Two Michaels walk into an office… and argue if virtual meetings are real!

I’m a huge fan of videos where there are two talking heads and both are the same person. Especially I’m a fan of Pitch Meetings by Ryan George. That’s why as I started my new @MichaelTeam YouTube Channel I wanted to try it out myself and finally yesterday as I had my favorite “Design Fight” meeting with my Nozbe team I decided to take this opportunity and try it out:

Are virtual meetings real? What do you think?

Having our Design Fight meeting with Nozbe team re-kindled the idea of many people dismissing virtual meetings as real. To me, this meeting is my favorite meeting every month and it feels very real to me.

We argue, we have heated debates, we laugh, we cry, we get angry. It’s freaking real, even though participants of this meeting are in three completely different cities in Poland and three different countries.

That’s why I recorded this:

The age-old “virtual” vs “real” meetings debate!

First I started with a script:

Old-school Michael: Hey, what are you doing?
Modern Michael: Psst, I’m on a meeting!
O: But it’s not a real meeting. It’s a virtual meeting.
M: Yeah, virtual or not, believe me we’re having a meeting and we’re discussing design of our Nozbe app.
O: Yeah, but it’s not real, ‘cause you cannot see the body language and the subtleties…
M: Maybe, but we’re discussing real design issues and you’re bothering us. Is this guy bothering you, guys?
Virtual Meeting People: Yes!
O: Well, I still don’t believe in virtual meetings!
M: There’s nothing to believe. Virtual meetings or “real meetings”… We are having a meeting and you’re disturbing us, so… bye!
O: OK, bye!😢

Coming up with this wasn’t difficult. I’ve had countless similar discussions with people for the last 17 years and they still don’t believe in virtual meetings. And at Nozbe we do virtual meetings all the time and they are: regular, optional and well prepared.

How to record two Michaels talking about meetings?

Now comes the fun part. To make sure it works, I had to convince my colleagues to take part in the recording. Here are the things I paid attention to:

• Old-school Michael has an elegant shirt, no glasses and is looking straight at the camera.
• Modern Michael has casual clothes (a hoodie), glasses and is looking away from the camera - to the side.

I had to record all Modern Michael parts first, including my friends shouting from the screen. Then I changed, stood up and recorded Old-school Michael.

After I recorded both, I opened up my iPad Pro and Luma Fusion app to edit the video. I put both Michaels timelines, cut each section and moved clips around so that they make sense in chronological order.

Now the tricky part comes in. In order to make the conversation more smooth, I detached audio from video clips and slightly moved them so that sometimes you can see one Michael while the other is speaking. This creates a better illusion that these are really two people talking:

Once the video was ready and below 1 minute, I exported it and posted first to my Instagram and then to my new YouTube Channel and other socials.

And yes, if you’ve made this far, you should totally follow me there! 👊

The original inspiration by Ryan George

Here’s the 100th video of Pitch Meetings that inspired me to give the concept of Two Michaels a try:

I still need to work on my catch-phrases…