Becoming a TV Host: Co-Hosting 101

Co-hosting is like going to a a cocktail party and you the two people are co-hosting are friends who have had a shared experience that you're sharing with your third friend (the camera), who wasn't with you.

Say the two co-hosts went to the zoo. And then you saw a friend (the camera) at a party and you're telling them about your experience of going to the zoo. You would work together to remember and communicate all the things that happened at the zoo so your friend that wasn’t there gets as much of the experience as possible. That would mean looking and talking to each other, as well as the third friend (the camera) that waasn’t there.

Since it's a shared experience you ackowledge each other at least 30% of the time because you had the experience together, but we also want to tell our friend who wasn’t there all about it, so they should get 60-70% of you attention.

We also want to stay as flat to the camera as possible and not turn to look at each other with our whole body. If you turn to look at each other (like we do in life) then you’re totally in profile and we can’t see your face. So we need to “cheat” our site line a little bit and angle our face to our co-host when we talk to them, but not all the way.

Another GREAT tip is to utter and mutter (a word or a sound) before every line you have after your co-host and have that word or sound be an ackowledgment of what you just heard before you launch into your next line. A simple “Yeah”, “Wow”, “Absolutely”, or “Uh-huh” can do wonders for creating relationship between you and your co-host to make it look like you’ve been working together for years!

(Thanks to my man and AMAZING host Brian McArdle for helping me out in this video! XO)