EmanMade – Beginnings of a YouTube channel

Starting this thread to document my new and probably largest project under taking. I’m going to start a YouTube channel. I’ve been a fan of the Maker culture and scene for a long time and follow quite a few builders across all social media. But YouTube content is by far my favorite way to keep up to date with everyone. Big fan of Tested.com and the stuff they do over there as well as well as some of the content that Core77 sponsors. After consuming so much content over the past years I figured it was my time to try and contribute as well.

Step 0: The groundwork
Was actually listening to makingitpodcast.com a podcast about literally Making stuff and YouTube. I just listened to the entire backlog of episodes and have been slowly dabbling with the idea. These guys are great and really helped plant the seed to do this. I started listening because I wanted to listen to more podcast about people actually making things and it turned out to be if not more about how they made a career out of Video Content and the ins/outs up/downs of the journey. It’s a very fun group of guys to listen to.

Step 1. Figuring out what type of content I can make.
Essentially this is just going to be a more well documented version of my instagram. http://instagram.com/EMANCARRILLO Which has a lot of the little side projects I dabble in outside of work. It’s not super focused on one style of project. It’s sometime furniture, electronics, house goods or even art pieces. This may evolve if I find out that being all over the place doesn’t make sense for the channel. But as of right now the idea is to just bring people along with all the weird hobbies and projects I get into.

Step 2. Branding.

A big thing they talk about early in the MakingIT podcast is to just have a defined visual style. It helps people recognize your content and helps link all your stuff together. Again this will most likely evolve but I wanted to get something started. I’m not a graphic designer, But I do like to think I’m a designer that helps build brands. (Usually lifestyle brands.) So it was a fun challenge to try and tackle my personal Making Brand.
I began by doing a large name dump and brainstorm around the name. Figuring combos out of Making, Make, Maker, Made, Eman, Emmanuel, Design, Goods, Products etc. And just kit bashing things together. The problem was finding a name that I could buy a domain for. Because I personally think if you can’t get .COM domain, its not worth having as a domain. So things like DesignIt, DesignAndMake, etc were immediately out. I eventually tried as was able to grab EmanMade.com which I like because its easy enough to type out, but unique enough to not be forgotten. I then tried to grab all handles on social media. Twitter, insta, facebook, etc. Which I wasn’t 100% successful at :frowning: So I might keep my emancarrillo handle, since I have a monopoly on that handle. Not sure yet. Need to figure out if it’s worth combining the two online handles.

Step 2.1 Logo.
Pretty much browsed dribble and tried to find something I liked. Grabbed a lot of reference and settled on one image that I really liked.
open-uri20151228-3-6mt2j.gif
Broke down why I liked it (Isometric, electronic based, clean thick line weight) and tried to incorporate that into a logo. (I’ll try and find my early doodles) Ended up making a fun little PCB based design that incorporated some components into an E and distilled that down into more iconic word mark and logo set. I liked the fun Arudino E and plan on making other more graphical takes on the logo to show different process. Electronics, Welding, Woodworking, Casting, etc, thought it would be a fun way to play with the branding a bit.


To do:

Step 3. How do I actually make this stuff?
Whats my content plan/roadmap. What can I actually shoot? And how do I shoot it (I have an iPhone 6 and a GF2 right now), editing, video equipment, sound equipment. Can I borrow equipment from friends/work? Premiere or Final Cut, Motion graphics, Creative Commons Music? Do I have a visual style? If so how do I define all that?

All stuff I’m diving into right now. I understand my first few videos wont be perfect. But hard not to dive super deep into all this. The making stuff I can do all day and night, its the documenting and edit part that’s new to me, fun stuff to learn, but lots to learn here.

Step 4. How do I get this in front of the people that want to see this?
Content/ Marketing strategy. The part that is the most foreign to me. How to do this in a way that gains me followers and gets my content out to as many people as possible. I’m doing this to try and inspire more people to make. I love the instgram community and how supportive it is over there and the YouTube community looks like it more of the same. Everyone looking out for each other and one big happy making family. I don’t want to just make all this content only for it to fall flat and never be seen, I want to actively be part of the comminuty that I lovbe so much already.

