Guest post: How to make a good tutorial

What you'll see in this video is actually not so different from what you would see in the vast majority of the tricking tutorials on youtube. (Close caption is available, click it!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXqjLb2ANrc

Online tutorials are a big deal in tricking. Despite the increasing number of tricking schools spreading around the world in recent years, it is still known that the vast majority of practitioners are self-taught. This peculiar nature of our activity has made us all develop a propensity to help each other by systematically sharing advice online... which is one of the most fascinating things we have in our community! Unfortunately, though, it often becomes a way of self-aggrandizement for people who have no business at teaching, who end up giving thoughtless advice. Ask any beginner who's having trouble learning a basic trick about the 1000+ tutorials they've seen on the net, and they'll tell you that most of them have been completely useless. ("To do a b-twist, use your b-kick takeoff, wrap your arms and twist!" - Duh! No shit, Sherlock!)

As a student, and as a teacher, this kind of advice drives me nuts! This compulsory drive for self-affirmation many have to teach others everything they learn, as soon as they learn it, regardless of their actual understanding of the move and explicative capabilities, can be as detrimental as it is sometimes useful. So, if you are thinking about filming a tutorial yourself, and you are getting all crazy and enthusiastic about the idea, let me give you some tips so that you don't make yourself look ridiculous.

1. THE OBVIOUS

Ask yourself:

• Can I do the move consistently?

Do not make a tutorial for a move you're just learning yourself. This should be a no-brainer, yet so many people, especially teens, keep acting like they're in a position to teach moves they can barely land. This has to stop. It is one thing to share your new move with your training pals and try to help them achieve it like you just did, but it's another thing to do an instructional video for potentially thousands of trickers to watch. People get hurt following inexperienced advice. You may think you already know what you're doing as soon as you do it, but trust me: you don't. Have some modesty.

• Do I know what's making the move work?

Well, let's say you do land the trick consistently. You've done it for years. Is it enough? No, unfortunately. It might very well not be enough. Are you really conscious about its mechanics? Have you ever tried it differently? Do others who can do the move feel the same way? It's counter-intuitive, but sometimes the more easily you can do something, the less aware you become of how you are actually doing it. Do you still think about how you construct every single phrase while you talk? Of course not. This is why being able to speak fluently and being able to teach a language are two vastly different things. And this is actually the main reason elite tricksters often fail to give good advice on basic moves: those who are in the top tier are usually genetically gifted people, who've built the foundation of their movements at a very young age and now execute most of their tricks so naturally and instinctively that they've long lost their connection to what it feels like to start from scratch. Be mindful!



YouTube video: Tutorial - Axe-AerialTwist - Sammy Vasquez

2. THE AVAILABLE MEANS

Ask yourself:

• Which format should my tutorial have?

Should you film yourself talking about the trick? Should you make a slide-by-slide explanation? With voiceover or superimposed text? The best format for your tutorial depends on your preference, your technical means (camera/place/editing skills) and, most of all, your subjective capacity to convey your knowledge in the most effective and least annoying possible way. Nothing is more exasperating than watching a tutorial filmed in a crowded gym, with people screaming everywhere and background noise so loud you have to rewind the video every few seconds and try to lipread what the dude is saying. Or a videotext tutorial with 9 minutes of fading phrases you need to pause-play the video at an ischemic stroke pace to be able to read, while a 50-second videogame medley keeps looping in the background for the entire time. If you want more people to watch your tutorial, you gotta find a way to make it less disturbing!

Do not make a "live explanation" tutorial if:

• You don't have a decent camera


• You don't have a quiet place to film yourself


• You stutter and/or can't speak loud and clear


• You are not fluent in the language you want your tutorial to have


• You tend to get lost in your talk and forget what you wanted to say


• You don't appear the least bit charismatic

Do not make a "videotext" tutorial if:

• You don't have decent software


• You don't have the essential video editing skills


• You need too many words at once to explain yourself


• You can't keep it within a couple minutes


• You have questionable musical/graphical taste

The more you know yourself, the better your tutorial will be! Maybe you're not very good with words, but have exceptional body language. Maybe you don't have a quiet place to film yourself, but have enough editing skills to make a decent voiceover over a muted clip. Experiment! Show the video to a couple friends before publishing it and ask them if they have trouble following. It's hard to resign yourself to redo the whole thing, but sometimes you'll have to.



YouTube video: Stephen Renney's Cartwheel to Front Flip Tutorial

3. THE EXPLANATION

Ask yourself:

• Can I teach a PROGRESSION to the move, rather than just the move itself?

This is the most underrated factor for 99% of the tutorials on the net, and it's actually the main point of this whole writeup.

You can't possibly expect someone who wants to learn the fulltwist to just try to rotate his backflip 360 degrees after listening to an explanation on how to do it, much like you wouldn't expect him to start juggling knives. This grab-the-balls "do or die trying" approach is not an efficient strategy. It's not how learning new, scary (and potentially dangerous) stuff works. Well, it can work for some gifted people and some mindless kids who're not afraid because they're unaware of the danger, but it's not how it works for the general population.

Providing a ladder to climb up is extremely important both from a safety and from a motivational standpoint: having multiple steps not only makes the learning process safer and less scary, but also less frustrating! Surpassing intermediate goals makes it easier to stay motivated, not only because they make you better visualize your improvement, but also because they make you better realize what you're doing wrong. (How many times have you wondered in despair "What the hell am I missing!?" while struggling for a new trick?)

