SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

Episode Theme:
Tips for creating high-quality videos using your cell phone—geared toward entrepreneurs, marketers, and content creators.
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?? Key Cell Phone Video Tips:
?? Lighting
• Critical factor in video quality. Even a poor camera can produce good video with proper lighting.
• Avoid backlighting (light behind subject); instead, light from the front or over your shoulder.
• Use the "three-point lighting" system: key light, fill light, and backlight.
• Special lighting techniques can even make you look 20 years younger (taught at his studio training).
• Watch for glare from glasses, especially in Zoom calls; dim your screen or tilt glasses.
?? Sound
• Good audio is non-negotiable. People will tolerate bad video, but not bad sound.
• Use external microphones if the subject is more than a few feet from the phone.
o Cheapest: wired clip-on mic with long cord.
o Recommended: wireless DJI mic (covered in episode 1003).
• Watch for ambient sounds (fans, clocks, fish tanks) that you might not notice but the mic will.
• Use wind protection (“dead cat” mic covers) when outdoors.
?? Camera Stability
• Use tripod/selfie stick hybrids for stable shots. Tom recommends one that extends to 6 feet and costs around $22.
• Handheld shots can add energy if edited well. Hollywood editors can use shaky footage to add excitement.
• Tip: Shoot everything, then let a good editor polish the final product.
??? Framing
• Use the rule of thirds (imagine a tic-tac-toe grid).
o Place subjects at intersections of lines—not dead center—for more dynamic shots.
o Allows space for on-screen text or bullet points.
?? Vertical vs. Horizontal Video
• Vertical is best for social media: TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts.
• Horizontal is best for YouTube, training, or Amazon Influencer videos.
• With planning, you can shoot in a way that allows content to be used both vertically and horizontally.
?? Teleprompters
• Many free/cheap teleprompter apps exist for cell phones.
• Drawback: Eye movement looks unnatural if the camera and text are far apart.
• Tip: Stand farther from the camera, make text large, and practice.
• Professional teleprompters (used in Tom’s studio) let you read while looking directly into the lens.
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?? Training Opportunities
Tom offers:
• A free automation eBook: screwthecommute.com/automatefree
• An in-depth video weekend training at his TV studio: screwthecommute.com/videoweekend
• Mentoring and training programs: GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com
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?? Final Thought:
If you apply just a few of these tips—especially lighting and sound—your videos will dramatically improve in quality, engagement, and results.

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Episode 1011 – Cell Phone Video Tips
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody. It's Tom here with episode 1011 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today I'm going to give you some cell phone video tips. And not really all the tips would work on any kind of video camera, but everybody's using cell phones now. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Hope you didn't miss episode 1010. That was simple online math. And before you zone out on me on that because you hate math, this kind of simple, simple math and paying attention to your promotions can make you a fortune. All right, so that was episode 1010. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number. That was 1010. All right. Pick up a copy of our automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and pick up version 3.0. Because version 2.0, if you got that before, then this has all kinds of new stuff in it. So some of the old stuff and some of the new. So pick that up at screwthecommute.com/automatefree, check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com and my school at IMTCVA.org. Hey, also, another link you want to keep track of is screwthecommute.com/videoweekend. You can either come here by yourself or get a small group together and train in my TV studio for your in-house training. And then we spend a day going out into the field to show you how to make videos about your topic, no matter where you are.

[00:01:59] And it makes it very interesting because they're live out in the field. And then of course, we have video marketing and social media video marketing training class in our classroom. All right. So check that out at the weekend. All right. So here's the deal folks. People are shooting TV shows on cell phones. Now you have really a lot of power in your hand. You have it with you all the time. I gotta turn the ringer off to mine so it doesn't interrupt us. Okay. So you should be able to put out a decent YouTube video or a video for your website, or a VSL video sales letter, those kinds of things. And like I said, these tips I'm going to give you here are if you just make yourself a little checklist and check each one of these before you shoot something. I know sometimes you don't have time. You got to just grab the video or it's gone. But when you have time to think about it, you can really make some great stuff. So that's what we're going to talk about today, some tips that you can implement easily and cheaply that can really up your game when it comes to video. All right. So first is light and I have an episode on this called 710. I highly suggest you listen to it because lighting is the key to all of this. You can have the crappiest camera on Earth, and if you light the thing well, you can do well.

