I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation.
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Today on our first Christmas holiday bonus episode of Something You Should Know the interesting origins of the office Christmas party.
Also, how do we eliminate some of the stress from your Christmas shopping this year and taking better holiday videos?
You'll learn professional secrets that turn chaotic holiday moments into crisp, share-worthy videos, without fancy gear or a film degree.
In fact, all you need is your smartphone.
The phone that you have in your pocket is so smart and so good at lighting and so good at saying oh, this is a sunset, I know how to make this look beautiful, that you can do things, that it took Alfred Hitchcock in the middle of the 20th century 100 people and 60 lights to do.
And you can do it with that thing in your pocket instantly and beautifully.
All this today on a special holiday episode of Something You Should Know.
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Hi and welcome to this special bonus holiday episode of Something You Should Know, where we explore important things about Christmas in particular, and the season in general.
And we start today with the iconic office Christmas party.
It's a tradition that goes back about 150 years and was initially a mix of Victorian charity, social control and early corporate PR.
During the Industrial Revolution of the mid-1800s, working conditions were tough.
Long hours, dangerous machines, and almost no social benefits.
Christmas Day wasn't even guaranteed to be a day off.
But Victorian society placed new emphasis on charity, community and family during the holidays and employers began to feel a kind of moral pressure to give back to their workers.
The earliest ancestors of today's office party were factory-hosted Christmas dinners in Britain and the US.
They weren't fancy usually bread meat, tea and a short speech from the owner.
But they did have a purpose to boost morale, project benevolence and reduce labor unrest.
As work slowly migrated from factories to clerical offices in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the concept of the Christmas party followed.
Businesses began hosting staff teas, holiday luncheons and year-end gatherings as a way to show appreciation and encourage loyalty.
But these events were modest and highly proper.
Then came the 1920s, and everything changed.
Offices were expanding, more women were entering the workforce and corporate culture was becoming more social.
Companies started throwing department parties, gift exchanges, and even small dances.
But the true take-off point for the modern office Christmas party was the post-World War II boom.
American companies were thriving, employee benefits were growing and morale building was seen as smart management.
By the 1950s and early 60s, the holiday party became a major annual celebration.
Today, the office Christmas party has leveled out.
It's more inclusive, often smaller, but still rooted in the same core ideas born in Victorian factories to gather employees together, show appreciation and end the year with a sense of community and goodwill.
So if there's a holiday celebration at your workplace, Remember you're participating in a tradition with roots in industrial hardship, Victorian values and over a century of corporate evolution.
And that is something you should know.
At holiday time, people take a lot of photos, but more and more people shoot video and you've likely had the experience of looking at some video taken at the holidays or any other time for that matter And thinking yeah, that really didn't quite capture the moment.
Video can be very disappointing.
Well, and so can photos too.
But with so much video being shot, wouldn't it be nice to create those videos so they're more watchable and really capture the essence of the moment?
Well, Steve Stockman is here to tell you how.
Steve is the author and creator of the book and video course, How to Shoot Video That Doesn't Suck.
Hi, Steve.
Welcome back to Something You Should Know.
Thanks for having me.
Appreciate it.
So I'm sure there are a million things people could do to make their video look better.
So let's just dive in and start with some of the basics.
I think that the first key, easiest way to make your video way way better is to think about how professionals shoot video.
If you watch a film or a TV show, you're going to see cuts, that little shots that last between one and ten seconds.
You know, video is not put together in one 20 minute thing and then we're done.
And if you think in terms of shooting short shots, even for your home video, then you'll find that whatever you have left looks way better, even if you don't do anything else.
So what I'd recommend is, instead of shooting 30 minutes of Susie opening presents, is you think about?
Well, let me get the beginning of her opening this present.
And I'm just going to shoot 10 seconds of that.
And then let me get 10 seconds of her face as she takes it out of the box.
And then let me get a two second close up of the Lego set that she just pulled out.
And when you think about getting those shots that are very deliberately composed, almost like you're taking still photographs, and they each one contain like a little bit of action.
When you put those together, you don't even have to edit.
You just output them all in a string and they're going to look way, way more interesting than anything else that you could have put together.
So I'm sure that there are plenty of people who have taken video with the best of intentions of editing it later in some editing program, but then they never do.
So I like what you're saying about give some thought to shooting the video in an order that makes sense and is watchable to other people, and then you don't have to edit it.
The trick is when we want to do video that other people are going to watch, we have to think about the other people a little bit.
It's sort of like the difference between in the olden days, when you were shooting still photos or maybe, if you still are You, you might shoot 100 photos of some big holiday celebration.
