I'll be screwed in my edit. And doing that work ahead of time means that when you get on the set with all your friends on Saturday, you're not going to have to solve those problems while they're staring at you wondering why you didn't fix them before. And so my advice is to make a really good shot list of every shot you want to get, put it in some kind of shooting order that that makes it easy to shoot and think about how long each of those is going to take to get so that you don't try to do five days worth of work in a day and so that you get really get the stuff you want and really get creative with all your shooting. Steve I'm sorry, Steve How do you pick a crew in particular, the actors? How do you go about picking the right actors for whatever type of. Actors audition for jobs, right? So, so they they will if I'm doing a commercial, you know, we say, Hey, we want a six foot tall guy with a full beard who's not very muscular, has a giant stomach and looks he could be a foot tall guy, you know, And then the casting agent will look for all the good people they know who fit that description and who can act and who they think I'll like. And then we line him up and talk to him in a day and they read the part and we see how they look. So it's an audition process in a film. You know, you make if it's a very well-known actor, you'll you'll he won't audition them, but you'll make an offer. And if they like the script and they like the money you've offered them, then you'll meet with them and see if you all see eye to eye before you hire them. But even in something like Brandon's going to do, it's really important to know that you have the right people for the right part, because if you don't have the right people for the right part, you'll never be able to get them to do what you want them to do on set. And your movie will not come out the way you want it to come out. Right. Sierra have it. Are you still with us? I'm always here, lurking in the shadows. I'm always with. You. Usually have words of wisdom. So do you have anything that any question or anything. And just soaking it all in, you know, do more. But it's all. It's all good info. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Not in a rigid way. Right. But in a I've thought about this and I see the pros and cons way. I mean when you, when you, when you go from a script to the start it things are always going to change. You know, the light isn't exactly like you thought it was going to be in the backyard and you know, that tree isn't really where you pictured it in your head, even though you went looked at it three days ago. And so and the actors force that day and they just don't get the line the way you do, even though you sent them the script and talked about it, stuff happens, right? So you don't want to be rigidly stuck to your shot list, but you do to think about as much as you can before you get there. So I would argue, even if you're doing a home video, let's say you're let's say you're shooting your son's graduation from college, well, they hand you a shot list when you walk in. It's called a program. And it says, what's going to happen next right. So you can look at that program and you can go, well, I should probably walk over here about them because that's where the action is going to be. Or I'm looking around the auditorium and I see some really cool stuff going on that I definitely want to get when my son gets his diploma right or I want to. It's better for me to go up close, but I'll be in the way of those parents and there might be a fistfight. So maybe I'll shoot video screen. You know, these are things that you can think of whenever you're shooting in your head. You should start shortlisting and think about the possibilities that you're going to face. So, yes, I would think about those as far in advance as you can. And then on the day, you may throw it all away, but you'll at least have thought about. Which iPhone model are you going to use on the next shoot. I don't use iPhones for shoots. I have I have directors of photography who bring really big, expensive cameras. But I do use iPhones around the house and I use whatever one is handy. You know, the newer ones all look great, so. Thank you for coming on the show and I appreciate you and I. Yeah, well, I thought, Sir, thank you for all the words of wisdom and the food for thought. I appreciate your coming on the show, Steve. I think you gave me some really good tips to help me with with the video. Thank you so much for coming. I have been through some of your articles, and it is just a lot of really good you're really good at explaining things and you're really good at breaking it down from just step. You're great at explaining just from step one. Like I've been told, there's a camera in my hand, but I can't confirm that for sure and moving from there. So like, everybody can and everybody can get the basics of it. I can't wait to share a lot of the stuff on your website with some other students that I know that are interested in film and production and video. And just thank you for coming and sharing with us. Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I've enjoyed the conversation. Very relaxed. Happy to come. Again, the the website is SteveStockman.com and there's a lot of free stuff, so please use it.