Mark takes viewers behind the scenes of his seven-part YouTube series, covering why he shot it in black and white, the interrogation-room look, the props and table, and editing with WeVideo.
Transcript
I'm Mark Silverthorn, the founder of Debt Coach Silverthorn, and today we're going to do something different. About eight months ago I started the Debt Coach Silverthorn YouTube channel, and in September and October of this year we published a YouTube series called Confessions of a Collection Agency Lawyer. It was seven episodes, seven videos, and today's video is all about the making of the series. We're going to take you behind the scenes.
Why a series, and why black and white
I wanted to do something very unique that literally no one else could do, and I thought that doing some videos using the title Confessions of a Collection Agency Lawyer would generate a lot of curiosity and could be very compelling. We filmed the videos in black and white because we wanted to do something different. I've watched a lot of YouTube videos, and I just haven't seen any shot in black and white. I was a collection agency lawyer between 1994 and 2006, and these videos are supposed to be me being interviewed in an interrogation-type environment, so what better way to set the scene than for the footage to be in black and white?
The worst thing I was called
I distinctly remember speaking with one gentleman, and he was very agitated. I'm not sure if it was that he owed the money or if it was a friend or family member, but he called me a pond scum, and for some reason that stuck with me. Now, I've got two ex-wives, so I've been called a lot of names, but I've never, ever been called pond scum. I'm not even sure what pond scum is.
The opening scene
With the exception of one of these videos, the opening scene appears to be an interrogation room in a police station. I wanted to have some footage at the beginning of these videos that set the scene, and the title of the series was Confessions of a Collection Agency Lawyer. So what better way to set the mood than to have the first 10 or 15 seconds of the video use footage of what appears to be an interrogation room in a police station? Then, during this footage, a narrator would set the scene for that particular video.
The shirt, the table and the props
There are a number of reasons I wore the same dark-coloured shirt in each of these videos. One is that it would have looked a little phony if I was wearing a lavalier mic during an interrogation, and by wearing a dark shirt it was very difficult to notice that I had one on. The other was continuity. I wore the same shirt during all seven videos, and a person might think this was one long interrogation, with each video a small part of it.
The table is about a $60 picnic table that you can pick up at Home Depot. On the videos it appears that there was some kind of recording device. This is the actual item we used, an old alarm clock that I picked up at Value Village for about $5. The purpose of having it on the table was to give the appearance that the interrogation was being recorded, and on top of this piece of hardware was a cassette. We also had some file folders on the table, for a couple of reasons. During a police interrogation there are often file folders on the table, and the particular picnic table we were using had a crease down the middle of it that we wanted to hide. By placing the file folders in the middle of the table, we were able to hide that crease.
Editing the series
There was myself in front of the camera, and behind the camera there was my lovely wife, Danny. About one week before we shot Part 1 of Confessions of a Collection Agency Lawyer, I purchased a software editing program called WeVideo. I just love this software, and I was the person who edited these videos. One of the cool features of WeVideo is that you can take footage and convert it into black and white, and it's also relatively easy to add text, either static text or motion text. In addition, the footage of the interrogation room at the beginning of six of the seven videos was stock footage that I got from WeVideo. They have a huge archive of royalty-free pictures and stock footage.