How To Look Good On Camera

In this ‘Getting Started With Video Series’, I address the the biggest concerns my audience have with using video in their business.Today, we’re going to talk about how to look good on camera.Remember, the most important thing in your video is your content. This is true but in order to deliver your content effectively, you need to feel comfortable and confident. The way you look or more to the point, the way you feel you look, plays a huge role in how comfortable and confident you are.

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Hi there, I’m Michelle Eaton from michelleeaton.com.You need to do whatever you can to be happy with the way you look and this will be different for everybody.Lighting plays a major role in helping you to look good on camera, but I covered that in the last video so I won’t repeat it in this one.

For me, I like to wear makeup and I like having my hair looking nice. Not a big hairdo, I don’t want a stylist, or a makeup artist, or anything like that. I do my own makeup the same as I wear normally on a daily basis. Foundation, concealer, powder. Translucent powder is so good, it will stop the shine on your face. Especially if you’ve got hot lights on you.Blusher, eyeshadow, mascara, and lipstick and sometimes I wear eyeliner, eyebrow pencil and lip liner.

Clothing – casual is fine, formal is fine too. I just like something that makes me feel good about the way I look. Something I feel comfortable in.Plain colors are better. Elaborate patterns and stripes can sometimes distort in the camera. I think it’s called the Moiré effect and it sort of gives a distorted look as the camera’s trying to focus on it and it’s quite distracting.

Some people like to have a theme to their clothing, like Mari Smith, the Facebook expert. She often wears turquoise. And some people like to color match the clothing to the set they’ve got. In other words, the background they’ve setup for filming their videos.I don’t often use a background. Sometimes I use a green screen so if I wanted to, I could just take that video and put any background to it.

If this sort of thing interests you, you can get ideas of what colors complement each other on color.adobe.com. If you have Adobe Illustrator, you can download the palette to use in that program. Maybe this doesn’t interest you for your clothing or your filming set, but it’s still worth looking at for any design project you’re doing like your website or social media images. Any room you want to decorate in your house.

So simply type in color.adobe.com then click on the Explore menu at the top. And you’ll be taken to a page with loads of color palettes. If you don’t use Illustrator, never fear. Just get the free ColorZilla browser extension. It’s for all browsers and you can get it for Windows and Mac. The color eyedropper will then sit in your browser bar at the top for easy use.

Next, open a document, a text file, Word document or a Google doc and name it “My Color Palette”. When you’ve found the palette that you want on the Adobe site, take a screen shot of the palette using Windows snipping tool or any other method. Then you can copy and paste the picture of the palette into the document so that you’ve got a visual reference, especially if you’re going to be saving a few different color palettes.

Next, on the ColorZilla eyedropper, choose page color picker active. Next, place the center of the cross hair on the first color in the palette and click. This will copy the value to the clipboard. Now, you simply paste the hexadecimal code into your document. Do this for all five colors in the palette. Now, you have the exact colors always to hand when you need them, for any project you want to do or any program you use.

If you want to incorporate all of these things getting yourself ready, your background sorted, and do things that will really brand you in a professional way, then the way to go is to batch record. This means, you have everything ready to record a few videos all in one day or one session. You can change your clothes and jewelry for each video if you want to look slightly different. You can film a lot in a few hours.

Things can still go wrong. I can’t tell you how many times my neighbors have been so noisy, the internet has cut out for the day, I’ve got unexpected visitors, but listen up though.This is the most important thing.Don’t take a lot of time getting everything ready visually and opportunity wise, and then not know what to say. You need your content sorted first. I’ve done this so many times. I feel I look okay to record something and then, I don’t know what the hell to talk about.

Now, if you’re just starting out, just be yourself. I’ve seen so many YouTube videos now where someone is starting a weight loss journey and the latest one I looked at, to be honest, 12 months later she wasn’t looking that much different. But it doesn’t have to be an amazing transformation. People just loved her honesty, her journey, her struggles, you know, it’s like reality TV. Where it’s so popular because it’s like real life and we can relate.

Please don’t feel like you have to look a certain way, dress a certain way, or be a certain way. It’s good to make an effort and make them look professional but it depends what your video’s for. If your video is for the homepage of your website, you might want to give the professional, polished image or you might want the more personal, personable approach. So it depends on the image you’re trying to portray.

Now, how would you like to have a private place to practice your videos with help from me? You can just be yourself, I know it’s difficult at first. I still find it difficult, but practice makes perfect. I don’t know who coined that phrase but we don’t have to be perfect.We can do Facebook Live broadcasts in the closed group so nobody sees it other than us group members and I can show you how you can practice live video on your own. So only you see them and if you don’t like it, you just delete it and nobody’s the wiser. I can also show you how to prerecord a video and then use a free video live streaming service to stream it live. So, in other words, you record a video that you’re happy with then you go live on Facebook or YouTube with the prerecorded video.

The only reason really to do that is it can really help you to be less wooden if you do it live. You don’t have to, you can do prerecorded videos like this one is, but live video can often get you into the groove if you like, for want of a better expression. It can get you into the groove, talking, being more natural. Sometimes with pre-recorded videos, the thing that you tend to do is try to be perfect, and you’ll stop it and rerecord, edit and rerecord, and it can be a really long process, and you might feel it all a bit overwhelming, whereas a live video just sit and talk. We all know that if we don’t go out of our comfort zone we don’t progress and we don’t grow. And someone else, you can be sure, someone else, your competitors, will be going that extra step. So it definitely is something that you should consider.

If you would like anymore on the makeup, if you would like to join the Facebook group, please leave me a comment. Any other questions, any thing else you want me to cover, let me know and I’ll leave it there. And I’ll speak to you again soon.