YouTubing is Not Safe On The River
News is worthless unless you can share it. Visual information will remain firmly in the brain mo’ betta’ than audio information. Bring on the video revolution for announcing your announcements. Every ministry of the church should have a YouTube account. I promise you your bulletin isn’t being read by most of your congregants. I promise you most people are unaware that you posted an announcement on the PowerPoint scroll that plays before the worship starts. Sadly, not everyone is reading your Facebook or Twitter status updates.
YouTube brings a power punch to push your points to the peeps. It is not painless and it will take a lot of preparation to produce a palatable poiniant piece that people will paruse. Okay, I’ll stop with the alliteration. People love YouTube to the tune of watching 100,000,000 every day, if you wanted to watch every video online right now you would be watching for the next 600 years if you took no breaks.
Equipment You Need. Good News Not Much!
YouTube is free. Which is good because you are going to need to save your pennies to purchase a video camera. Good news video cameras are getting less expensive all the time. Most digital still cameras will shoot pretty good video too. So you might not have to lay out a heap o’ cash to get started. Most YouTube videos are recorded with a very cheap webcam and 300,000,000 people are flocking to watch them. Young people are far less interested in the aesthetics of film than the previous generation. After all they are watching movies on their psp or iPhone. So big layout for production gear isn’t the important part of YouTube.
I use a flip camera that cost about $90 bucks. It is adequate for what we need. The cool thing about flip is the files are pre-formatted in YouTube format. If I have one complaint about it is there is no input for an external microphone. Do some research online to help you find just the right camera for shooting video. Check your digital still camera and see if it will record video you may already have what you need.
Software is not a big problem if you bought a computer in the last five or so years you will probably own Windows Movie Maker which will be enough to make a YouTube video. Apple has software included with their computers too. A lot of my friends recommend Magix Movie Editor Pro. Can’t tell you how to use it but it sure makes nice videos.
So you see the equipment and software are really not the important part of YouTube Video Production. Your content and personality are the key to making videos people will surf to watch.
Talking heads died out with Max Headroom. People get enough of that on Fox News Channel and Bill O’Reilly. Creativity will be the fuel for building audience on YouTube. Notice that I didn’t say talent. In fact having no talent can be a great publicity magnet, remember William Hung.
Brevity is King! Short pithy video announcements are always better than long, boring ones. If your announcement is longer than 3 minutes consider cutting it in half and then cut it in half again.
Solicit volunteers. Kids love to monkey around with video stuff and people like to watch them do it. If you can get a 3 year old to read your copy while giving their pet hamster a mud-bath, you will have an Oscar worthy YouTube Announcement Video. People also like to see their friends doing stupid things too. If you can get the preacher to wear a cowboy suit and yodel your announcement you’ve got yourself the perfect YouTube announcement. Invest in a few props like wigs, glasses and silly hats. Record your video in an unusual place that people will recognize.
These are the types of things that make your YouTube efforts worthwhile. Its not Dan Rather and the Evening News that people are looking for. 
Just because your video is creative does not mean that you can be sloppy. Be sure to script everything. Layout a plan for your shots. Give your announcement script to your actor/reader far enough ahead that they are familiar enough to sound natural as they read the copy. Cue cards or a laptop teleprompter are great tools. Make sure you have good audio. If people can’t understand your voice track you’ve wasted your time and theirs. Sometimes voice over is a great addition to your video for clarity. Most editing software has voice over and titling capability.
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