Feedback Needed Why Scotland?

[Arfa]

Just a quick video yapping a bit about why my family and I chose to relocate from London to Scotland, with (of course) lots of lovely footage from Scotland, including a spectacular ride from Christmas day.

Just a short one, thrown together with video from a few recent rides this winter with voice dubbed over in post. Hope you enjoy it and as always, critique is much appreciated. My kids keep telling me that I'm so softly spoken I should be doing ASMR videos!

Tech used: GoPro Hero 9, Blue Yeti mic, iMovie.

 

[Hippo-Drones]

Scotland is a gorgeous place to ride motorbikes, I was glad to leave though and get back down south after 8 years based up there in the Royal Navy.
As for feedback, your kids have a point; you are very quiet compared to the music, I'd suggest dropping the music level by half and possibly upping your voice audio by 50% too, nothing wrong with you being softly spoken, just need to make sure you can be heard better over the ambient music. I'd also probs stick to just the voice over the on bike footage than cutting back to you in your office in this example where you were reading a script. If you were speaking off the cuff with no script, then that angle would work better as it would feel more like a conversation. That was some beautiful on bike footage, I really loved riding bikes there, just not anything else lol

 

[Guest]

Opening shot: Stand on the grass/field/whatever and start on the bike and rotate to reveal the water.

On shots where you record backwards, you can just have the clip play in reverse. 70% of my drone footage in my last drone video was actually just replayed backwards because it's easier to fly forward than backwards, but backwards is more interesting to watch.

In your office: The reading off the screen is very obvious and makes me feel meh about watching somethin someone is reading.

Footage with the kid while talking about the kid: Thought this was excellent.

Scenery: Top notch, beautiful.

Story telling: I like that you gave enough detail on the situation that brought you guys there to tell the story, without getting too into the details, good balance.

4:40-4:44 something happened with your layers, we get a half second flash of you

More of the talking head portion could be set over b-roll. Whenever I catch myself reading script in my talking head parts I try to put some b-roll over it to hide myself looking at my cheat sheet. Then I flip back when it naturally makes sense.

Sign off might need some tightening up. There's a good 15-20 seconds after when you stop talking where you'll probably see a ton of viewer drop off. Your average % viewed will hurt because of this.

As a motorcyclist from abroad I just want to know the logistics of how you got your bike over there. Did you ride, trailer, freight?

No call to action until the end of the video... might want to put something a little sooner. When I think I've done something cool or witty (probably just in my own mind) I ask for a Like shortly thereafter.

Hope this helps! My style isn't the right way, it's just the only way I know how to do things so this is the only feedback I know how to give

 

[Arfa]

Cheers for feedback, yep nowt there I can argue with and definitely stuff I can do better. I struggle with the off the cuff chat, hence tend to favour the dubbing over with a cheat sheet/script. Will try to make this less obvious in future. I'll try and sort out the levels more too, default iMovie voice over compression level is never enough.

Glad you liked the footage though, watch this space for more!

Thanks again.

 

[Guest]

I goof up off the cuff too.

My workaround is to read 2-3 sentences of my script out loud a few times. Until it's in my head. I turn to the camera and repeat the 2-3 sentences looking into the camera. Repeat the next 2-3 sentences out loud until that's stuck in my head, turn to the camera and repeat.

In other words, I am never going off the cuff, but I am also never saying to the camera, more than I can remember in one shot. My videos are basically a series of many two or three sentence clips.

If I don't do this I would be either need to read off the screen like you were doing or I would be unfocused and all over the place and run long and boring.