[00:03:30] And I had training. I had training clear back in Hollywood initially, and then I had two Hollywood retired guys working for me that taught me unbelievable trips, the tricks to make your yourself look 20 years younger with lighting and just all kinds of stuff. We teach you all this stuff at the weekend, so if you're going to light a person, well, first of all, make sure that the topic of backlight is really important. You don't want a bright light behind you because a person's face is going to go dark, or whatever your subject is, is going to go very dark. If the light, if a bright light is coming from behind it. So you don't want that. You want the light coming over your shoulder. If you're not in the subject, if you're just shooting the video onto the subject okay, so that's critical. No backlight unless you're doing it for special effects. But that's a whole different thing. And then guess what? The main lighting of a person's face is based on. You'll never guess in a million years unless you've heard one of my other episodes. It's the nose, the nose, nose. You want a little bit of a shadow on the nose, so you want a bright light hitting part of the person's face. That's called the key light. And then if you just only had a big, bright light on one side of somebody's face, it's going to make a massive shadow and look weird and theatrical and crazy on the other side of their nose.

[00:05:02] So you use another light called a fill light that can reduce that shadow to make the depth of field and the person's face and give it character. And then you can have a little bit of backlight that hits the back of their head and sets them apart from their background. That's the basic three light system you can look. There's thousands of videos about that online, but we teach you actually how to do it. And when you come to my studio anyway, a lot of times when you're out in the field, you don't have you're not going to have a whole lighting kit and all this. So you just use natural light the best you can and get the person's face lit up. But think about the nose. And another thing you got to think about is glasses. Because glasses create glare. I see a lot of this on zoom and things where people have the and I have trouble with this myself. I have to darken when I'm really doing a good zoom thing. I mean, I don't do it for my everyday, you know, just, hey, I'm going to help you fix this problem. But if I'm doing a nice zoom training, then I've got to dim my screen. Usually there's something on the keyboard that'll help you dim your screen, and you can tilt the temples of your glasses up so that the light from the screen doesn't hit your glasses and bounce back into your webcam.

[00:06:21] And that's looks. You look like an alien. You got great big, you know. You know, lights in your both eyes, like like an alien. Okay, so there are some tips on light. Think about light. And you're right, there is going to make your videos way better. Okay. Next is sound. Now if you're holding the camera and shooting something, most of the camera's either iPhone or Android or whatever you got is you'll have fine video. Just just good enough, you know, plenty good if it's right next to your mouth when you're talking. All right. But as soon as you get one foot, two foot, three feet away. It starts to go downhill fast. And the rule that we have and I'm a professional in this field and I was trained by Hollywood professionals, is that people will put up with bad video, but they will never put up with bad audio. And so you've got to have decent audio. So if you plan on doing selfies or doing stand ups where you have the thing on a tripod and you're standing back doing talking about something, you got to have some type of external microphone. Now super cheap is to get a clip on microphone with a really long cord that's about as cheap as you can get, but you have to make sure that it plugs into whatever cell phone you have, or whatever camera or GoPro or whatever you got.

