Tim Street Transcript:
Steve Garfield: Now, you've produced high quality shows like you produce shows that could go on TV and you're using the Flip
Tim Street: I produce TV shows.
Steve Garfield: TV shows, okay, and you're using the Flip to do interviews and things like tell me a little bit about that process, like choosing that.
Tim Street: It's great. I don't remember how I got turned on to the Flip, but it's right in my pocket and I just pull it out and if you're here with the press, you're supposed to have your badges tagged. That's the official way to do things at South by Southwest, but just with this little camera, I can record Steve Garfield just like that and then I can turn around on myself if I need to and you can see the video right there. The other thing that's really cool about it is like when you get done shooting, you just go like that and this plugs in right into your computer. So, I just plug that in and I can pull all the videos over and upload them immediately, tag them, get them up on my blog pretty quick. So, it's great. There you go.
Steve Garfield: When you say you flip that open, which I figure out why they call it the flip, because that thing flips open, that's awesome, and then you put them on your computer. Do you use the Flip Share program to do that? How do you do it?
Tim Street: This makes AVIs, so I just drag and drop the AVIs over onto my desktop and then I upload them to mDialog because mDialog is a sponsor of mine and I love mDialog. So, I upload them to mDialog and then I take an embed for mDialog and drop that into my WordPess blog at 1timstreet.com.
Steve Garfield: There was no editing mentioned in that. Do you edit your videos?
Tim Street: You know what? I'll bring them into iMovie and the only thing that I edit is if there's some kind of mess up I'll cut that out or if I need to edit something, but usually I just do a super onto person who's talking and then I output that as a .mov and upload it to mDialog, grab the embed and then put that into WordPress.
Steve Garfield: Okay. What's the secret to online video?
Tim Street: All right. Are you ready? I'm going to shut my camera off here. Hold on.
So, here's the secret to online video. If you want to get an audience, if you want to make money, if you want to be noticed in online video, you need to move two or more emotions, have a spectacle and a little bit of story.
Whenever there is a technological advance in entertainment, spectacle comes first then story. YouTube has been that spectacle. You take a look at the early days of filming.
There were these brothers, the Lumiere Brothers, they shot a train pulling into a station. People paid money to go into a movie theater and watch a train pull into a station and they run out of the movie theaters scared to death.
They were like screaming and jumping over each other because they thought they were going to get hit by the train. They didn't understand the technology. YouTube is kind of the same way. We're watching all these cats swinging on ceiling fan videos and we're getting involved in these news stories like Lonelygirl15 where we don't know if it's real or if it's not real and then eventually we find out it's not real. That's kind of where we're at.
We've had this spectacle. We're slowly moving into story right now, but any good media whether it's a good book, whether it's a good film, whether it's a good TV show, it needs to move emotion. It needs to engage the audience. If you can give yourself chills, you can give other people chills. There you go. That's the secret.
Steve Garfield: And if people want to find you on the web, why don't you tell us again where to go?
Tim Street: I will not be at stevegarfield.com, but you can find me at 1timstreet.com.
Steve Garfield: Okay, Tim. Thank you.
Tim Street: All right. Thanks, Steve.
Read an excerpt of this interview and more in my book, Get Seen.