- If you're about to embark
on an awesome adventure or go through a unique experience and you wanna film the whole journey, well there are some things
that you need to think about to be able to tell a better story and to be able to make a video that your viewers are actually
going to want to watch. So in this video, I'm gonna
go through the concept of what a theme is for your video and how it ties into story, and how you can use that before you actually go on the adventure or go and do the experience so that you can craft a better
video when you come back. Now recently I finished a video where I climbed this mountain up in the North Cascades of Washington that had this insane 3000 foot rock wall. And I knew that this was
gonna be an experience that I wanted to capture on camera and be able to tell this story because this climb was
definitely out of my comfort zone and I knew that there'd be a story somewhere in the experience
that I wanted to tell and actually make a video
around for my second channel. And if we haven't met before,
my name is Jeven Dovey, and on this channel, I teach you how to make better videos and how to tell better stories. Now my second channel,
Project Discover Earth, is all of the stories
that I personally tell, so I'll include a link to the video that I'm talking about down
below in the description as well as a link to my second channel. Now this video does not have a sponsor, however, this channel is
supported by viewers like you, and the cheapest and easiest way to help support this channel is just by hitting the subscribe button and hitting the like button, especially if you wanna learn
how to make better videos. But if you do want some more
exclusive in-depth training, then head over to the
creatorfilmschool.com, and that's where I have all my classes around making better videos
and building a YouTube channel. And you could purchase
each course individually or sign up for the membership which is less than the
cost of a coffee per month. But let's talk about theme, story, and some things that
you need to think about before you actually go out on the journey. Now if you're a YouTuber and you're trying to add
more story into your videos, this is one of the concepts that's gonna help you take
your videos from just a vlog that kind of follows you
along whatever you're doing, to actually something
that has more of a story and has a deeper connection with the audience on the
other side of the camera. Now if you just have some
really cool experience and you wanna make a video around it, well this is gonna help
you craft a better video that's not just your typical
family vacation highlight reel, or like a recap video, or like a cinematic B-roll video where it's just a ton of footage but there's really no story
there besides the visuals. Personally, my focus has been around story and crafting better stories, because especially if you're
a creator here on YouTube, well story's gonna help you stand out and your videos are gonna
have more of an impact if you can tie story into
everything that you're doing. So the big question is theme, what is theme, and how
does it tie into story? Well a theme is your overall message that you want somebody
to get out of the video after they've watched it. It becomes your guiding light on what to shoot and what not to shoot. Oftentimes the journey
becomes the background element and the theme is the more important aspect because it connects you to the viewer who's watching your video. And for my video, I'm
climbing this crazy mountain with this 3000 foot rock wall, and most people won't put
themselves in that situation, however, the guiding theme
that I made for this video is what's gonna connect the viewer to me and it helps give them something that they can take away from the video and feel more connected to the content that they're watching, rather than just being a
video that's a spectacle. And don't get me wrong, you
can make spectacle content where people will just watch it for the sheer craziness
of whatever's going on, but ultimately, we're striving
to become better filmmakers, so we wanna have story and theme built in to the kind of
videos that we're making so that it could reach a broader audience and not just be about the spectacle. The spectacle is still a part of everything that you're doing, but there is a human side to every video that you're creating, especially here on YouTube, because we're creators, and a lot of times the
content that we're creating is around us, so we are the main character and we wanna have that connection with the viewer on the
other side of the camera. And so a theme is just a universal concept that somebody can pull out of the content no matter what the content is. So for example, if you watch
the movie "Finding Nemo," well the reason that
we enjoy watching that and we feel like we have a
connection with the story isn't because we're watching this video about a fish going on a journey, the actual theme of that movie is around trust and friendship, and so it's concepts that we
deal with on an everyday basis and so we feel a connection to
the characters in that movie. Now I know some of you might be thinking, "Well, that's a feature film, and that's so much different than this video that I'm making
around climbing a mountain." Well, yes and no. So if you look at the bigger
creators on this platform, they are using these concepts of storytelling and theme
to make their videos. Let's look at Ryan Trahan's Video, 100 Days in the Metaverse. He did this video where he was in the
Metaverse for 100 days. It's a spectacle piece, it's kind of a crazy concept, being in this world that is
