Study The Film

Practice does not make perfect, practice makes permanent. That's why it is so important to make sure that you are practicing and performing the right way. Without reviewing and critiquing recordings of your performances can mean that you are unknowingly cementing the wrong habits into your work. This means you are in essence working hard to be the best at making those same small mistakes over and over again.

It has also been said by many high performance professionals that a few hours of film study can provide more benefits to learning and improving from mistakes than a year of just practice.

Making improvements are my favorite benefit to providing keepsake videos for my clients. I have found them to be very helpful for me to be able to review my performances in order to improve song selection as well as my on-mic announcing.

As a result, announcements have gotten cleaner and my timing is better making for ever more relaxed and smooth running receptions.

Reviewing recordings of my performances have been a big part of my life for a long time. I always reviewed every interview I ever did while hosting the live music and interview show Live@Lunch on KRFC Ft Collins. In the 6 years of being a host from 2009 - 2015 I was a part of well over 100 one hour shows, many of which can still be heard at noon Monday - Friday on 88.9 FM in Ft Collins or at www.krfcfm.org 

Reviewing each of these shows allowed me to analyze how I as the host was pacing and framing the interview portions. Was I talking too much? Or allowing the musicians to talk for too long? Was I including the station id's and announcements correctly? Those small mistakes began to fade away and I was able to develop the right habits to where I was doing the right thing without needing to think about it. That's mastery, and that is what experience combined with critical review can create.

I see so many similarities between my experiences on community radio and MC/DJing weddings. Sometimes when working a wedding, I have that old familiar feeling of working the airwaves feeling like I nailed an announcement or an intro and feeling so happy about all that time I was able to volunteer and come to really understand how beneficial it is to "study the film."