How to Make DIY Videos for Fun or Profit Whether You are Doing it Yourself or Hiring a Team

By Monique Littlejohn

If you've watched, studied and loved DIY shows for years, perhaps you would make a good director and producer.  It's easy to get the bug, but how to actually make it happen?

The ability to share a process in pictures and teach people is a must, but so is the ability to see the project through from one end to the other.  Once you have the basic tools and processes down, there doesn’t need to be hard work or long hours involved. This can be a fun and truly rewarding experience that you'll either talk about for years to come or actually set you off on a new career. After all, what could be more rewarding that helping others learn new skills?

This book will show you how to go from your unrealized dream of being a DIY show developer.  We'll start of by showing you how to doing all the planning that will help your first DIY training project go off without a hitch and avoid some of the more common pitfalls that commonly plague first-time directors.  Next, you'll get a look at the production itself, from how to keep your crew happy and productive (if you are enlisting help) to directing your team into giving the performance you've imagined. I’ll also show you how to truly DIY without any crew, so that you have full creative and production control while keeping your costs down. Lastly, your vision will truly come alive in the post-production process – this book will give you hints and tips for making the most of the footage you have. 

It may surprise you that it doesn’t cost a lot of money to produce DIY videos that you can then sell online through established websites and ultimately make around $700 per hour of work. Just like the gold rush merchants in years past, you can move from the idea that you need huge crews to produce the best video to creating a MVP – minimal viable product – DIY style, so that you can make a living at your new craft.

Creating online training videos is a wonderful form of passive income where you put in the hard work up front and can expect to earn money for years to come.

The author, Monique Littlejohn has created several DIY online video tutorials on jewelry making, fundraising, and other topics, and has created a lucrative passive income stream.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Monique Littlejohn
• Release date: Feb 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386903918

Book preview

Dedication

This book is dedicated to Elizabeth and Declan Minnis – a fantastic production team that filmed all of my intros and outros for my 2016 DIY season.

Table of Contents

Dedication

introduction

Is filmmaking for you?

Pre-Production

Film-making on a Limited Budget

Production

Post-Production

Doing a quick and dirty DIY Program for with a $300 budget for the entire season

Conclusion

introduction

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I’ve been a tinkerer all of my life. If you ask my family, they will remember me making headbands to sell to my classmates before I was in 5th grade. I even chose my University and major based on my love for making and selling things – Retail Studies and Marketing. While in college, I started selling jewelry and hair accessories to local retail stores, and this helped to pay my bills.

In early 2008, my jewelry was sold both online and in boutiques in California and Australia for between $85 and $300 per piece – designer prices for one of a kind pieces. Then the Global Financial crisis impacted discretionary purchases. People stopped buying one of a kind ‘bridge jewelry’ and switched to fast fashion pieces made in China. What I could have sold previously for $85 was not sold for $10! Clearly, I couldn’t make a living that way unless I joined in with the trend of making the design and sending it to factories in China to copy and sell worldwide. That was not the direction I wanted to go.

As an offshoot of jewelry design, I learned the art of lapidary – gemstone cutting while living in Australia. While cutting an opal out of a rough boulder so that I could bring out its brilliance, my future plans came to me. During the California and Australia gold rushes, the people who were making a fortune were rarely the miners. Rather, the merchants selling the gold pans and sluices were raking it in. If it worked back then, why not see if I could use modern technology to provide virtual gold pans to our internet gold miners? The gold pans that the merchants sold were functional but not top end by any stretch of the imagination. They just needed to be used as a tool to separate out the gold from the base rock. Why not see if I could use this analogy for jewelry making?

For years, through a laborious, yet fun process, I was making jewelry. In a way, I was trading time for money. If I could figure out how to set up a process so that I could create a service that lives on perpetually, I could create passive income for life.

It took a couple of years to figure out how to make a switch from producing income in products to producing it in services. In 2012, I decided to produce my first how-to video, teaching others how to make the jewelry that I had been selling in stores. The rest is history.

Now, I am a mediapreneur – online and print author, videographer, and website developer. It is so creatively fulfilling! The energy that I previously spent making ‘one-off’ jewelry pieces is now spent teaching others online. The best part is that I can live anywhere in the world. We have moved between the USA and Australia twice in the past 7 years.

Is filmmaking for you?

If you've watched,