How to Start a Faceless YouTube Channel in 2026!

0:00Thanks to Higgs Field for sponsoring this video. If you want to start a YouTube channel, but are nervous about showing your face, there's good news. There are several ways to actually build a high-quality professional channel that looks great, gets views, and grows an audience without ever showing your face. So, in this video, I'm going to show you four different methods for starting a faceless YouTube channel this year. Now, the first kind of faceless channel I want to talk about are top-down faceless channels that have demonstrative stuff going on on a table, sort of a flat-lay view. The thing about these types of channels are there are some benefits to

0:33this format. It's a fun format to explore, but there are some real challenges. And I do want to talk about specifically we got Look at this. One, two, and three benefits that we're going to cover in this video. All of these benefits are very valuable on their own, but there are also two key challenges I want to touch on. And then finally, we'll cover some bonus tips about this format if this is something you want to explore. So, benefit number one over

0:57here is that this format is very visual. As you can see, I'm doing kind of like an explainer top-down video. But even if you were doing a different sort of format, like you were doing a knitting tutorial or a cooking demonstration, and it was a top-down format, it's a very visual medium because you can explain things, lay it all out in front of you, and it's very creative. The second reason though is that there is very low editing with this format. Like for this shot today, I'm really just kind of doing this. All I've kind of rehearsed it a couple times, and I know exactly where I'm heading in the piece. So,

1:29there's not a lot of editing you have to do with this sort of top-down format because everything is just laid out right in front of you. But the third thing is they're also really simple to execute. As you can see, there's not a lot of B-roll I'm overlaying for any of this video. Everything that's happening is just happening right here on the

1:45table in this top-down explainer format. Now, perhaps you teach mathematics to homeschool families. You could apply this same format. You just have a top-down shot with a piece of paper, and you're working through algebra equations. Maybe you have some sticky notes that come in on screen. You can apply a lot of these same principles I'm doing in this video to different kinds of formats. Now, even though this format is fairly simple to execute, there are still some challenges associated with

2:09choosing this style of faceless channel. The first challenge is just your preparation time. This does take some time to set up this kind of visual demonstration top-down video. Even the tech that I have set up for this shot is fairly simple. I just have a little top-down desk mount that I've mounted my smartphone to, which is recording this

2:26top-down angle that you see right here. And I have a little podcast microphone and this green desk mat that I'm using as a background. But even though it's fairly simple, it does still take some time to get this all set up. And then the second challenge over here for this format are anytime you make errors or mistakes, it's very difficult to cover those cuts up because usually you only have like one top-down shot. So if the papers shift around and get all messed up, it's very obvious when you have to do a hard cut and everything's moved around. Or if you were like crocheting a scarf or something, and then like some

2:57of your stitching unraveled, it'd be so obvious to the viewer where these jump cuts take place. So it's really hard to cover errors or mistakes with these top-down videos. Now, if you want to explore this format on your own, there is a little bonus tip I want to mention for you, which is something you really need to focus on if you want to succeed with this format. And it is this: composition and really even just camera angles and even your desk mat angle. You want everything to be really straight and take extra time and intentionality before you hit record to make sure all

3:28of your visuals look really appealing. If your angles [clears throat] are super canted and off-center, it's going to look really awkward on camera and your viewer will notice. So take extra time to ensure your compositions are properly set up and all of your angles are really straight. Now, the second kind of faceless YouTube channel you could create could center around screen recorded content. This is great for tutorial videos or explainers or reaction style content to news or music videos, anything like this. You can do screen recorded breakdowns of all of these different types of content. The benefit to this format is first and foremost, it is completely free. You can

4:03use a bunch of free softwares to capture your screen. I'm on Mac systems and you can use the built-in QuickTime application or I actually prefer using a free software called OBS. It's Open Broadcast Software and there's a lot of high quality recording settings you can adjust here inside of OBS. Now, if you download OBS, which is available on Mac or Windows systems, that's really most of what you need to get started with this format. If you're going to purchase any other piece of equipment, I would encourage you to grab a high quality microphone. Because you're not sharing your face on screen, the only way your audience is going to get to know you is

4:37through your voice. So, purchasing a simple microphone like a podcast style microphone that can clip onto your desk can be a great way to capture good audio. My favorite budget recommendation is the FIFINE AM8. It's like a $50 microphone that comes with everything you need to get started. The main challenges with the screen recorded format are first that it is kind of technical to get used to. There are some basic like canvas sizes of your resolution that you have to figure out for how to record your screen and the frame rate that you're trying to record in. So, if you're using OBS or even QuickTime, there's some basic settings

5:08that you have to understand. It's not usually as simple as just like hitting one button and you're recording your screen. If you want to produce really high quality screen recorded videos, you do need to kind of understand the technical aspects of how to get those screen recordings the highest quality. Overall though, the screen recording faceless format is one of the easiest formats to explore if you want to start a faceless channel. Okay, so now this third method is kind of a new one. It's actually leveraging AI generated content to create faceless videos. And listen, we know here at Think Media everybody's got opinions about AI or generative AI,

