Over the past seven weeks I have put together my first YouTube channel to showcase the best practices of reading and reviewing books. This page is dedicated to showing the process of how I developed my final videos.
How to Read from a Critical Perspective
About ten years ago, I started reading books avidly. To help me decided what to read next, I went over to YouTube to watch some of my favorite “booktubers” give recommendations and talk about the latest books. Their videos were relaxing and informative, but I knew I could never create something like that.
A couple of weeks ago, I was presented with an idea, “what is one project you wish you could create.” There were several idea that popped into my head, but creating a YouTube channel stuck. So I got to work.
The Proposal
First, I needed to create a proposal. What do I want to accomplish? What are my goals? What is the plan? I put together a proposal that featured my goals, objectives, scope of work, timeline, format, video breakdown, and more.
The Plan
Now that I have written my proposal, I needed to break down my plan into small, more manageable, steps.
I broke down the process into four main stages: research, pre-production, production, and post-production. I then broke up each stage into tasks that I needed to complete. This organization method allowed me to easily switch up my schedule incase a conflict occurred during this process.
Pre-Production
The main components of pre-production consisted of creating thought maps, sketches, drafting storyboards, and writing scripts. These tasks were very important in helping me make critical decision before I sat down to film each video. First, I started off with sketches to help me plan my ideas. Next, I drew thought maps to get all of my ideas together. Then, I drafted up some storyboards to get a visual idea of what I wanted the videos to look like. I knew they were going to be simple storyboards because I wanted to follow the common “booktuber” tradition of sitting in front of the camera and talking to the audience. Lastly, I drafted up the scripts.
Production
The production stage focused on branding, filming, writing descriptions, and creating the actual YouTube channel. I broke up this stage into two weeks of work. First, I started with branding and creating my channel. The next part was to finally sit down and film my videos.
Post-Production
The last stage, post-production focused on audience testing, editing, and posting the final videos. For the audience testing, I asked three people to watch and critique my videos. I provided them with a Survey Monkey document to provide their feedback. Their insight was very helping in the final editing process. Putting the final touches on each video was my favorite part of the whole process. It felt amazing to finally post the finished product for everyone to see.
Final Videos
How to Read a Book
Critics
How to write a review
Review Example
Conclusion
It is a bit cliche, but I really did learn a lot from this project. I found a new confidence in myself, and I encountered less stress by properly planning each step of this process. By finding confidence in myself and planning everything out, I took a lot of pressure off of myself and was able to focus my time and energy into creating my content. Now that I have created my first series, I look forward to seeing what I can create in the future.
Jennifer Coffey 