So I’ve been listening to some podcast and trying to learn more about social media/brand growth strategies. Which is actually very interesting. A lot of it geared toward entrepreneurs and startups. But its a very interesting world I never really dived deep into. Also has given me idea on how to structure my personal brand and online presence too.

Anyways in the end I’d love to make enough off the videos to fund the next project. I’m sure it might take a year or so to eventually get there. But it would be fun for it to be a way to fund my hobbies. Example I want to make a small (well designed) rotocaster and rotoacast a small vinyl that I designed in CAD/ 3D printed and made molds for. That has been on my to do list for awhile, just takes the back burner to easier/cheaper projects to accomplish. So hopefully in the end this helps enable all that.

Been working on a few Video Bumpers. Playing around with the E and making some dynamic logos based around the project ideas. All of this was done in After Effects. Bulk of this I learned from this one video. Summit 37 - Delicious Web Build - After Effects - YouTube and the cool line drawing effect from this AE Basics 25: Shape Layers Part 9 - Trim Paths on Vimeo So with those two videos I was able to make these. Simple now that I did it twice.

Electronic:

and

Woodworking/Metal Working

This is awesome Eman, I’ve always enjoyed your side projects and it’d be really cool to see your process!

On the branding and social media aspects I thought I’d share a few Youtube channels that I subscribe to that are most memorable. Hopefully there’s something to learn from why their channels are favored vs. others.

  1. Alan Thrall - Fitness Youtube Channel -
    STOP deadlifting until you learn how to do THIS/How To:Romanian DL - YouTube

Alan’s editing almost seems to be intentionally poor, but the information is straight forward, and has taken off on the web communities. Strong personality, a good amount of humor, and finishes all of his videos with an outgoing tag-line “Train Untamed”. He does a good job at keeping vocabulary simple and conversational.

  1. Ross Tran - Concept Art Youtube Channel -
    RossDraws: KORRA!! (Avatar) - YouTube

Another really strong personality, non-stop energy, and a high entertainment value. I think Ross is pretty clever in the way he delivers his content, rather than get technical and explain every step he keeps his videos around 5-7 minutes, and picks a few things to highlight in each video. Camera placement is also intimate and a view that I haven’t seen before from a drawing video which caught my attention right away.

I’m excited to see what you come up with, good luck!

Thanks for this, great to see a few channels I haven’t stumbled across before. I can see why Ross is popular. Very high energy and fun. I’m debating on the in front of the camera/ personality thing right now. Not sure how well I’d do with that. But I think I just need to try it out.


My goal is to experiment with a few style of videos first and see what feels most comfortable.

And going to try a sketch to product approach. Like a commentated time lapse of the entire design process.
Just need to figure out how to make it not be a long video.


After I try out those approaches. I hopefully I will have a better understanding of what works best with my side project workflow.

Hi Eman, great idea. Tested is one of the few channels I watch and it is great, if you can approach it from a product designer’s viewpoint that will definitely give you a unique channel. I suggest keeping videos around 7-10 minutes so you can go in depth while still short enough for a quick break. To not handle too many things at the same time, include some context/community involvement (the guy going to the frozen yoghurt place for his base image works great) and to make your content recognizable not just with a logo but with your language and setting as well. Rhett and Link from Good Mythical Morning do that well too https://www.youtube.com/user/rhettandlink2 . And of course, people will want to really learn something from your videos.

I gave a similar idea a shot a two years ago. I wanted a way to share projects. I enjoyed dabbling in cinematography and enjoyed making things, so I figured I might as well give Youtube a try.

So the most important take away, I stopped after 2 videos. :laughing: With that said, I’d consider trying again.

I didn’t really think my strategy well enough at first. I ended up making polished DIY videos rather than videos documenting design projects. Trying to keep a high production value is incredibly hard when making something. I fond I was putting more effort in the video than in the projects. I’d end up with half-baked projects I wasn’t super interested in by the end and just wanted to be over with… It just killed the fun of making things for me.

I see that so far you’re aiming for highly polished content. And I’d really discourage you from it. Keep it raw, keep it about the story. Sure you can make TV quality content at home but the amount of time required to do so is crazy.

Workshops typically have poor lighting and getting a good angle is a pain in the butt as there’s always something in the way. My advice on that front is to have decent lighting throughout your workspace and use the videos as motivation to keep things tidy and organized so you’re ok with shooting in any direction.

