A Simple System for Video Ideas Using Notion (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Welcome back to my creator bookcase. And so far we have our channels nice and set up but they're empty. So let's work on filling them with actual videos. And the first step to doing that is coming up with video ideas. So today I'm going to be going over how I come up with ideas for content and where I store and script all those ideas. Let's get into it. Now for me there's really no surefire way that I come up with ideas. I don't do the typical thing of scrolling through what's trending and researching SEO keywords and meticulously studying analytics. My method is a lot more elementary. I simply ask myself what would be fun to make a video about and if I was scrolling on YouTube what would I stop and click on. Sometimes I sit down and have brainstorming sessions but I would say most of the time my ideas just kind of come to me throughout the day and I just write them down. And a really good exercise I did to kind of build that muscle of ideas coming to me naturally is at the end of every day I would write down five video ideas that had to be related to something I either did or saw that day. The ideas didn't have to be good and I certainly didn't have to make them but over time it really did kind of rewire my brain to better notice things in the real world that would make for a good video. For example one day I saw this meme about The Rock when I was just scrolling on Twitter and that gave me the video idea to watch and rate his entire filmography which eventually turned into one of the highest performing videos on my channel. And a good way to test if one of your ideas is good enough for a video is to just give it a title and thumbnail. Ask yourself if I were to make this video what would the title be? How would the thumbnail look? Would it be enticing enough for someone to click on? Usually if I already have a strong picture of what that would look like it's a good sign that the idea is good enough for a video. Now there's two main ways I store my ideas. One is analog and the other is digital. This is the analog. Yes welcome to the patent pending Big Boy Brain Board. This is where I like to write ideas on a flash card and literally pin them to my wall. Now there's no real huge benefit to storing your ideas this way instead of using your like notes app but I do find it a little easier to get and stay in a creative flow when I do have a real pen and paper in my hand as opposed to just my phone or laptop. Because let's face it we're already on our screens all day so it is nice to have that separation of physically writing things down and having a real tangible place to look at it especially during brainstorming sessions. Plus it's super satisfying to look at when you're done. I mean look at this don't I look so smart and creative standing next to this thing? That could be you. And this is digital. Welcome to my Notion database. And if you don't know what Notion is it's basically just Google Docs on steroids and it's a super useful tool for not only storing but scripting your ideas. So I'm basically going to make an exact copy of this for my other channel and you guys can follow along if you want to make something like this too. Okay so here we are we have a plain page for my trust me I think videos. So this is what we're going to do. First thing we're going to do is we're going to make a database. We're going to go down here click on database. Now there's already a whole bunch of templates that you could use especially for like creative projects and stuff like that. So you can honestly just use one of these templates if you want. They all work pretty good. But I'm just going to go with the empty database. Now we just need to add our properties. So I'll start with this one. This one's going to be the title name. Then we're going to do one for dates. This one is going to be our upload date. Then I like to have one for my script. Then I like to have one for a link. When I'm done with the video and it's posted I put the link to the video in here just so I have them all easy to access if I need them. And then the last one we will do a number. And this will just be our video number. We are going to add a sort for the video number. And we're going to do descending so that it always shows us the most recent video at the top and our oldest at the bottom. So that's basically how I have my thing set up. You can get a lot more intricate with this. You can customize it to whatever exact need you want. This is like very surface level but it's what works for me. So anytime I think of a video idea I just throw it in here. So now I guess let's brainstorm some ideas that we could do. Since this is me pretending to be an expert I want to think of some like hard topics or professions that it would be really funny to see an amateur try to excel at. So I guess one would be philosophy. I really think that could be a funny episode just because philosophy is so complicated. I'm also I'm not good at like building stuff so I feel like it would be funny for me to do that. And that could be something super simple like building a simple table or even something smaller than that. Another one is cooking. This one I want to be a little bit careful with because I think there's already a series like this already. I think it's by the Try Guys where they try to make stuff without a recipe which is kind of the same thing. So I don't want to reach into that avenue too much since that's kind of like already taken. But it's just an idea. We'll throw it in there for now. I think this is a good amount of ideas for now. So this is basically what I do. I write my ideas here and I just don't number them. All the ones that have no