But then when you make the little album for your grandmother, you pick the ten best ones and you have them printed out online and then you send her this little album.
And if you think about it that way, the video that you're shooting for the holidays for other people to watch needs to be curated just the way you do it for grandma's photo album.
The next biggest mistake that people make is, They just shoot too much.
So if you think about your vacation, for example, if you shoot one 10 second shot every hour for eight hours for five days, that's 400 seconds of video, which is a little bit more than three minutes.
Sorry, it's a little bit more than six minutes.
It's almost seven minutes long.
The problem is that nobody is going to want to watch more than seven minutes of your vacation.
So often, what people do is they'll get on their video camera and they'll shoot everything in their lives, as if anyone else including them, is going to care later what they had for dinner.
The result is you've got so much stuff that you need an entire other lifetime to watch it, and so you never will.
So the first thing to do is to think about what's important in your video and how much you really want to spend time doing it.
Like you want to triage it down to the stuff that you really want to get and then realize that if you only take one shot an hour on your vacation, You're going to have a very long vacation video that you may still want to add it later before you show it to other people.
What's your professional opinion of real video camera versus the one in your phone?
It's funny.
Because the phone that you have in your pocket is so smart and so good at lighting and so good at saying oh, this is a sunset.
I know how to make this look beautiful.
That you can do things, that it took Alfred Hitchcock in the middle of the 20th century 100 people and 60 lights to do.
And you can do it with that thing in your pocket instantly and beautifully.
It's very hard to get a terribly lit shot on a smartphone, And it's just going to keep getting harder as they keep adding new algorithms to it.
So I would say, if you are not a committed pro or semi-pro like you're not shooting wedding videos for a living, or you're not seriously building out your YouTube channel, that your phone is going to do everything that you want it to do and it's going to do it way better than anyone could do it 60 years ago.
So it's going to look great big in favor of using phones to shoot everything that isn't absolutely professional stuff.
It almost seems like getting a real video cameras like now is more like left for like real video files more than everyday folk, because the phone cameras are just so good.
I mean, they're just like some of the video people take is just looks amazing.
It just looks amazing.
It's kind of like learning to ski.
It's like you show up at the rental store and you go, well, this is the first time I've ever skied.
And they give you the crappiest skis.
And it doesn't matter to you, because you're worried about standing up and not falling in the snow while you're waiting for the lesson to start.
Videography is kind of the same way.
You can go quite a ways on your smartphone before you're even going to know what you don't like about shooting with it.
So I would say you can do short films, you can do music videos, you can do great home video.
You can do all that stuff and just start in.
And then when you start to go oh, I wish I could change the exposure on this, or I wish I could change the frame rate, or I wish I had a better lens, then you're starting to know enough to know what you want to buy if you want to graduate up to a professional or a semi-professional camera.
But until then, it's not the equipment, it's the way we think about how to shoot that makes the difference between a good video and a bad video.
A professional director could, and some have, shot entire feature films on a smartphone.
And conversely, there have been very many terrible things shot on professional equipment.
It's not about the equipment and people get all hung up on that.
It's really about learning how to put together a video that people will want to watch?
Everyone has watched a video that they maybe have shot.
You know that sunset or the, you know the birds on the beach and all that.
You never get the sense you got when you actually shot it.
Like somehow it's just not, it's not even close.
And I want to know why, but my sense is why is especially when there's people You're too far away.
I think that's true.
We forget that all of the video we watch is about people, right?
And if you think about your own home video, What you want is the memories of the people that you were with.
It's like the Grand Canyon is going to look exactly the same in a hundred years as it looks today.
And it's been shot by photographers way better than you.
So unless something happens and it blows up, in which case you'll be able to Google it.
You don't need beauty shots of the Grand Canyon.
The Grand Canyon is your location, but what you need is great shots of your kids and what they're doing at the Grand Canyon, with the Grand Canyon as a backdrop to that.
You need shots of your hike.
You need shots of them enjoying it.
You need an interview with your daughter talking about how cool it is that she's walking into the Grand Canyon and down through all those eons of rock to the bottom.
You know, these are the things that we're going to remember, because in five years the Grand Canyon will look exactly the same, and you will not.
And neither will your daughter.
And those are the things that we want to remember.
Staying close to the people is exactly right.
It's what we want out of any video.
You don't watch TV shows about rocks or trees.
You watch TV shows about people may be in a particular location which is important to the story, but it's not about the trees.
Yeah well, i i've seen this with photographs mostly, but but also with video, where when there's a lot of people and and it's like well, let's get everybody in the shot together, And the photographer keeps backing up.
