Start Showing Up: A Camera Shyness Success Story
When you’re faced with a feeling of camera shyness, what’s it costing you in your life when you aren’t showing up?
Where does your shyness show up in other aspects of your work?
I have a client who’s work is helping Moms feel less overwhelmed. She’s creating a daily planner especially designed for Moms called ‘The Artful Planner.’ But, when we first talked about making a video that would promote her work she said, “There’s no way I’m going to be in the video.”
Which, not all that surprisingly, is how a lot of people react when I first bring up video making.
Beat Your Camera Shyness: Strap on a GoPro
In this case we came up with a creative solution to accommodate her camera shyness that showcased my client’s planner using a you-are-there point of view with the help of a GoPro camera.
The cool thing about GoPro is that you get to be in the driver’s seat of whoever is wearing the camera on their head. (Think base jumpers, surfers and other extreme sport fanatics.) In this case we simply showed a-day-in-the-life of how any Mom might use an Artful Planner.
[bctt tweet=”Using a GoPro is a great tool for any small business to show off their process.”]
This was so much fun to make! I had my client wear the camera on her head and I controlled shooting via an ipad monitor. A 9-inch monitor!! I was also using a second camera – so I found that I could do a two-camera shoot simultaneously.
When you’re thinking to show your work, and promote your work to others, you really want to think process, not product. Share a unique glimpse of what you’re working on. By sharing your day-to-day process – the things you really care about – you can form a unique bond with your audience.
Show your work, share your creativity and get discovered
I just put down Austin Kleon’s most recent book – which is great for quick inspiration on sharing your creativity with others (you can read the whole thing in about 10 minutes – there’s lots of pictures). Austin proposes that you show your work in the form of a daily dispatch. And that if we do, then over time the small contributions will begin to add up to something profound.
The process is nothing terribly involved: Austin recommends spending 15 or 30 minutes at the end of each day selecting and sharing something on your social networks.
That’s it.
“What I mean by that is one little bit of media that you push out every day, some little piece of your process that you share with people,” he says. Set yourself a daily goal to show your work: one photo (or a 15-second video) on Instagram, tweeting the favorite sentence you read that day, doing a blog post about something you love.
Imagine strapping a GoPro to your head and sharing moments from your work day. In 15-second Instagram snippets.
Just remember to give value when you share.
“The act of sharing is one of generosity — you’re putting something out there because you think it might be helpful or entertaining to someone on the other side of the screen.”
You can start sharing your work – and getting great feedback – by joining my Video Creators Lab Facebook Group and sharing your live videos there.
