What if you could find the best training content on YouTube without spending hours of your life watching the first 30 seconds of the bad stuff?

YouTube is full of amazing content, created by generous and entrepreneurial filmmakers who have been there ahead of you. It’s also full of inaccurate (and just plain bad) content generated by inexperienced filmmakers and teenagers with webcams. And until you actually watch the content, all you have to go on is a thumbnail and a pithy title in YouTube’s search results.

Well, here at moviola.com we’re working to fix that. In addition to the great free homegrown content on moviola.com, we’ve begun carefully compiling “the best of the rest.” It’s a curated list of training and informational content from YouTube, Vimeo, and other sources that is worthy of your time.

Über articles for ease of access

Our latest addition to the Tips and Techniques section is the concept of über articles on specific subjects. For example, what if you need to stage a fake fight for your next short? Pop over to moviola.com and check out the article on Throwing a Fake Fight. It’s a single entry with (in this case) six different videos selected from dozens around the web, covering the various aspects of stunt fighting. It’s the most useful information we could find for doing it safely and believably.

Brevity, accuracy, production value

We’ve focused on three core elements when selecting videos. Firstly, we favor videos that get to the point. Why waste your time watching 8 minutes of a host talk through their dating problems? On the rare occasions when the value of the content outweighs the long-winded presentation style, we try to supply playback time references to the point where the information becomes worth tuning in to.

Secondly, we want to make sure the information is accurate and depicts best industry practices. It’s amazing how often YouTube voices will speak authoritatively concerning subjects they know little about. It can be difficult to discern between subject knowledge and pure, projected self-confidence. We’ve endeavored to vet our curated list for accuracy, so that if it appears on the site it’s a valid technique.

Finally, we want to make sure the end result is something that looks good in your finished movie. We’ll make the occasional exception: If an After Effects technique is good but just executed too quickly in the tutorial to look production worthy, it may still make the cut. But in general we’re fans of judging a book by its cover. If the end result of a tutorial wouldn’t make it into a professional cut, then the technique being demonstrated probably isn’t worth pursuing.

Growing our own

One of the great by-products of this curation process has been finding the gaps in the “collective brain trust” of the web. We have no interest in reinventing the wheel, so when we find great videos by other training content producers, we’d rather aggregate and promote their work than attempt to recreate it. A perfect example is CrashCourse’s exceptional Film History series.

What we found, however, is there are many topics either not covered well out there on the world wide web, or covered in woefully inaccurate ways. Color space and scene referred workflows come to mind, along with intellectual property use, model releases, and a host of other mystical topics. This helps steer out internal production team to focus on areas that truly matter to the wider community.

Growing monthly

We’re adding these curated articles constantly, so check back every month to see what’s new. Our plan is to quickly have a comprehensive library of techniques and practices from the best content creators out there. The perfect supplement to moviola.com’s always free, world class training.

This month, check out How to throw a fake fight, All about lenses, Casting, Storyboarding, and Interview Techniques