And I think this is going to be the worst picture ever.
You're not going to be able to even tell who's in it.
But you got everybody, but now nobody cares.
Right, exactly.
This is why I always tell people not to shoot until you see the whites of their eyes, which is a kind of a way to remember that, if we buy the idea that video is supposed to be about people, faces are where the people are.
Right.
We carry all of our emotion and our expression and we say things all with our faces.
And those are the things that we want to remember from five years ago or 10 years ago.
We're talking about holiday videos, how to shoot them.
So.
They look absolutely fabulous.
My guest is Steve Stockman.
He's author and creator of the book and video course How to Shoot Video That Doesn't Suck.
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So Steve, are there things specific, very specific things on all smartphones that know that you recommend turn this off, turn this on?
You know this.
This isn't good.
This will make your picture, your videos, better.
Is there anything like that that you can recommend?
Understanding that they're different kind of smartphones and different kind of things, but some general but specific guidelines?
Yes.
Specifically, don't let your phone do anything permanent to your footage.
So some phones come with the little emojis that can animate through the frame.
They'll do sepia tone or black and white or any of those things.
And the first thing that you want to do to take good video is never do any of that.
There's a reason that you don't see any of that stuff in the TV shows that you watch.
And that reason is that they're stupid.
But the second reason is that they're permanent, right?
If you do it with your phone, you're stuck with it.
There's no unclown nose button on your editing program.
So if that's the way you shoot it, that's what you've got.
Whereas if you really like that stuff and you want to play with it, you can play with it in an editing program and hit undo later.
So turn all of that stuff off.
The other thing that I would argue is If you're not putting this video on a social channel that requires a vertical orientation, like TikTok and Instagram and YouTube shorts.
Some of those are more oriented toward holding your camera the long way up and down so that the picture's thin right.
It's fine to do that if that's what you're aiming for.
But if you're just going to share videos with people or post to YouTube, note that The widescreen exists for a reason.
And the reason is that that's kind of how we see the world.
That replicates the way humans view things.
And you get way more information in a frame if you do it wide than if you do it straight up and down.
So for all the home video that you're doing or the marketing content that you're going to put on YouTube or on your website all that stuff really needs to you need to hold the camera the wide way.
Is there any default setting typically, or something that you might be better turning that off, or maybe turning it on if it's defaulted off, or anything like that.
I think...
The part of the process of getting better at video is playing with your equipment.
It used to be.
I remember when my dad gave me a still camera when I was a kid and he gave me the still camera and the instruction booklet and said Now read this carefully so you don't break anything.
And that seemed like great advice at the time because I was eight.
But it's not the way we do things now.
Things come so that you can play with them out of the box.
And what I would say is go out with your camera just in your yard or your living room and play with it and see what it does and experiment with it.
Because again, the equipment itself isn't what's going to make great video.
But your ability to take a great picture is going to make great video, and your ability to know how to get close to things and know how the picture looks when you turn on the lights versus turn off the lights.
That's going to make great video.
And so the most important thing you can do is, whatever piece of equipment you have is go play with it and experiment a little.
When you're not shooting grandma, taking the turkey out of the oven and you're not kind of under pressure to just get stuff and get to know your equipment.
And then you'll understand how to use it a little bit better when you shoot.
So one of the things that I notice in videos that people take is as great as cameras, phone cameras are and everything else, the audio sucks because it's that little microphone in the phone and and you know it's far away and and it's not a real top tier microphone and that can ruin a video.
Because what do you say?
What I can't, what?
And being an audio guy, I you know I like good audio and I hate when I can't like.
Oh man, that's just sucks.
Yeah.
I know what you mean.
I come from radio as well.
And I'm very, very sensitive to that.
But even mixing a movie or a TV show, you have to be super sensitive to that because it's true.
You can get away with a bad shot. because it only lasts about ten seconds.
But if the audio in your video is terrible and unintelligible, people are going to turn it off really fast.
Nobody watches bad video.
So not annoying people is one of your first mantras.
So the thing that people don't understand about the phone mics is that they pick up the sound but they don't really understand what sound they're getting.
So they pick up all the sound.
So if you put a lot of physical space between you and your mom across the room, then the mic is going to pick up everything in between the air conditioner hum, the clatter of the silverware, the people talking behind you.
And it's going to amplify that and it's going to make it impossible to hear your mom.
So there's no such thing as a Zoom mic.
And people tend to hang way back and shoot from far away with their cameras zoomed way in.
And what's better is to Zoom with your feet, walk up close to mom.
