It wasn't the camera
Most of you know I DJ. I go by L8DY8 (Lady 8), and I picked it up a couple of years ago. It’s something I’d always wanted to do, and I really enjoy it.
I started a YouTube channel as a kind of experiment. I’ve filmed sets outside, in front of a green screen, wherever I could make it work.
Then I went to a DJ academy in Tulum, and they filmed my set properly. A drone, several cameras, the whole thing. I came home wanting that for my next video.
Which is where I got stuck. I could say I wanted it higher definition. I could say I wanted a drone, or more angles. But I didn’t really know what I was talking about, so how was I supposed to tell somebody else?
I feel like a lot of people get stuck right there, with a website, a logo, a kitchen, the caterer for a party. You know it’s wrong, you just can’t say why. So you either say nothing, or you say it doesn’t feel right, and that doesn’t help anybody.
So before I hired anyone, I sat down with Claude, the AI I use, and just talked it through. No clever prompt. I talked to it the way I’d talk to a really smart friend who happens to know cameras. Here’s my video, here’s the one from Tulum, I don’t know what the difference is, help me figure it out. And I said what I always say: if there’s something you don’t understand or need more information about, ask me.
We pulled thirty six still frames out of my video and put them on one page. You could see it in about two seconds. Thirty two of them were the exact same shot.
Then the part I didn’t expect. My footage was already 4K. The high definition I was going to ask for, I already had.
By the end I actually had words for what was wrong: coverage, depth of field, lighting that isn’t flat.
So I wrote a brief, with Claude. More than once it decided something I hadn’t decided, and I told it no. It made golden hour, that soft light right before sunset, a requirement, when I can usually only film during the day, around school pickup. It wrote a whole page of rules and left no room for the person I was hiring. And the thing I want most from whoever films this is ideas I wouldn’t have had myself.
Then I sent the brief to a videographer. Even after all that, it was long, and she told me, kindly, that it was a lot. She’d gotten a little lost in it and asked if we could get on a call. Once I walked her through it out loud, her read was that the work itself was simple.
What I actually needed was to know what I wanted, clearly enough to hand it to someone else.
Here’s a prompt to try. Next time something you made or paid for feels off and you can’t say why, paste this into ChatGPT, Claude, whichever one you use, and then just talk:
Something I’m working on isn’t coming out the way I want, and I can’t put my finger on why. I’m going to describe it as best I can. If there’s something you don’t understand, you’re not sure about, or you need more information on, ask me clarifying questions, one at a time, so we can work on this together. Don’t try to fix anything yet. When we’re done, help me sum it up in a few sentences I can give to whoever’s doing the work.
The one at a time part matters. Ask for everything at once and you’ll get a wall of questions and answer four of them.
The next video isn’t filmed yet, so I don’t know if I asked for the right things. I’ll tell you either way.
If you try the prompt on something, hit reply and tell me what it turned up.
Faith