[00:07:52] And I don't even know if GoPros allow external mics. Maybe there's some of the newer ones, I don't know, but that's the super cheap way. But I, I highly encourage you if you're going to do a lot of video. Listen to episode 1003. I got this this DJI microphone that I was using when I was I have a, you know, high level drone. Dji makes drones and electronic stuff like that, but their microphone kit is just freaking fantastic. And I covered that on episode 1003. But another thing you have to think about is background noise. Because a lot of times, like right now, I stopped to listen and there is a fan on my dog because it's really hot. I turned off the fan on me because it just makes too much noise. And then I'm going to do a noise reduction on the video because I know how after I'm done recording this, to cut out that fan noise, sometimes you can't do that, but sometimes you want the background noise. If you're out on the street doing a live thing, you might want the cars going by and beeps and sirens and that kind of stuff. But sometimes you got wind that you don't notice, but the the microphone notices, so you have to have something on the microphone or hide them, you know, and this sounds bad, but the little fuzzy thing that goes on the microphone in the business is called a dead cat.

[00:09:25] Right? But sometimes you have that, sometimes you put it underneath your shirt or your blouse or your coat because wind noise, unless unless you're covering a hurricane for the news channel or something that doesn't make sense to have that, that, that loud noise on there. So the problem in your home is that you you tune these sounds out because you live in them all the time. I had this one lady, I'm saying, what's that? Click, click, click in the background. She says, what are you talking about? I'm sitting here by myself. She had a giant grandfather's clock. I think they call him, you know, go and click, click, click. She had tuned it out because she lives there. Another guy had a fish tank. I'm saying, why does it sound like you're underwater? You're bubbling right. You had a fish tank right next to where he was recording, and he he had zoned it out. Say so. So you have to pay attention to those kind of things, or you're creating enormous nightmares for if you have an editor or if you're trying to edit yourself or you have to throw it away and do it again somewhat someplace else. So pay attention to sound. All right. Now this next section is sometimes stable slash sometimes not. So this is about putting your camera on some type of device like a tripod. Now I highly suggest this is one of the best things. There's millions of them on Amazon a selfie stick tripod.

[00:11:00] I have one that goes to six feet tall, but it folds down where I can use it and have a good handle on it. I hold the tripod legs when they're closed and it's a selfie stick, but I can also let the tripod legs open and sit it down, raise it up to six feet and talk right into it on the on the thing. And I think it was on like $22. So this is really important to have something like that handy both for selfies and for when you want to stop and put it somewhere and have it be very stable. All right. So that's that. Here's the thing. Remember I told you I was trained by Hollywood in Hollywood, but then I ran into a guy named Gary Smith. He was a retired editor all the way back to Star Wars, Emmy nominated for his work in Hollywood, retired, and he started shooting speaker videos. And I met him and and we he taught me so much about, uh, excitement in videos for a guy like him will agonize for three hours over a 10th of a second cut because he knows how to keep people interested where they can't possibly hit the stop button, say so. He taught me a lot about that, and so he said, hey, Tom, when you're speaking, just give somebody a camera in the in the crowd or your assistant and handheld and just tell them, do not turn it off and just shoot everything.

[00:12:34] Shoot people, shoot you, shoot everything. And a good editor will find the shakiness and turn it into excitement in the video. See? So if you have a good editor with those kind of skills, I mean, it's hard to get those kind of skills, I got to tell you. But shoot everything and then a good editor will put it together and make you look better than you ever thought you could. Okay. Oh, and speaking of that, I forgot about In Light. Yeah. This, um, this other Hollywood guy was retired, came to work for me. And all the celebrities wanted him to shoot their promos. You know. They even covered his divorce in people magazine, I think. I don't know, but he was a big shot in Hollywood before he retired. And he showed me a lighting technique which we teach you in the. When you come to the studio, it'll take 20 years off of your face. I mean, it's unbelievable. Right. People were just going crazy when we taught them this. Okay, let's see what's next here. So sometimes stable, you need a stable picture and sometimes not let it just shoot everything. And if it's a little bouncy, see, a lot of your cameras have stabilization in it. So a little bit of shakiness. It doesn't show up because the camera takes care of it. But you know, if it's a lot of shakiness, it can be used to your advantage.