I’d really suggest keeping it about the project. Why are you making it, why are you making it that way - what’s your thought process? Spend more time explaining the design and thought process than the manufacturing. You don’t need to give enough information for every layperson to reproduce your project.

Have a look at Casey Neistat (especially prior to his vlogs), Colin Furze and Linustechtips. I really think Linus perfected it to an art. Most of his videos are of him talking in one take and B-roll footage just flies over top to show detail. It must be very fast to shoot and edit everything this way and it makes it very engaging for the viewer.

Though I’m slightly embarrassed, I’ll share one of my video so hopefully you can learn from it… Way too many shots, way too much editing, heck I even produced the music… voice-over in my second language was also painful :laughing:

Thinking about this makes me want to give it another shot though. I’d just make it way simpler and shorter. I’d probably do it with short clips on Instagram and then use that as B-roll for a long form video of the whole project on Youtube…

Great to see this. Im surprised more industrial designers aren’t on YouTube. I can only think of a few, it really is a good mix of all our skills. I


I’d really suggest keeping it about the project. Why are you making it, why are you making it that way - what’s your thought process? Spend more time explaining the design and thought process than the manufacturing. You don’t need to give enough information for every layperson to reproduce your project.

Im finishing up my very first video right now and I agree, this how to DIY approach is easy to do, but doesnt really showcase any unique skill that I bring to the table. I might still do them, but Im going try and at least keep it focused on very design forward DIY projects and not really utility focused one.

Example, just shot and did a rough edit of this project. Emmanuel Carrillo on Instagram: "Made a thing today. Outlet + USB extension box. Takes maybe 10 minutes to assemble and less than $40 in materials. #instructable?"
It’s a nice looking product, but no real process is shown. Next video I have queued up and in the works (furniture piece) will dive more into the design process/why of things.



Have a look at Casey Neistat (especially prior to his vlogs), Colin Furze and Linustechtips. I really think Linus perfected it to an art. Most of his videos are of him talking in one take and B-roll footage just flies over top to show detail. It must be very fast to shoot and edit everything this way and it makes it very engaging for the viewer.

I’m going to have to get use to this. Just doing my voice over was painful for me too. I use so many umms and breaks. I had to edit it to be smooth. When I practice speaking everything comes out smoothly and succinct. But as soon as I know I’m recording, everything goes to crap and I have to do 5-6 takes of the speaking part. Eventually I had to say this is good enough and move on.


Thinking about this makes me want to give it another shot though. I’d just make it way simpler and shorter. I’d probably do it with short clips on Instagram and then use that as B-roll for a long form video of the whole project on Youtube…

Do it. Id love to see more designers take on the YouTube age. I love watching YouTube, but hardly see videos where I’m like. I reallly want to make that. I feel like designers could give enough umph to projects to make me actually go out and create what I watch. Plus id love to have someone doing this alongside me. Be fun to have someone to talk to and bounce ideas off on the more technical side of things.

I absolutely love Tested. One of the few sites I pay for premium content and actually have flown to to a few of their live events. When they were looking for new hires. I strongly considered applying. I wanted to be their Product design correspondent and help them review products with a designers view on it. But I realized I had zero article or video producing stuff to show. If I could get to that level and become a more design focused version of them Id be happy.

Hey Eman, there are definitely not enough product designers on YouTube, the more the better. Here’s my two cents for what they’re worth:

Product designers are well known for being perfectionists, but as long as you get the basics, good sound and interesting imagery, story etc, YouTube is fairly forgiving. As you’ve found, getting good narration without ums and eeerrrrs is really hard, it really slows things down with take after take, or lots of editing if you try and get it perfect. So I wouldn’t worry about a few slip ups. I found I just can’t naturally say what I want to off the top of my head, I have to have it written down. If I’m doing a piece to camera, I use an iPad with the Teleprompter Pro app. I built a Teleprompter from a picture frame and black T-shirt, which works fine and cost next to nothing. There are videos on YouTube about it.

I also write all my scripts on iPad which I can copy straight into the Teleprompter app. After uploading to YouTube, I import the same script as a transcript into YouTube, so every video has subtitles, this allows YouTube to rank your videos more easily and more highly. The description is also important for searches and it’s worth putting in lots of effort on this, there is plenty of advice out there.

