YouTube: An Insider's Guide to Climbing the Charts

Choosing and Directing Actors

Actors are the talking puppets who bring your stories to life. OK, they're more than talking puppets; they're humans, with real emotions and feelings. Either these emotions and feelings can get in the way of putting your story on the screen or you can work with these emotions and feelings…and desires. That's what a director does—"directs" the actors to channel their human experience onto the screen.

Choosing Actors

Most YouTube videos star amateurs as the actors. In fact, most YouTube videos star you and your friends. (That's why it's called YouTube, not ThemTube. ThemTube is our nickname for television.)

Figure 2-10. YouTube. Yay!

Figure 2-11. ThemTube. BOO!

For vlogs, and for funny, cute stuff, having you and your friends is fine (Figure 2-10) and it sure beats ThemTube (Figure 2-11). But what if you have a more sweeping vision in mind? What if you want to make something "as good as Hollywood," but better? You will need some people who can act.

For all the things that Hollywood does wrong, it does a lot right. What they do wrong is this: They tell the same hackneyed hero's journey, happy ending story over and over. The situations may change, but it's pretty much mostly all the same movie. This is called pandering to the lowest common denominator, and if you're ...