There's a common misconception that understanding clearly what you have to do implies having the necessary degree of control over your body to do it correctly. If that was the case, why would you bother learning high dive-rolls before frontflips? Because even if you perfectly know you have to jump up before you tuck forward in a frontflip, your body still doesn't! And the higher the fear factor of the trick, the harder it is to make your body follow exactly your commands, so it's nice to have a safer and easier way to teach it to comply in the right way before you actually attempt the trick... for the frontflip, the high dive-roll fits a good deal. This applies to every single trick, but beginner/intermediate tricks especially: always, ALWAYS provide a gradual progression whenever you can! The more you can split the learning process into small steps, the better!

• Can I simplify the move as much as possible before going over the details?

There are two colliding needs that have to be met when trying to learn a new trick: first, as you skim through tutorials on youtube, you feel the need to eviscerate every cognizable crap out of it so you can feel safe and in control once you decide to try it... but then, when you finally get in the gym, that same excess of information you were craving for ends up freezing you! It's the same thing that happens in a lot of dating situations: ever spent so much time wondering how to ask a girl out, that you ended up screwing your chances with her? Yep, it's called "paralysis by analysis" and it's a common psychological anti-pattern: it consists in over-thinking a situation to the point of never taking efficient action.

When you think too much, it doesn't leave room for aggressiveness. And aggressiveness is the ultimate key to land new tricks, (and to pick up girls... but we'll come back to that one some other time, ahah!) so being able to find the right compromise of information for your tutorial will be the greatest gauge for your success as a teacher. My suggestion? When in doubt, split the explanation in 2 parts! First, provide just the bare essential to try the trick safely for the first time without having too much to think about, and only then start explaining how to make it perfect, one detail at a time. We're not gymnasts; it's better for us to land an ugly trick as soon as possible and perfect it overtime, than wussing out for months hoping someday to do it perfectly on the first try.

• Should I really dive into the mechanics of the move?

Personally, I think this whole thing of explaining the physics at work during a trick is a tad over rated. Leave it to sports physiology students to perpetrate this self-pleasing mental masturbation. You can science me all over the place, but you'll never convince me that talking about balance points and angular momentum in a b-twist tutorial will help someone land it. That said, whether and how you decide to include such things in your tutorial is up to you... just please, please, for f**k's sake, don't go overboard with lines, diagrams, and formulae. I've seen some tutorials that look like topology demonstrations! Yes, an arrow to show the direction of a movement could be a useful no-brainer, but keep your theory of relativistic mechanics for yourself! We're trying to learn tricks, not to graduate in physics. 'Nuff said!



YouTube video: "Tricking Tutorials by AlexD" - J-step Cork

4. THE DETAILS

Ask yourself:

• Who is my tutorial addressed to?

As counterintuitive as this might seem, a snapuswipe tutorial hardly needs to be as long and detailed as a 540 kick tutorial. Why? It's a matter of audience: a snapuswipe tutorial is supposed to be directed towards really advanced trickers, people with several years of experience both at kicking and at twisting, whereas a 540 kick is directed towards beginners. Another thing that influences the level of detail a tutorial should have is whether it's supposed to be a complete tutorial for people that never attempted the move or just a series of "fixing tips" for people who have already tried it and are very close or want to perfect it. Different people at different levels could have different needs even for the same trick! The most masochistic thing you could do would be trying to appeal to everyone. Don't be afraid of being specific! Say out loud who your tutorial is addressed to and for what purpose. Want two opposite examples of good specificity? Here you go:

Anthony Mychal's tutorials page on his blog,



And Jeremy Marinas' -3Amigos Tricking- playlist on the 87Eleven Action Design youtube page.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOiUdbpu8nFgHSD8pGYlnW5N1QfBpo9AD

Jeremy holds a small series called "Tuesday trick tip of the week", where he gives his view on some semi-advanced moves. His tutorials would seem pretty scarce to the general audience, but he states pretty clearly that they're not meant to be step-by-step guides. They're just tips for people who already have some experience. They're fine because they're not ambiguous.

On the same, but opposite principle, Anthony spends hundreds of words even to describe the simplest movement. I was skeptical about his page, until he pointed out to me that most of his viewers are people who still aren't in a sufficient physical and mental shape to just throw themselves on the ground. And yes, those people may need a detailed kneeling forward roll tutorial, even if such things would make most active tricksters laugh. Both Anthony and Jeremy aren't worried about appealing to everyone. They do a better job by being specific. Be like them!

5. A FINAL WORD

• "Guess what I have in my pants? A bandana!"

Up above I've recommended not to film yourself talking about the trick if you aren't at least a little bit charismatic. It might sound superficial, but trust me: it's not! Look again at my Nontutorials video embedded at the top of the page and think: you've probably watched it all the way to the end just because of its inherent joke. Had I been completely serious, would you really have listened to me talking in that tone for the whole 4 minutes? This is the final small piece of advice I want to give you with this article: strive to make your video original or funny in some way. It's the cherry on top! As valuable as your explanation could be, it serves nothing if people get bored listening to you. Don't underestimate the power of trivial things. A good joke alone may very well be what will leave your video impressed on people's memory.

- Andrea Rodolfo Nadia