Any Advice?

[Arconik]

This is the first draft of a video I am making.

Any advice will be helpful as I have a few doubts of my own.
The tricks are quite poor (something you would find in a children's magic book).
The tricks don't flow.
It ends quite abruptly.
I used one edit however people may think more is edited as a result of it.
The first part would only be understood if you know some background knowledge (I did a YouTube account called the kai and arrik show).
I want to use it as my trailer type thing - too long? Doesn't show much of my skills? Seems like a project a kid would make for school?
Just want any opinions this is a first draft so if any people have good ideas for tricks I could do and replace the poorer ones (or poor camera quality ones as my main canon is out of storage and my brother isn't letting me delete anything of it).
I don't want it to drag on for too long so if I was too add sections to tie it into more of a story other sections will have to be cut out.
Thanks for your time if you did bother to watch it and read this far

 

[Elbrando83]

Hi there. A couple of questions:

What is your goal here? Is it to entertain? Promote yourself/your show/your brand? Get gigs?

Who is your audience?

I think if you can answer those two questions, then the project itself will come into better focus for you.

Without those two questions answered, I don’t know how much help any of us can be, but I will offer a few constructive suggestions:

• Check out some lighting tutorials on YouTube and try to find some ways to improve the production values. There are inexpensive ways to do DIY lighting that will make your video look a lot better.
• If your target audience isn’t magicians, then don’t worry about the difficulty of the tricks you do or the method behind them, worry more about making them perfect. If your audience is magicians...I don’t know. Maybe a less forgiving audience for there, but still I think the principles still apply. Someone else on this forum can probably give you better guidance on the magic portion.
• Think of your video as a story. There should be a clear beginning, middle and ending. If the story is a day in the life of a magician, then it should be an interesting day. Work in some dramatic tension to keep people watching.

I think you could make a good video, but you’re not there yet. Keep at it, though, and let us know what you come up with.

 

[MohanaMisra]

I think @Elbrando83 touches on the production value end quite well. The lighting can be better, but then you did say it's a draft, so I'm assuming you'll brush up the production anyways.

But there are two minor things I'd like to point out in the original post. First off, whether a trick is found in a children's magic book or not, it (usually) doesn't matter. Eric Leclerc makes the straw/pencil conjuring effects look brilliant even though the actual method is pretty much the same as the one we'd read in a children's magic book.

Secondly, you ARE a kid. Anybody who's watching the video will know that instantly. Don't try to to run away from it. Embrace it instead. Don't be afraid of looking like a kid doing a school project. There are plenty of teenagers out there who are trying too hard not to be teenagers (I'd know) and it hardly ends well.

However, if you're just worried about the production looking childish, well, I'd say it depends on who you're comparing yourself to. If you're comparing yourself just to the general creator population on You Tube posting "A Day In The Life Of...", then I really think the quality is pretty satisfactory. When I watch videos like these, I'm usually not there for the production quality. I'm there for the content. There are hundreds of popular You Tubers out there with almost zero production value. All I want is that I can see the subject, that I can hear them when they speak and that the production value syncs with the topic. If you were making a video explaining b-rolls/tutorial on how to make a short film, then your production value would be more important. Right now, it isn't. Since you check all those boxes, I don't think you need to worry too much. If you're comparing yourself to Chris Ramsay however, then it's just not practical.

1) People with that sort of video quality have experience, which you'll gain only after making hundreds of videos like these.

2) They have great gear. Anybody who says that gear doesn't matter at ALL is really pulling your leg. It's simply not true.

So calm down about the quality.

The content itself, is cool. I like it. There seem to be one or two shots where you're moving your lips but I can't hear anything, and I don't know if it's intentional or not.

Practice your effects more, especially in front of a mirror.

For the video to 'flow', your shots need to flow as well. Make them shorter. Learn about the 180 degree rule of editing cuts in a video.

As for editing in a magic video to achieve the magic, I follow only one rule of thumb:-

If you don't want them to think you use edits, then don't.
Really.
As you say, if they spot you using edits once, there's nothing to prevent them from believing that you didn't use edits every single time other than your word. And a magician's 'word' is rarely worth anything as it is . Try to remove it or maybe play around it. Insert a segment maybe where you're sitting down and trying to edit the video to make the magic happen but are failing, and in the process do a couple of visual effects (making a stylus appear, etc). Be out of the box with that.

Meanwhile, you have made a video. That's already more than 90% of people who want to make videos do. You're not camera shy (something a lot (me) of people also have a problem with) and hence can perfectly be yourself on video. The video is genuinely good (in my opinion)!