pretty foreign to a lot of us and doing it for this
extended period of time makes us wanna watch that video. But ultimately, the
video is not just about being in the metaverse for 100 days, the overarching theme for me was that this digital world
disconnects us from reality and we need to get ourselves
away from these digital devices and spend more time in the present moment and make real connections
with real human beings. And you can see how the
bigger theme will connect to everyone who's watching this video, whereas the spectacle is kind of the piece that draws you in. So if you're someone who's
making like an adventure video, yes, it's about going on this adventure and climbing this mountain, but you could attach a theme to it that's gonna connect to everyone who's actually watching the video, no matter what situation that they're in. Now in my videos where I have a story, I play around with this
theme in different ways. So for example, I did a video
where I went up to Alaska and went out to this
abandoned military base. The video was about this
adventure of me and my buddy Jake trying to get to this military base and see what it was like
when we actually got there. And I did it in an explainer format, so it was more about the
history of World War II and the actual trip of
going to this location was background element, it was the adventure, but the actual story was
World War II, the history, and the theme was how much
war has an impact on a region even years after the fighting has stopped. And I did another video
on my second channel where the journey was finding out where my burger comes from, so I went to a farm and
figured out the entire process of how the burger goes
from the cow to my plate. But the overarching theme is more about how we've become
disconnected from our food and we need to think about the things that we're
actually putting in our bodies. And then a third example
here on this channel, I did a vlog where I went up
to Alaska to test the Mavic 3, so the video was about the
adventure of going to Alaska and testing the Mavic 3 in
these extreme environments, but so many things went
wrong in that video, but the overarching theme became that everything will go
wrong at the worst time, but you can't let that
destroy the experience. So ideally, when you're
coming up with your theme, you wanna be able to boil it
down to one or two sentences, and coming up with a theme
before you go out and shoot is gonna help tell you
exactly what you should shoot when you're out filming. Because if you're going out and shooting a video and
it's this cool experience, say you're traveling to
Thailand for two weeks, how are you gonna know what to
shoot and what not to shoot? And there are plenty of times before I started understanding
these stories of concepts that I would go on at an adventure and I'd spend all of
my time shooting video without any idea of what I was actually
gonna do with that footage, and then when I would get home, it would either sit on my hard drives or I would cut together a highlight reel which becomes very boring for somebody who just
stumbles upon that video. Might be exciting for me and
people that were with me, but it's not really that exciting from an outsider's perspective, it's just a bunch of footage
cut together of a pretty place. So having a theme humanizes the content that you're producing, and also gives you kind of a guiding force when you're out shooting. Now the kind of content that I produce is a mix between vlog and documentary, I call them vlogumentaries because they have more
of the story element, sometimes I'll dig deeper
into the historical or the science side of
whatever's going on, but I always have these vlog elements that are showing the
journey or the adventure. I like this style, and I think it's a style that's being produced
more and more on YouTube, where creators are putting
documentary elements into vlogs, and so they're becoming more than just your typical travel
vlog or just daily vlog. So if you're about to
embark on an adventure or this cool experience, you need to take a step back first and come up with what is the content that you wanna produce from that. I kind of see four
things that you can make, you could do a cinematic
B-roll, just visual style video, and that might just be a highlight reel. You know, those can perform well if you're making them for here on YouTube, it could be like a cinematic travel film, and if you're doing that, then your focus is gonna be on just getting really epic visuals. Whereas another piece of content that you could
create would be just a typical vlog, and that's where there's not a whole lot of story baked into it, it's more about just filming
everything that you're doing and then cutting it together so someone can come along on the journey. To me, those aren't super exciting, there's definitely a lot of content like that here on YouTube, but I think that YouTube's evolving, and I think story is becoming
more and more important. And on the story side, well, you can make a documentary which would be about, maybe someone that you're
going to meet up with, or the place that you're going, or some bigger story around the whole adventure
that you're going on, or you can make what I think
is called a vlogumentary, which makes you the center
subject of the video and you're taking someone
on this journey with you, so it's a vlog, but then you have these deeper
story elements baked into it. And you definitely need
to think about this first so that you can go into the
experience with expectations of what you're trying to capture. Now, theme is gonna be important if you're creating a