And especially if you want to hear what she's saying or if you're going to interview her or ask her a question, which is a great way to get people into your home video in a way that You'll remember them and remember all about them and what they were doing later.
And if you're going to be more than two feet away from somebody and you want to hear them, you need to use an external microphone.
Which aren't all that expensive anymore.
It's amazing that people will spend, you know 1200, 1500 on a phone but won't get an external microphone.
I mean, we found them for, you know...
30 bucks and they're not fabulous, but they're better than the one in the phone, oh way better.
Yeah, it's funny that the the emphasis in technology in the in smartphones seems to be about picture, because they've figured out how to fix your terrible lighting pretty well, but they have not figured out how to fix your terrible sound.
And so you're really responsible for that all by yourself.
So if you're doing anything that you actually want people to hear and understand, you should definitely get an external mic.
One of the things that I find is that you know, when you shoot a video, very often it's kind of oh, we got to get this on video.
And it kind of like starts in the middle.
Like you miss the beginning.
And so it doesn't have a like context.
It has no beginning.
It's just everybody's there.
And like, what is this?
Yeah, I think you can.
You can do.
What we do in the professional world is something called pre-production and that can take days or weeks or years for a big project.
But I like to think about it, because pre-production is where We sit down and go okay, where are we going to shoot this video, and what do we want to get, and who do we need to cast, and what props do we need, and all that.
And where you're not going to do that at Christmas.
You can walk into your living room the night before and you can go.
OK well, here's where the fireplace is.
Here's where the tree is.
Here's where the presents are.
Here is where Sarah is going to sit to open her presents.
And here's know where the window is and i know that mom is going to make cinnamon rolls and i know that everybody's going to come over at two o'clock for a big dinner so what things do i want to shoot And even if you think about it for five minutes, your video will get better.
If you actually brainstorm and write down on a piece of paper what things that you might want to get, your video will get way better, really fast.
What are some other real quick but powerful tips that would help people shoot better video that's more watchable?
So here's a tip for you next time you shoot a home video, especially around the holiday season is don't try to hide the camera.
You know, often you'll have this little battle where you'll go.
I want to shoot you cooking this and the person cooking will go.
Oh no, I look terrible.
Right?
So often people try to fool people into being videotaped.
You know, or you'll hide the phone somewhere.
And I recommend that you don't do that and instead just shoot anyway.
Just not.
Don't shoot in their faces and don't shoot at them if they don't want it, because that's rude.
But just keep shooting the event.
And after a while people will become oblivious to the fact that you're shooting and they'll get bored with you and they'll start acting natural.
And that's the kind of video that you want to look at 10 years from now.
Anything else, any other good little tip?
I like to tell people to shoot first and yell later when they're doing video, especially of their kids.
Which is to say, It's great if everybody has a perfect holiday and everyone minds their manners, but it's more memorable if the cat climbs up the tree, knocks it over and creates a giant mess.
So, unless somebody is bleeding, shoot what is going on, because you're going to remember it later, and don't worry about cleaning it up until it's all over.
And if somebody is bleeding now, you've got evidence for the trial.
Yeah, exactly.
Now you've got great video.
I mean, that's that's killer.
Well listen, this is always interesting because everybody shoots video at least once in a while and it's good to get some suggestions and tips to make it better, to make it more watchable.
I've been speaking with Steve Stockman.
He is author and creator of the book and video course How to Shoot Video That Doesn't Suck.
And there's a link to the book and to the video course in the show notes.
Thanks, Steve.
Appreciate you coming on.
Thanks so much.
All right, Steve.
Take care if you're still planning to go out into the real world and shop.
Here are a few things to keep in mind from Morgan Hall, author of a book called Retail Hell.
Although people claim Black Friday is the busiest shopping day, it is historically December 23rd.
So that would be a day to avoid shopping if possible.
If you're kicking yourself because you could have done all this shopping earlier and avoided the crowds.
There is some comfort in knowing that waiting until the last few days before Christmas is actually a good idea, because that's when retailers really start slashing prices.
You can cut your stress levels drastically if you don't drive and park at the mall.
Take an Uber, have someone drop you off, pick you up.
Looking for parking is often more aggravating than the shopping.
And when in doubt, gift cards really are a good idea.
Years ago, they used to call them gift certificates and giving them was considered pretty lame.
But gift cards, they have a completely different image now.
It is cool and acceptable to give gift cards.
People like getting them, and it is so easy.
And that is something you should know.
Hey, I hope you have a great holiday season.
I hope it is everything you hoped it could be.
And we all here at Something You Should Know appreciate you listening and supporting this podcast.
I'm Mike Carruthers.
Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