Good sound is really important. I started off using my cameras microphone, which was fine for a while, until I got lots of complaints, sound is really effected by the room, an empty room means the sound bounces around, so the fuller the room with soft furnishings, the better. low battery also has an effect. I bought a zoom h1 and a good microphone (rode) which set me back about 160 bucks. It was a big investment, but well worth it. So I record my image and sound separately and combine when editing. I thought it would be a real ball ache, but it’s actually fairly easy and makes much much better quality.

If you come up with an idea, you might not want to search YouTube to see if it’s been done, you will never do it in the same way and seeing other videos can put you off and really effect your output, a trap I often fall into. There are over 1000 videos on making a DIY camera stabiliser for example, but I still wanted to make one. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

One of the biggest things to grow your subscriber list and something I can’t do, is to regularly release videos, if you can consistently release a video every Friday for example, this will help increase subscribers. If you’re planning a campaign, it maybe worth having several Videos ready to go before you release the first one, unless you can make them really quickly.

I think the reason there are not many other product designers making YouTube videos is that it’s hard enough designing and making an object, but having to stop and film it, edit etc, doubles the time it takes. Stopping to frame the shot, make sure it’s in focus, press record, drill the hole or what ever action your doing, stop, move the tripod etc takes much longer, than just drilling the hole and getting on with it, so if you have a friend who’s willing to help, this will be invaluable. Adam Savage in Tested is lucky enough to have this. I recently watched him making a sword prop from hell boy, having a camera man who also asks questions saves a heap of time.

I make all my music in GarageBand on iPad, which is really easy, but there are lots of royalty free sites out there, but not many tunes that fit what I’ve made, so sometimes it’s a lot easier to find the piece of music first and edit the footage to fit than the other way around.

My final suggestion is if you don’t already have one, buy a cheap photography reflector from Amazon, it will make a huge difference to the quality of your videos by getting more light on the scene.

Looking forward to seeing what you produce. PT

I’ve got to get my act together as well. I’ve started a channel for sketch videos but don’t have many up there.

Well that’s all the pep talk I needed, haha . Drop me a pm if you want to get in touch. Speaking of technical side, I’m actually a mechanical engineer, we might have even more to chat and bounce off each other!

Looking forward to your first video!

I built a Teleprompter from a picture frame and black T-shirt, which works fine and cost next to nothing. There are videos on YouTube about it.

I also write all my scripts on iPad which I can copy straight into the Teleprompter app. After uploading to YouTube, I import the same script as a transcript into YouTube, so every video has subtitles, this allows YouTube to rank your videos more easily and more highly. The description is also important for searches and it’s worth putting in lots of effort on this, there is plenty of advice out there.

Good idea. Script helped with my voices overs. but the Telepromter should help with the Talking head videos. Looks fairly easy to make.


Good sound is really important. I started off using my cameras microphone, which was fine for a while, until I got lots of complaints, sound is really effected by the room, an empty room means the sound bounces around, so the fuller the room with soft furnishings, the better. low battery also has an effect. I bought a zoom h1 and a good microphone (rode) which set me back about 160 bucks. It was a big investment, but well worth it. So I record my image and sound separately and combine when editing. I thought it would be a real ball ache, but it’s actually fairly easy and makes much much better quality.

Yeah I noticed. I made my first mistake on trying to do my narration right while I was recording some steps. Found out afterwords that If I wanted to cut things shorter it messed with my script plus it was being recorded off the camera mic so it was a bit echo-y. So editing and composing in in camera didn’t really work out. Maybe latter I’ll get better.

I ended up getting a Blue Yeti to do the voice over and it seems to work great. It really picks up everything in the room though. Didn’t take too long to learn how to edit the sound (normalizing and reducing noise), but I’m sure I could do a better job. A friend also let me borrow there Rode VideoMic Pro so that should help for the on camera audio.


One of the biggest things to grow your subscriber list and something I can’t do, is to regularly release videos, if you can consistently release a video every Friday for example, this will help increase subscribers. If you’re planning a campaign, it maybe worth having several Videos ready to go before you release the first one, unless you can make them really quickly.