numbers they're just my ideas. Let's say I want philosophy to be my first episode which I actually think I do want to be my first episode. So we're just gonna go with it. I'll give it a video number and it'll automatically populate at the top. All of the ones with no numbers will stay at the bottom. So those are just my ideas. And yeah it works well like that. So okay now that we know philosophy is the first episode we're gonna go with. Let's open it up and we can pretty much stay here. So philosophy is a pretty broad term, right? I don't think I want to talk about philosophy in its entirety. I think I more want to talk about like a specific philosopher and their ideas. So let's just research philosophers and see what we want to go with. 12 philosophical concepts you should know. I think this is a good place to start. Nihilism. This is also a popular one that I've heard of but I have no idea what it's about. Nihilism was born out of skepticism in the 19th century Russia. The philosophy rejects generally accepted ideas about morality, knowledge, and meaning. At the core of nihilism is the belief that nobody knows anything or can know anything. Many nihilists agree that values are baseless. There are no oral truths. Nothing can be known and that life is ultimately meaningless. That's a bubbly idea. I think there's a lot of good concepts here that we can choose. I think I'm gonna go with nihilism. So we'll change this from philosophy to nihilism. And then let's think of, instead of just calling it nihilism, let's think of what the title name would actually be. I feel like we kind of have to explain the premise of the show in this title, especially since it's the first episode. I'm thinking something like an amateur, how do you spell amateur, tries to explain nihilism for 10 minutes. I like adding the time thing at the end because I like when titles are just like ultra specific and literally telling you just exactly what the video is. An amateur tries to explain nihilism for 10 minutes. Uh, it's okay. I think the problem I have with this title is that I feel like it can come across as like me seriously trying to explain it, if that makes sense. I feel like this doesn't showcase the humor of it as much. What if instead I did something like I tried to become an expert in nihilism in 10 minutes. Yeah, I like this one better. I think we can tweak it. I think we can maybe make it better, but I think this is a good baseline to start. So now let's work on what this is actually going to be. So since this is more improvisational, I don't, how do you say that word? Improvisational. We need to worry about less script writing and more about like what's the outline of the show. How does it, how does it go? Usually what I would do is if this was a scripted show, I would do like nihilism script and then I would, I would turn that into a page. Which is like I can open here and then I can go off writing my script. And then what I would do is I would copy the link to the script and I would add that into the script section as a mention. So I can always just open it up right there. And then I would leave this space right here just for like an outline or general notes. So this would be separate from the actual script. But since we're not doing a script, I don't think we need this. I guess the question is, do we want to show me learning about the subject or do we just want to start with me explaining it? I think we do want to show me learning for a little bit. So I think we're just going to start with an intro and it could be something very simple like to master nihilism so I can teach it to you. Let's go, something like that. And then we can do like a couple minutes of me learning and then we go into me teaching it. I think I like that. I kind of want the vibes of this show to be like, kind of like those videos where they're like, I made a short film in 24 hours. I kind of want it to be that same vibe of like, I'm doing something that's a lot of work very quickly and it's not going to be good, but you're going to enjoy me scrambling to do it. So the learning section is essentially going to be like the production of the short film, right? And then we go into the teaching. This would essentially be like playing the short film, I guess. I want it to look as if it was like a show where I'm teaching you something like an established show. I want it to have similar vibes to Crash Course. I don't necessarily want to like copy the look or like the aesthetic or the layout of the show itself, but I just want it to have that kind of vibe of like a legit educational show. I honestly think this is enough to just start filming. I feel like a lot of how I want the show to look and feel is going to be hashed out, obviously in filming, but also in editing. In terms of like physically how I want it to look with like graphics and like lower thirds and titles, I feel like that stuff I better figure out when I'm in editing instead of like trying to figure it out beforehand. So I'm going to save that a little bit for later. I would say for me personally, and because the nature of the show is very improv, this is low key all I need to get started filming. Depending on what you need, you might need to get a lot more intricate with your outline and or script. But for this, I think this is good enough for me to get started. Perfect. Now I have an outline and I'm ready to start shooting my video. So for your homework this week, I want you to brainstorm some video ideas and pick the first one you want to make. Then finalize the script or outline for that video. And next episode, we're going to get our big old fancy cameras out and actually film the dang thing. So get ready to show that beautiful face to the world. See you in the next one.