chip+kim daily videos

On camera

You are not bad at this.
You are reciting.

Two different failures with two different fixes. Reciting happens when the words arrive before the thought does: the face goes still, the voice flattens to one pitch, the hands stop, and the eyes drift slightly up and sideways hunting the next line. Everybody feels it. What they call it is “that’s an ad”.

The five things that matter

01

One person. Not an audience.

Pick a real person before you hit record and say their name in your head. Not "people who might want to sell a house". One human being. Your neighbor. A past client. Your brother.

Everything downstream fixes itself. The volume drops to conversational, the pace loosens, your face starts doing the thing it does when you talk to somebody you like. "Hey, it's Chip" stops being an announcement and becomes a greeting, which is what it is.

02

Start already moving.

The single biggest one. Do not start from stillness and ramp into energy. You will spend the first four seconds getting there, and the first two seconds are the entire hook.

Before you hit record: move. Roll your shoulders, shake your hands out, one breath in through your nose. Then start talking AT the energy you want to end at. It should feel like the clip caught you mid-thought, already going.

03

Throw the line away.

The script is what you mean, not what you must say. Read it once, look up, say it your way. If you change a word, the word was wrong.

You are the only source for how you talk. If a line does not fit in your mouth it is a bad line and it gets rewritten. The one exception is the numbers. Those come from the MLS and they go in exactly as written, or not at all.

04

Your hands were always fine.

Do not hold them still. Do not put them behind your back. Do not think about them at all.

If your hands are moving, you are thinking, and thinking is what reads as real. Chest-up framing lets them enter and leave naturally instead of being parked in shot.

05

Land, and stop.

Say the last word, then hold. Keep looking down the lens for one full second and let the expression stay on your face.

Do not trail off. Do not add "so, yeah". Do not smile-and-look-away, which is the most common tell that somebody is relieved it is over. That held second is the whole ending, and it gives a clean cut instead of a trim into your next breath.

The warm up

Ninety seconds. Do not skip it. You would not walk on set cold.

1
Hum up and down your range twice. Unlocks the pitch variation that is the difference between warm and flat.
2
Say "unique New York" three times, fast. Wakes the front of the mouth.
3
Say one line out loud badly on purpose. Way too big. Permission to be terrible is what unclenches somebody trying to be perfect.
4
Tell the camera something true and unscripted for fifteen seconds, then delete it. It gets you talking rather than performing.
5
Then roll on take one.

If it is not working

Stiff, flat
Stand up. Sit back down. Go again immediately without thinking.
Like you are reading
Cover the script. Say what you remember. That version is better.
Rushed
You are talking to a crowd. Go back to one person.
Low energy
Your shoulders dropped. Reset them and start already moving.
Like a commercial
You believe the words are the point. They are not. You are.

The one thing to remember

Seven videos went out in the old format and got zero comments. Not one, on any of them, across three accounts and nine thousand followers.

Nothing was wrong with the writing or the footage. There was no person in them. That is the entire fix, and you are the entire fix. You do not need to be polished. You need to be recognisable.

Open the teleprompter →

Chip McAllister, Broker Associate · First Team Real Estate · DRE #01971252