5:41how much you should use it and lean into it or if you should just avoid it completely. And here at Think Media, we certainly don't use it as like an end-all, be-all solution, but we do think it is another tool in the tool belt for creators, especially small teams or solo creators who are just trying to get started with content creation. Using AI tools like this can be a helpful first step. So, for this video today, we're actually using Higgsfield. They're actually partnering with us on this video. And today, we're building a pitch for a documentary idea I developed a few years ago that I actually went really deep into

6:13pre-production on, but we just never ended up making the film. So, today, I'm actually going to build a pitch for that documentary using my own script and my own voice. And then we're going to use Higgsfield to bring the whole thing to life. So, this is what Higgsfield looks like. If you want to try any of this out yourself, I'll be sure to leave a link down in the description below so you can get started with Higgsfield and link any promos that are running as well. But, if you're kind of overwhelmed at the beginning, it's simply because there's

6:37so much you can do with Higgsfield. There's all of these different AI models you can use like Nano Banana, Seedance, Cinema Studio 4.0. But, where most beginners are going to have a lot of success, especially for faceless content, is going over here to these tabs, specifically video, and clicking on faceless studio or Higgsfield Explainer or just creating AI videos in general. Faceless Studio is kind of cool because you can go ahead and click this and start a faceless

7:04channel in just a couple of clicks. There's like educational presets, history, maybe you're wanting to make kids content. All of these things are presets that you can get started with so you're not always starting completely from ground zero. Now, today, I specifically want to leverage this Higgsfield Explainer preset, which allows you to turn any topic into an explainer video. So, if you click into the explainer interface, this is what it looks like, and you have all of these different presets you can choose from for just basic creative styles. Today, we're going to go with this first one right here, this editorial motion

7:33graphics. I think this is a fun style. We'll just go with that for simplicity's sake. Then over on this left side of the interface is where you're going to be able to give your prompts or topics and attach a few different files for references and you can even link some things if you want to. But today we're going to make it really simple so you can just see how this works. So the first thing you want to do is just attach some reference files for images so that you have an idea of what you want your visuals to look like. So I've just copied a few of these screenshots

7:59here that I pulled from the internet as basic reference files. There's just a basic crowd at a rodeo, a couple horses, American flags, people riding, just kind of generic stuff that I want to use as references. So I'll copy three of these references over into my project. The next thing we need to do is give some directions for what the video is actually going to be about and we can see right here I've personally written, these are my actual words, this is a script for this teaser and I basically used a logline that I wrote for this documentary and expanded on it a little bit. Then I wrote this like years ago so

8:32kind of polish it up and I think this is a pretty good script that I want to work off of. And then using Claude, I created a prompt for Pictory Field to turn this script into an explainer style video. So I will copy both of these things and then paste them over into this window right over here. Now that that script is pasted in there, just a few more things we need to adjust. The first is our aspect ratio. 16 by 9 is perfect because I want the image to fill the whole

8:56horizontal frame for this video. Duration, 30 seconds. That's perfect. I specifically wrote the script to be about 30 seconds in length so we'll work with that. For voice, I do want to add a voice to this script and have a voiceover narration. What's cool about Pictory Field though is that you can actually add custom voices. So I exported 3 minutes of a YouTube upload and used that to clone my voice and now I have a custom Craig AI voice that I can use to generate this voiceover. So we'll select that for this video and I don't need subtitles for this video. So all in all this video is ready to go so

9:29you can just click generate to get started. All right, the generation just finished. I haven't even watched this yet so let's just watch it for the first time together. Every year a small town in Oregon of about 400 people balloons to 40,000 in a single [music] week, all to watch one thing, the Saint Paul

9:44Rodeo. There's incredible riding, fireworks, [music] and spectacle, but the real story happens outside the arena. A small town spending all year to pull off something world-class. Drive through the whole town in about 8 seconds, yet thousands come each year to watch a rider survive 8 [music] seconds on a bull. This is 8 seconds in Saint Paul. Hey, that's actually super good for just a first pass. And the cooler thing to me though is like this is an idea I've had for years, and I actually now get to see like an elevator pitch of this idea visually instead of me just explaining to people the idea or writing

10:19on paper. I actually see a visual of what could actually be possible if this was turned into a documentary. Now right away though, there are things I would adjust about this video. Like for example, some of the voice-over narration, some of the words are getting cut off, and it doesn't fully sound like me. Even though I did clone my voice and it sounds a lot like me, there are inflexuations and just things that if I did the voice-over myself, I think it could sound a lot better. Also, some of

10:43the visuals are a little bit redundant. Like this one right here, the bucking horse or the bucking bull rather, it it didn't like kind of wipes over the screen and it's the exact same bull. I just don't like that very much, so I would probably change those visuals. What's cool though is you can actually hit this edit button or extend if you wanted to extend the video and add a scene, you could hit extend. But edit, you could come in here and select a shot and say that you want to adjust something about the bull. Maybe instead of it bucking up and down, you would like it to be like multiple riders in

11:12the arena at the same time. You could adjust your prompting over here and try to make corrections to your video without having to generate the whole prompt over again from scratch. And additionally, there's actually an assets folder that you can leverage, so you can download individual assets for the renders that were created for you. Maybe I wanted to use this file and not other parts of the video and download this and bring it into Adobe Premiere to make my own edit, you can actually do this. And what's cool is there's actually sound

