Hey everyone, this is kind of a random post for Whatever Wednesdays about Vietaliana on YouTube. This should be a short post.

From Instagram

Who’s Vietaliana?

Well, she’s my daughter. She’s half Vietnamese (from me) and half Italian (from my wife). So she’s Vietaliana.

I’ve talked about my daughter a pretty good amount over the last year or so since starting this blog. You can find some of her mentions at her tag: Kylie’s Korner

Anyways, in my recent post YouTube Starter Guide (on the cheap), I mentioned that my daughter wanted to try her hand at YouTube videos. She watches the videos on YouTube Kids on her iPad and likes watching the kids unbox toys as well as play with them. She likes the videos of people playing with toys over the unboxing though, I think.

From the “play” vids, she kind of decides whether she likes a toy or not. You might assume that she would want everything, since she’s only 4, but that’s actually not the case. I think she exercises her own internal Value Cost Ratio in her head while watching the play videos. Of course, since she doesn’t understand the Value of a Dollar, it amounts to “is this toy worth buying to play with”.

She expressed interest in making her own videos. So, I researched the most inexpensive way to make a decent video for YouTube and made that guide I linked above.

I explained my rationale for letting her try to do this, which I’ll reiterate here:

Realistically:

I want her to learn how to speak well. Although this isn’t technically “public speaking”, it kind of is since she has a virtual audience. I think this will help her to develop her own style of speaking and gain confidence in public speaking. While I never had any training in public speaking, I think it’s an important skill. For this reason, I’d like my daughter to be comfortable speaking in public. I think this will also provide the added benefit of developing her own self-confidence.

I also want her to learn a sense of responsibility, not just to me, but to herself, and to her potential viewers. She’s only 4, but I think it’s good to understand that when people count on you, you have to try your very best to do a good job. It’s similar to my blog. While I don’t have a ton of readers, I do feel guilty whenever my posts are late or I miss a post. Work ethic is difficult to teach I think. It’s something you kind of pick up and value at a young age.

I want her to be proud of herself. I’ve said it before, but I don’t want my daughter to just be happy, I want her to be fulfilled. I want her to be able to look back on these videos and be proud of the content she’s created.

Ideally:

If she made a little bit of money off of YouTube that I could put toward a Roth IRA for Kids for her, then that would be awesome. It would help her to understand the concept of saving money early as well as learn the Value of a Dollar. 60+ years of tax-free compound interest would be nice.

However, the truth is most YouTubers don’t make a ton of money from views alone. You could be “YouTube famous” but “Real life poor”. There are a lot of articles about it. In order to make a living off of YouTube you have to devote a ton of hours to it, establish a loyal following/subscriber base, and utilize other avenues of income, such as affiliate marketing and/or sponsored videos.

The success rate is low and the barrier to entry is also low.

So then, how did it go?

Well, I just set up the tripod with my smartphone and put the lapel mic on her shirt and ran an impromptu test. The first time I had the positioning all wrong (in my opinion).

The two positions which I think work well for YouTube videos are:

Number 1

Person behind a desk with good lighting and good contrast. This person then displays the object in front of them like they are showing it to an audience.

However, this kind of positioning does require some skill on the presenter’s part. You have to be able to understand what exactly you are showing your audience as well as have the dexterity to do things without necessarily looking straight at it.

I initially tried this method, but I think it was too difficult for Kylie to do it.

Number 2

Camera pointed at a lot of negative space, usually called a “studio” usually with stark contrasting colors (white or black background). Then all the camera films is the object and the person’s hands.

Once again, this kind of positioning is kind of difficult for presenter, especially a 4 year old. It also requires a particular camera setup, which is beyond my abilities.

So then, I couldn’t do either of the above.

I decided instead to try to work around my presenter, for what might be comfortable for her. I opted for an angled 3/4 view and our second attempt.

This positioning experiment went pretty well. She was able to naturally focus on her toys and just play with them. I did help her along with some questions to start with. However, after the initial few questions she kind of just began narrating for herself. Additionally, because I was behind the camera, she would naturally look over toward me to and show me what was going on as her “audience” which was nice.

To be honest, this was all kind of done on a whim. I wasn’t planning to use this take at all. It was just supposed to be to test the equipment. However, while I’m biased of course, I think she did a great job for her first time. I decided to just keep this take, pretty much unedited, and leave it as her first YouTube video.

She had a lot of fun making the video and I was surprised by how well she entertained herself and was able to “talk” to the camera.

Anything else?

Oh, I did make her a quick intro which I found a template for on panzoid.com. I actually made a bunch of them, but they were all kind of too wild. After having a few friends and family look at them I ultimately decided to go with one that is simple and short. The next section was a quick slide of what was being reviewed, and then we jumped right into the video, ending with a very simple outro.

Of course, I made all of this together in Windows Movie Maker. (on the cheap remember?)

Ok ok ok, so where’s the video?

Well, it’s uploaded to YouTube, but it’s still private. I do plan to make it public soon though, maybe this weekend.

Her YouTube is linked to my Twitter, so it should be announced there. I’ll probably also do a little extra blogpost on here announcing when it’s live too.

Do you think she’ll continue with it?

For the foreseeable future, I think so. She had a lot of fun and was really excited about it. More so than that, she was proud of what she created. Now she talks about all the stuff she wants to show everyone, like costumes and other toys.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to make any new videos. My major concern is that I won’t have time to do videos on a regular basis to keep up with her channel. However, I think if I can recruit my wife to help shoot videos on weekends then it is probably doable to post one video a week.

Maybe I will eventually transition into getting real lighting and a better camera/mic if she really enjoys it.

Additionally, it’s been a learning experience for me and I like learning new things.

TL;DR

Vietaliana is going to have a YouTube Channel soon. Look forward to it!

She had fun making her first video and I hope she continues to like it.

It’s been a fun learning experience so far for me as well.

-Sensei

Agree? Disagree? Questions, Comments and Suggestions are welcome.

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