Fantastic article. It aligns with my experience that books can be more useful than video tutorials at teaching you how to create interesting videos. The author

Fantastic article. It aligns with my experience that books can be more useful than video tutorials at teaching you how to create interesting videos. The author did great work to include so many video examples of the ideas too. The author referenced YouTube videos, but I find that books are still even better than paid Udemy videos for developing an intuition on how to make an interesting video. Though YouTube/Udemy tutorials can be great at teaching you how to use editing software, experienced filmmakers who write books are often better at expressing how they built an intuition for when to use a particular edit at a particular time. Murch's "In the Blink of an Eye" (2005) recommended by the author is definitely a great read. I thought it was a great insight that cuts are best when you would naturally want to blink. For a short video, I used the advice once to place cut between scenes when a beat in the background music hit, shortly after a natural pause in a narrative voiceover. Stockman's "How to Shoot Video That Doesn't Suck" (2011) is also a great introduction, which helped me competently film a few videos as a volunteer for non-profits that my colleagues were very happy with. It taught me the fundamentals of making a good educational or trailer-style video that don't relate to software. For example, I learned to film solid, non-shaky shots, to bring the camera close to the speakers, to generally avoid shots longer than 10 seconds, and to take special care to record high-quality audio with a microphone off the camera. This might be very basic advice for people experienced with video, but I remembered having trouble watching videos by people in university, who filmed pretty, creative shots, but recorded dialogue that was hard to understand with poor audio quality. Video tutorials definitely have a place—I would have struggled a lot more to understand Adobe AfterEffects and Premiere Pro without them—but I would say that books are even more fundamental. It's very possible that an entry-level videographer can produce an engaging video by knowing the fundamentals from books and just Windows Movie Maker or iMovie (sticking to basic cuts), as a great edits can happen without more advanced video editing software.