(As a "How To" blog you will want to start with the first post and work your way up to this one)

To Video or Not to Video..

The idea of making a video to pitch my project was almost too much for me. I was camera shy to the extreme, and would venture to say that there are less than 25 pictures of me out there in the world (that I know about at least).

When I read in Kickstarter School that projects with a video vs without is the difference of 50% to 30% in terms of success, I knew I had to confront my fear and just do the video. Yikes! So I did, and guess what I survived... and guess what... by the time I edited the film for three days I was no longer camera shy!

Here is the section of the Kickstarter School that discusses the video: http://www.kickstarter.com/help/school#making_your_video

Tips:  
 1. There are a lot of videos on Kickstarter that are super slick. There are ones that are shot by total professionals. There are some that look like Disney made them and had a $10,000 budget.  After spending a few hours on Kickstarter watching other artists videos you sort of get the idea that you should give up before you even start. I am here to tell you that an honest pitch, well explained will do the trick.

2.  There is hope!  I discovered a wonderful and affordable software to edit footage. I literally typed in "video editing software for idiots" into Google and this popped up: http://www.avs4you.com/AVS-Video-Editor.aspx
It is so easy! You just save your footage from your camera/camcorder to your desktop. Then open the program, open the footage and then drag the file into the right spot on the screen (red arrow).  Once you have the footage in, you can cut it, add music, add sound from a microphone, add stills and do all sort of fun transitions from shot to shot.  This program lets you use quite a few different file types. I used AVI and made the final film a MOV (which was the best quality type of file).

Final Advice:

My video is 8 minutes with a 3 minute slideshow tacked on. This is too long.  I wanted it to be 5 minutes which is really a perfect length. Unfortunately, the weather turned on me. I shot the footage at the gardens figuring I would see how it looked and then if needed go back and re-shoot when I knew what I really needed. Great plan but the next day it rained, and it poured for 10 days straight.  I was stuck with the footage and it was too long.  Anyway, the video is still doing the trick at 8 minutes BUT, I have a lot of people not making it through to the end. One nice thing that Kickstarter does is give you the ability to see statistics.  From my "Dashboard" I can see that out of every 100 plays only 30 people make it to the end.  All in all that is not a bad statistic, but if the video was 5 minutes or less I bet it would be higher!