Produce your own special. Keep away from gate keepers. (work in progress)

—Disclaimer—

I am still figuring this all out and can share that I have found some small amount of success with what I have done in comedy. I am in no way an expert on any of the following and waive any and all claims to anything and everything. These are all purely opinions/thoughts based on what I have done and am doing.

—end disclaimer—

Today more than ever is the time to make your own content. DO NOT LET GATEKEEPERS SLOW YOU DOWN AND DRAIN WHAT YOU CAN USE FOR YOURSELF. SPOILER ALERT - YOU NEED TO LEARN HOW TO EDIT VIDEOS WITH PROFESSIONAL SOFTWARE. I use Premiere Pro and yes it is nearly $60 a month to use.

Yes. Arguments can be made for gatekeepers. Should everyone be doing comedy? No. The people who should do comedy are the ones who want to put in the work and time and honesty.

As you go down the comedy road, people in your life will want to come see you. Tell them no, go out there and hit as many open mics as you can. Develop a 30 minute act. Make sure all jokes work in that 30 minute act by getting laughs for each one on at least 3 different shows. Once your 30 minutes is set, find a venue, get a show, and THEN INVITE ALL THOSE PEOPLE.

Save money. $1800 to $2500 should do (not including the video editing). Find a small venue. If you spent your time developing your act, you should know of several venues and should have existing relationships with people who run shows at the venues. Make sure the room/area where you perform is closed off from any other rooms so no sound carries over. You may only have one shot. You don’t need a theater. You need a small space you can fit at least 20 people into with some cameras, and a place to perform. If sound is built in, terrific. If not, you can rent the necessary equipment. Lighting can also be brought in (addressed later).

Ask the venue if you can tape your first “album” as a show. Get a yes. Offer them 100% of food and beverage sales. Make it as attractive as possible for them to say yes to you. Maybe you offer them the ticket sales too. You should be able to just offer food and beverage sales and you keep the ticket sales. Of course you can also rent venues, entirely budget dependent. It doesn’t have to be a theater. Look for places with performance areas/live music/poetry readings. Look at breweries/bars/distilleries/restaurants/libraries (some libraries have little auditoriums)/universities…

Find a videographer (google “videographer” (insert location)) and ask for pricing, work something out with the resources you have. Go to the facebook group dedicated to standup comedy in the city where you live and put in a post “looking for a videographer to film my first special on a budget, please DM if interested or if you know anyone.”

Don’t spend more than $1500 for 2-3 cameras and make sure there is a camera operator for each camera being used and they have the sufficient memory cards and batteries. If you have 3 cameras, get one dedicated to filming the audience. If just 2 cameras, have one doing a center shot (as in capturing the center of the stage/performance area) and another off to the side.

For filming, you might only get 15 people in the door. That is ok. Have them sit in front of the cameras/in a way that makes the room look way fuller than it actually is. All that matters in the end is the final edit. Build your filming around the attendance of the show: do not have an angle that doesn’t show any audience. You want to see silhouettes of heads laughing in the bottom 25-30% of the frame.

When talking with your videographer, tell them you are going to do the editing and all you need them to do prior to delivering the full length versions from each camera is to line up the finished audio recording with the video files so they all start at the same point (spoiler alert, you need to learn to edit your own clips to have an edge over other comedians).

Find a sound engineer. First ask your videographer if they know one. If not go to concert venues and talk to the person running the sound board and ask them if they would be willing to record the audio for a live comedy taping…tell them it is just two instrument feeds (the mic for your voice and mics for the audience) instead of the 15 they are used to). Tell them you would like to record the audio from the soundboard.

If the venue has an existing soundboard, make sure to get that information to the audio engineer prior to recording so they can advise what can be done. If you have to bring in equipment, ask the audio person what they think will work. You should be able to hire someone to do the initial recording for $200 to $300 or so and then ask them what their rate would be to “master” it, simply meaning go through the recorded version and make the necessary adjustments so it sounds good for distribution on YouTube/Vimeo/Social Media.

Make sure the videographer and sound engineer talk/coordinate. You want the sound to be recorded directly from the soundboard. Also ask the audio engineer for the best way to capture the audio from the audience. “Pencil Mics” are great to hang from the ceilings (with the cords they are attached to) and can be plugged into the sound board.

Here’s the big part - learn how to video edit at a beyond basic level. I use Adobe Premiere Pro. It took several months to learn the basics, many of them highly frustrating. Once I got it, I got it and it allowed me to do everything I need to do, including the highly valued clip cutting for social media/youtube shorts. This will also save you money with the videographer. Don’t rely on anyone to edit for you.

Lighting: hopefully the venue has installed lighting for live performances. If not, not a problem. You know the construction lights that you clip onto walls/pillars? Those with a small watt soft white lightbulb work great, especially if you can hang them from the ceiling directly above you. Turn off all the other lights and have that. To enhance it slightly, get a $50 “spotlight” from Amazon to create a more spotlight look (make sure to use the two).

Certainly if you have the budget you can hire professionals to bring in and set up the lighting, but you don’t need much. Just make sure the lights for the audience are off.

Now - you have a venue, you have a videographer, you have an audio engineer, you have 30 minutes of material, you have lighting, and you are learning how to edit. Next: get an audience. Invite all of the people you know. You see why I said early to not invite people you know to your early shows? See why a smaller venue is better?

Look at partnering with a local charity and offer to donate either a percentage or all of your ticket sales to them if they promote it (I recommend having a prior established relationship here).

Hang flyers, do social ads, do whatever you can to get people in the door. I partnered with a charity and donated 100% of the ticket sales to them and the brewery where I did it was in the town where I lived for 3 years so we had a small group of people based on that and the charity filled in the rest for us.

Get the venue to promote it with posters in the bathroom with QR ticket sales codes (I used eventbrite which worked fine). Have small little posters at the tables/bar of the venue. Get in good with the staff. Do whatever you have to.

Show time. You most likely only have one shot. Make sure you practiced and know your set in and out. When you get on stage remember, you don’t have to be perfect. This is your show and you can direct the audience to react how you want them to (for the most part).

For example, I wanted to make sure my last punchline got a big laugh and a standing ovation, so I simply asked for that at the beginning of my set - knowing I could edit the special to make it look like it was at the end.

Spoiler alert - I am going to keep in that part at the beginning and also edit in at the end. If you flub a joke, tell the audience you flubbed and need to start over and make a game of it. Make it fun for you and them.

Another trick I did for editing, was to sit in a stool. By sitting in a stool, I am in a mostly stationary position the entire time. That way, if I flubbed something or found that I could edit something to look better, it was way easier to hide in editing because I was sitting in the stool and not pacing around the stage.

Have someone you know and trust emcee for you and have one or two other comics do a few short sets ahead of you to get the crowd ready. If you know of comics with material that can be done to set your set up nicely, do that. During my special I asked a friend who had material about being a “Colorado Native” and I knew that would be an excellent set up for my material about being born in Colorado so I specifically asked him to do that set right before I performed. It worked.

Lights. Camera. Action. Once you are on stage, that stage and that performance is all yours. You want to be up there knowing you did everything you could to put yourself in a position to succeed. More importantly you don’t want to think you could have done more, but didn’t.

Next steps - see “YouTube vs Instagram for Comedians” blog post.