[00:13:57] All right. Okay. Next thing is framing your shot. Well, close ups are better. They make a bigger impact when you fill the screen up with stuff. But if you're shooting people or or specific things. Think of a tic tac toe board. And at the top, two places where the lines cross, like off to the side or right off to the side to the left. That's considered one of the best framing to have, and also gives you room to put text on the video if you want to. Bullet points and things. Graphics and still have the main subject in the picture. So that's a little bit about framing. And then vertical versus horizontal. This is kind of funny because in the old days if you shot your cell phone vertical, people would make fun of you. You're an idiot. You're the dumbest person on earth. And now it's almost switched to. If you shoot horizontal, you're the dumbest person on. Not really. But this was long before YouTube shorts and In Instagram Reels and stories, Facebook stories and all these vertical TikTok, all this stuff. Okay, so you have to think about, okay, what is my use for this video? Is it going to be a story a real. Is it going to be a TikTok or is it going to go on standard YouTube, not YouTube shorts? See. So you got to think about those things now if you if you practice and are careful about it, you can shoot a horizontal video but frame things a little bit different than the tic tac toe board I was telling you about, so that an editor can flip it vertical and it can still be usable.

[00:15:50] See, so you can get dual purpose out of them. So but you need to think about these things ahead of time. If it's only for YouTube, like I'm doing stuff for right now for the Amazon influencer program. And they want horizontal pretty much. So okay, so I'm not even bothering with any vertical for that. Some people are shooting verticals and they're putting them in there, but mine have appeared to have greater impact because they're horizontal and fill the whole screen up and all that. You can put thumbnails on them and everything. So you got it. But you got to think about what's the purpose and how is it going to be distributed. And then one other thing is there's loads of what they call teleprompter apps. And these are now again, I'm in SAG after the actors union for, I don't know, a hundred years now. But when I was up in D.C., we had training classes on teleprompter. And what I can assure you is that the closer you are to these, you know, kind of half assed teleprompters, the worse it's going to look. You're going to look beady eyed and untrustworthy because a real teleprompter, you look through a piece of glass directly into the camera lens as you're reading your script.

[00:17:10] But these other ones are the self. There's tons of teleprompter cell phone apps and I'm all for them. Really I am. But the closer you are, you know the the edge of the text can only get so close to the edge of where the camera is on the edge of your, your cell phone. And what it's going to do is you're reading, but your eyes aren't looking at the person. They're looking down. And the closer you are, the more noticeable it is. So if you're going to use some of those things back up, you got to back up. Make the text big. You know, they have little things where you can a Bluetooth thing where you can change the speed of it remotely. There's all kinds of stuff out there now. They even have one that'll hang on your screen of your desktop. And I think that one you can look through the glass directly into your webcam. That's cool. But if you're if you're close up and you're just looking kind of near the edge, you're going to look really bad. All right. And it takes practice. See, a lot of people get deer in the headlights when they look in a teleprompter. They're like staring at the text and they look like they just saw a ghost. All right, you have to practice with this. We practiced endlessly so that it looks natural when we're doing a teleprompter read. I don't do them much anymore because the stuff I say is not critical.

[00:18:38] Like legal fees and things. And I'm known for winging it. Great. But if you're going to use it, you have to move your head. Move your eyes, look away, laugh, chuckle. You know all these things so it looks natural rather than deer in headlights. All right, so that's teleprompter. All right. So anyway, if you did even a portion of what I just told you, especially the audio and the lighting, man, you're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna really, really improve your videos, get more watches. More watch time. More click thrus. All kinds of good stuff. So, um, that's my story. I'm sticking to it, if you'd like. Full blown immersion training on this. You can come to my TV studio, spend the weekend, and we'll teach you all this stuff. We'll take you out in the field having you shooting videos in the field that match your business. No matter what business it is. We'll figure out and teach you how to turn a on site video into something that supports your business. And those are really interesting because they're more than the just talking head crap you see all the time. So anyway, we'll teach you all this stuff at the weekend and you can either come yourself or get together a small group and I'll make you a deal. All right. That's my story. I'm sticking to it. We'll catch you all in the next episode. See you later.