A great speaker makes every single person in the auditorium, in the boardroom, in the workshop feel like they are speaking to them. A speaker creates that sense of intimacy, and they do that in part by feeding off the energy of that room, of those people in the audience.
Now if you’re doing video, specifically a recorded video like this one, you don’t have that audience, you don’t have that energy to feed off of, and that can be a little discomforting.
But the thing to remember is that video already has the idea of intimacy sewn up; it’s part of it, so instead of going from ‘here’s you, and here’s the audience’ and you’re trying to create a sense of intimacy, video brings you and that person that you’re looking at right up close to each other.
So, you still get that sense of intimacy happening—you get it happening even more because when you get used to doing video and you’re looking at the lens the way I am (I’m actually not looking at the lens, I am looking beyond it because I’m seeing you) video becomes the other side of the coin from speaking to people in public from a stage. Video is the other half of that coin. Both of them create the intimacy that you need when you are getting a message across; they’re just slightly different ways of doing it.
Think of it like a toolbox—or a toy box and there you are out in the sandbox and you’ve got this little plastic tub and you’re pulling out all your stuff and you’re gonna create this little world, this little space that you are going to inhabit. It’s exactly the same thing on video. That audience is there, they are in your pocket.