11:37effects for this video right here. Listen to this. Some crowd cheering. The fireworks. That's super cool. Now, I do want to show you one more thing. I did just spend another hour rendering a couple of different variations of this project. You can kind of see the variants here. And what I did is downloaded those individual assets that I liked the most, and then added those to a custom voice over that I just recorded to create kind of a combination of AI generated plus my own human touch to create this final video right here. Every year a small town in Oregon of about 400 people balloons to 40,000 in a single week, all

12:18coming together to watch one thing, the Saint Paul Rodeo. There's incredible riding, fireworks, and spectacle, but the real story happens outside the arena. It's this small town spending all year preparing to pull off something world-class. You can actually drive through the entire town in about 8 seconds, but every year tens of thousands of people show up just to watch a rider survive 8 seconds on the back of a bull. This is 8 seconds in Saint Paul. [music] And so that final video is honestly not that bad. Some challenges though with this format of using AI is that it really does take a lot of patience with prompting. It does

12:53take a lot of time. Now, these tools are really improving fast, and Higgsfield has a ton of different things you can do with the platform, but honestly, getting a good result is just a really patient process. Now, my personal recommendation to you if you're exploring generative AI is just please try to insert yourself creatively as much as you can into the process, and don't outsource all of the creative elements to AI. As you can see here, a lot of the strong visuals I relied on Higgsfield to create because it would have taken me weeks inside of After Effects to try to figure out some of these motion graphics, but I

13:23creatively inserted myself into the script writing process, and I just chose a topic that I know a lot about because I planned this whole documentary myself. So, the more that you can insert this human touch and yourself into these AI tools, the better your overall end product is going to look, and your audience is going to thank you because the content's not just going to be a bunch of AI slop. Now, the fourth kind of faceless channel you could start is one that leverages B-roll mostly and maybe has some voice-over elements as well. So, instead of you talking to the camera and having an A-roll is what it's

13:54called, like me actually talking to the camera right now is A-roll, but imagine that you never saw my face and all you saw was voice-over material or even no narration at all and it was just cinematic visuals, beautiful sound design potentially. You can create an entire channel that's just focused on B-roll elements and you don't even necessarily have to talk. The first example for this is a video I recently released on Think Media, which was the

14:17best 4K multi-cam setup for live events. And during this video, basically the entire video is just B-roll of our setup. I showcase different parts of our tech setup and the behind the scenes of how we set up these live events. And for like 98% of the video, my face is not even shown. I do show my face at the very end of the video just for a second, but basically it's all just voice-over narration with B-roll. Another example

14:40would be in the food or cooking niche. There's a lot of channels out there that teach you how to cook beautiful recipes, but these creators never actually show their face. I also weirdly like watching home project restorations or car restorations. These are really visually pleasing videos. A lot of times again, there's no audio here. Maybe there's some music or sound design, but no voice-over driving the story. It's really just the visuals of that restoration process and the B-roll of that restoration, which ends up being the whole format. The benefits to this kind of format are it's a little bit more spontaneous and you're more like documenting a process versus performing

15:16and talking directly to the camera. You don't really have to do that with this format. One of the challenges for this format though is there's a lot of heavy editing. Because you're filming so many different clips and portions of the video that you're going to compile together in its file form, you have to understand basic video editing and how to start and end clips and organize them in a way that actually makes the story make sense. And additionally, these videos just in general are a little bit challenging to produce because you have to find visuals to cover your entire story. Versus like this video right now,

15:45if I don't have B-roll that makes sense for me to show or I'm lacking B-roll cuz I didn't go film anything, I can actually just show my face and then I don't have to worry about trying to find B-roll to cover up this portion of your video. But with this specific type of format, you've got to make sure you have

15:59visual elements for your entire story. Whether you go out and shoot those things yourself or you leverage AI tools like Higgsfield like we talked about in this video, you've got to solve for your entire video being covered by B-roll. Now, as you're trying to figure out how to start your faceless channel, some things to remember are that these four methods of starting a faceless channel, while they're very helpful, you don't

16:18actually have to just only choose one. You can actually sort of cross-pollinate them and use aspects of each of the formats in your videos. Like for example, if you were doing a tutorial video, you could open with a top-down shot and then do some screen recording elements and then use some AI-generated cutaways for part of your film and then even some B-roll that you go shoot. So don't feel a bunch of pressure where you can only compete in one format. You can actually use aspects of these together

16:43to create really great faceless videos. And as I look at these four different methods for starting a faceless channel, not any one of these is necessarily better than the other. It really just depends on you as the creator and the specific kind of channel that you're creating to figure out which format is going to work best. Now, if you are interested in trying out this AI format, I'll be sure to put a link in the description so you can check out Higgsfield and get signed up with our Think Media code. And if you're new to this YouTube thing and you're just starting to figure out how to get your

17:10channel set up, you can click or tap the screen right here to watch this video where I walk you through the entire process of setting up your YouTube channel the best way. It's an awesome video and I'll see you over there.