documentary or a vlogumentary, and I don't think that you
have to know your theme before you go out and shoot, I think you need to know
where your direction is, where your aim is, and your theme can kind of start building as you're out on the experience. If you can come up with
your theme beforehand, it's definitely gonna
make a stronger video, however, depending on the type of content that you're producing, a lot of times things will happen that actually push you down
one path versus another. So for example, the farm
documentary that I did, I didn't have a clear theme when I went up and made that project. I was actually pretty lost, I knew what I was filming, I had a goal of what I
was trying to achieve which was basically showing the process of how the farm works and
how it gets to my house, however, once I was there, I started to understand
how the farm operated and actually what regenerative farming was because it was a newer
concept to me at the time, and that started shaping what I was actually
gonna do with this video, which became a completely different video versus just showing the process of the supply chain of cow to plate. And so I don't think you
need to beat yourself up if you don't have your
theme right out of the gate, but have it in the back of your mind, so as you start going on the trip, if you start seeing a theme popping up, maybe it's about the people you're with and it's the friendships
and the connections that you're making, or maybe it's about something internally, so maybe you've been
struggling with something and going on this trip is
bringing that to the surface, and this trip is actually changing you in some way to make you a better person. So sometimes you'll know
right out of the gate what your theme's gonna be when
you're going into a project, and sometimes you'll figure
it out on the journey. So when I'm doing something
like the Alaska Project where I was telling the history
of the World War II base, I could come up with my theme before I actually shot the video, because all of the pieces
are in front of me. I had the whole history and
I was crafting the story of how I was gonna tell that history. Whereas this video where I'm climbing Mount
Goode up in Washington, I didn't know what was gonna happen, and so the theme for me came out later because I had no idea where
the story was gonna go when I was actually filming, and so in that situation where
you don't know your theme before you start filming, what I suggest you do is
come up with your story, and by story, I mean what is your goal? So what is the point of this video that you're trying to produce? For this mountain climb, my goal is to get to the
top of this mountain, and it became sleeping
on top of the mountain because it's this crazy lookout point, and we were gonna sleep on the summit, and there was a lot of challenges between us leaving the parking lot and actually getting to
the top of that mountain, so that's what I was going off of when I was shooting this video. I knew where the story's
trajectory was going, I knew what my goal was, and I knew what some of my
challenges were to get there, and by going through the process, I came up with my theme, which is, we need to challenge ourselves to be able to put the rest
of life in perspective. And I discovered this on this trip because this was a journey that really tested me in a lot of ways and was one of the most memorable
climbs that I've been on, just because everything around
the climb became so intense and it became such an extreme adventure, at least for me. I know there's some people that would've climbed that
mountain and they'd be like, "Oh yeah, no problem." Whereas other people are like,
"I would never go there." And so the actual climb itself
becomes a background element because that's more the spectacle, that's the piece that grabs you and makes you wanna watch the video, but the thing that connects us is that we all have our limits, and being able to push past those limits and actually challenge ourselves helps us grow and become better people. And so if you're getting
ready to make your video, a couple things I suggest, set up a goal, have some challenges that
are gonna get to that goal, that's the basic elements of story, and also think about
change or transformation because stories typically
have this element of change or discovery
at the end of the video, and so if you could have this structure, it's gonna help you start
crafting your story, and then you're gonna be able to start thinking about your theme, whether it's before you
go out on the adventure or the experience, or it's while you're actually filming it. And when you're out filming, just make sure that you're
not shooting everything, you wanna shoot things that fit that story structure that you're building, and also the theme that
you're trying to show through this video. Now I know my stories aren't perfect and my themes aren't
perfect in my stories, however, it's like a muscle, you have to continually practice, and so if you're wanting to tell stories, well just get started. Come up with themes, come up with stories, and just practice. And the more videos that you make, the easier it will become
to come up with these themes and come up with these stories and be able to put all the pieces together to make engaging videos that your viewers are gonna wanna watch. Now if you like this video and you wanna learn more
about telling stories and crafting better videos, make sure you hit that subscribe button, but next, you should check
out this video right here which goes through my entire process of how I approach making a vlogumentary. I'll see you over there.