I wanted to do this originally, to have 3 or so videos released at once. So that people have a backlog of projects to look at. But honestly ill probably just release them as they are done. Sorta gives me closure to the project a bit and I can get acclimated to the upload and backend process a bit. Plus it feels like progress to release videos.


I think the reason there are not many other product designers making YouTube videos is that it’s hard enough designing and making an object, but having to stop and film it, edit etc, doubles the time it takes. Stopping to frame the shot, make sure it’s in focus, press record, drill the hole or what ever action your doing, stop, move the tripod etc takes much longer, than just drilling the hole and getting on with it, so if you have a friend who’s willing to help, this will be invaluable. Adam Savage in Tested is lucky enough to have this. I recently watched him making a sword prop from hell boy, having a camera man who also asks questions saves a heap of time.

I did notice this. It does slow things down a bit. But not terribly. The biggest thing I noticed is that its just as much work if not more to edit the videos. Going through the video and editing it down, pairing it to music and doing all the overlays takes a bit of time. Its fun having it come together, but there is a lot more to creating the content than I accounted for. It’s not just import the video and spend an hour editing it.

My final suggestion is if you don’t already have one, buy a cheap photography reflector from Amazon, it will make a huge difference to the quality of your videos by getting more light on the scene.

Definitely going to have to pick one up. Been borrowing a lot of stuff from work and friends and really need to build out my video gear a bit over the next few months.

I’ve been in the YouTube game for a little while. Top 5 suggestions:

  • Keep your brand generic - you never know what you’ll be focusing in on in a year or 6. You don’t want to start over. Subscriber numbers help…

  • Thumbnails are important - they are the #1 thing to generate interest in your video, even more than the content.

  • Just do it… now, and keep doing it. - Your first 20 videos will be mediocre anyway… don’t get hung up on production value… it doesn’t matter that much.

  • Do it because you enjoy it. It shows in your videos, I’ve met plenty of miserable YouTubers that do it for the money and are totally burnt out.

  • Production for YouTube is way different than TV. Get to the point quickly and keep your audience engaged. No more than 10 seconds per single shot is a good rule of thumb. If something doesn’t change within 10 seconds in a shot (like talking to the camera), expect your viewers to click on something else.

I wish someone had told me these few things about 5 years ago.

YouTube is fun but you should check your ego at the door. It will not make you famous. Also… things that are popular on youtube are not the things you might think. YouTube is for entertainers. If you can take a subject and make it entertaining you’ll do great.

I hope this helps a little.

Tony D.

Good advice Tony. I think I need to work on my thumbnails a bit.

Whats up Sain!

Great post man! Glad you are getting into youtube. I love youtube, I think video is the most fun and interesting way to document your projects or whatever you decide to do.

I’ve been making youtube videos since I was 15, but never consistently…which is what I attribute to my lack of followers.

The biggest downfall I had was not doing one topic long enough on a regular basis, which essentially how people find you and know what you do. Viewers and subscribers value consistency and that’s how you get them to keep coming back. I find that I do videos for a short while, then I stop due to school, loss of interest, or for whatever reasons…

My simple advice would be to keep at it, make videos on a regular basis, be consistent, and dont spend so much time on each one.

My second biggest downfall is promotion of my videos as you mentioned. All I did before was upload my videos and post them to facebook. With my newest channel and series of videos, I’m trying very hard to promote and spread the video as much as I can through facebook, instagram, this website, and just trying to be more apart of the community.

Here is my channel, check it out!

Best of luck to you! I’m here to talk about cameras, lenses, lights, audio, editing if you wish to partake in that discussion!

Wow so I started this in April. I have slowly been chipping away at this and have learned a ton in the few videos I’ve tried to make. There’s a lot of video production stuff I had zero idea about before getting into this, but I’ve slowly been picking it up. Hoping to do this more consistently in the future.

Wanted to post these here and hopefully keep a better log in the future. Newest one is at the top and I personally think its the best of the 3. Which i would expect. Still a long way from where I want to be. But done is better then perfect.

These videos are really great to watch.
You have done an excellent job editing and putting them together. The steps are easy to follow and i like the use of CAD as well at the start.

Keep up the great work :slight_smile:

Also, that maker space looks amazing!

Agreed. Consider me subbed.