A fast way to find your filler words
and more musings on editing videos of yourself talking
Record yourself talking. Edit your recording to try to remove filler words. It's incredible how many you'll find. I've tried to catch my filler words before, but in editing recordings of myself I've found 100% more than I used to. They're couched in my language like hidden dust motes that only reveal themselves in the light.
Here's my filler words and phrases I use too much, roughly listed from less to most frequent:
just, and (to start a sentence), so (to start a sentence), like, really, very, actually, and also, the fact that, totally, basically, I (long and drawn out because I'm thinking as I say it)
After creating a few videos, I'm able to catch myself more before saying a filler word. It's interesting to figure out what style of video I want to produce. The one I'm going to release next follows the style of my previous ones, which uses significant jumpcutting. This method produces a fast-paced video that's more attention-grabbing, but sacrifices natural tempo and flow. I want to challenge myself to make the next videos:
not scripted
minimal word editing
leave in natural pauses & pacing
The editing part is the most time-intensive, and if I do the original take better, aka speak better, then editing wouldn't be so laborious. I'm curious to see what happens when I release a video with my imperfections left in, the hesitations and slips and pauses. The start of a sentence and changing of it mid-sentence. I already have little patience for adding the bells and whistles to the video - I just want it to be as natural a reflection of reality as possible. Not flashy. I want to focus on content.
My brain is also fried from hours of cutting down 2 hours of footage. It's an incredibly inefficient process I have right now, most likely hindered by my continued reluctance to craft something that I don't consider great. I'm used to writing, in which I can return to my words and edit them, mercifully. But a video, once released, is permanent. It cannot be changed silently like the way I can dip into a blog post and fix a typo ;)
This constraint is a good one. It makes me have to commit. I upload, I leave it alone, and I move on. Always move on. Keep making the next one better. And also, given the vast number of things I wish to share, I should release more raw unedited videos. It would be great if I could just shoot it once and then upload.
Kind of like a gamer would when livestreaming? They don't go back and edit.
Hmmm. Maybe I should have a no-edit policy. I'll work on improving my speech and presentation, and see how that goes. This 2 hours of footage I got yesterday, I'm only keeping about 50% because so much of what I say I whittle out. I'll try to tackle the problem at the source, the best way to solve problems. I will cut the filler.