Stephanie Angelo | Public Speaking Demo Reel

Stephanie was looking for a professional, well-paced, and well-structured video to promote herself as a public speaker in order to get more speaking roles at upcoming events. Unfortunately, she had hired videographers in the past that had not done a very good job (horrific, yellow lighting that they were unable to correct out, shaky footage that was poorly stabilized, and no real point to their video) and had no footage for me to edit. We came up with the plan to have me come to her next seminar and shoot some footage that I could create a reel out of.

As I had not shot for a speaking reel before, I was unsure of where to start, so I did a lot of research. I came across a few businesspeople online who were speaking about what they want out of an HR consultant. This helped me form an idea of what people in her industry are looking for out of her and helped me form an audience as well as an objective for the piece. I then watched countless demo reels from all kinds of speakers, motivational, financial, HR, medical, and started making a list of what did and didn’t work in my eyes. Now I had a fantastic idea in mind of what I needed to get while I was at her seminar especially considering I only had this one shot.

I needed a partner for the shoot to operate a second camera and had someone locked in that I worked with consistently, but he had to drop out at the last minute - about 10 hours before the shoot. I did the only thing I could, which was ask my girlfriend Alexis to come along and assist me for the day. That actually worked out fantastic as all I really needed was someone to pan a wide shot as Stephanie moved, and Alexis did a great job. I also took two testimonials after she finished, which she posted on her site.

We captured the event on a GH5S on a Ronin-S gimbal and a GH4 on a tripod with a fluid head. We took a live feed out of her microphone using a Zoom H4n and used a Sennheiser G3 for capturing audio during testimonials. The video was edited in Premiere, with motion graphics and transitions custom created in After Effects. The heavy color correction was done in Resolve to get the image to look normal under the terrible conference room lighting conditions. We had planned for that in advance and made sure our camera settings were there to support us.

Camera Operator: Alexis Vigil