How to Film Professional Videos with Just Your Phone

In this video, we're going to talk through how you can film yourself using just your phone. No fancy equipment, no fancy stuff. The hacks and tips and tricks that I've picked up over the last 8 years of being a, I guess, professional content creator. By the way, if you're new here, hello. My name is Ali. I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur. And since 2017 on this YouTube channel, I've been documenting the journey from broke medical student to working full-time as a doctor, including during the pandemic, to now being an entrepreneur and an author. And for the last 5 years, I've been running an online community called the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, where we have helped thousands of students, including lots of faces and names that you probably

recognize, start, grow, and monetize their YouTube channels. But all that said, let's get into the video. Now, whenever the lights are off, what I'm always looking for is a window. So, there is a window over here. Now, I probably don't want to film being backlit because there is a light behind me. What I'm really trying to find is I'm trying to film in a way where the light is sort of like 45 degrees from where my face is. So that's thing number one. Find a light source that's ideally as like big as possible. So windows are very big lights and ideally get it around 45° from where you are. Principle number two is you kind of want your background to be a bit more interesting than just a plain white wall. If for

example I stand here now I've got like more stuff in the background. And if we go if we put the camera here and just go straight on. You can see over here I'm like, "Okay, this is another way of doing it. I've got the light directly in front of me. I generally don't like it when a light's directly in front. But over here at least, the background just looks a little bit more interesting." Right? The other key principle is you always want your lines to be straight. So if, for example, Becky, who's behind the camera, goes wonky with the camera, you will see that this looks absolutely freaking terrible. Like it just looks

super unprofessional. Like you can basically take the same shot, you can be a bit wonky with it and then you go straight and now hopefully the shot looks a lot more professional. We're like just doing some playing around with it. If your lines are straight and you're sort of eye level with the camera and you're sort of your head is sort of brushing the top of the frame, that generally looks pretty reasonable. It looks pretty professional. And then we also want to appreciate what effect like tilting has. So most mostly in cameras you can get a sort of spirit level and you want your thing to be kind of eye level. There are other ways of doing it. So for example, if we put the camera underneath and

tilted it, what that does is create allegedly create a more like powerful imposing kind of thing where I'm like speaking down to the camera. Alternatively, if we go up and look down at me. Now here my camera is still theoretically brushing the top of the frame, but this looks a little bit different. Unless you're deliberately going for like the POV look that like you know that kind of vibe. Unless you're deliberately going for it, you generally want to just be eye level looking straight down the barrel of the lens with as many straight lines behind you as humanly possible without any weirdness going on in terms of like wonkifying and like tilting your

camera view. Now, when filming it with a phone, obviously, one thing you can do is you can just use the selfie camera and you can just hold it out and this is a sort of like hey Becky, you know, this sort of vibe. Now, the issue with using the selfie camera is look at where my eyes are looking. I can totally do headbrushing the top. I can totally do like, you know, straight lines roughly, but I'm just so tempted to look at myself. Whereas, if I look at you now, hopefully that feels a lot more natural because I'm actually looking at the camera. I'm not looking at myself. There's something about looking at yourself that feels weird. So, one of the biggest signs of like kind of noobs to being creators filming with their

phone for the first time, they often look at themselves when really they should be looking at the camera and they should be looking at the viewers. Sometimes it's not exactly obvious where the camera is. So, sometimes what I do is I put my finger and I'm like, "Okay, oh, that's the camera." Especially if you're filming with like the back of a phone. And so here I've got the 1x camera. I'm like sort of holding it like this. I have no idea. Absolutely no clue what this looks like. I don't even know which of the three cameras it is. And so what I'm going to basically do is flip the camera around and I'm going to

be like, "All right, I'm going to cover that one. Okay, it's not that one. Oh, it's that one. Okay, so it's bottom right. Okay, cool. So now I know that if I'm filming myself from this kind of perspective, I'm I need to be looking at this camera right over here. Because if I'm looking at that one or if I'm looking anywhere else, it will just it there'll just be something about the video that feels a little bit off compared to directly looking at the camera that I know I should be looking at. And this is something that like you kind of have to train yourself to do.

Now, for filming with the back of a phone handheld like this, 1x could work, but often 0.5x often looks nicer because it feels a little bit more vloggy, if that makes sense. So, that's like my 0.5x view. So, now if I'm doing like handheld with a camera like this, I'm trying my best to just sort of generally keep it straight. You can see what this looks like. I'm trying not to be wonky with it because generally wonky looks weird, especially if you're like putting doing stuff in like horizontal. And I'm making sure I'm looking at this one because I know that is the 0.5x lens. And so hopefully this looks like relatively reasonable. And as I'm walking along and filming with my phone,

I'm trying my best to be my own kind of stabilizer. If I was really trying to optimize it, I would probably I've got light source over here. I've got reasonable background over there. I'd probably do something like this. I don't know what this looks like because I obviously can't see myself, but I just sort of know that if I've done the general principles correctly around like background, around like having a soft light. I mean, there's a big harsh light in my face. I don't really care personally, but like whatever. I know if I've done the general principles right, this should look somewhat reasonable. Even though I've literally just whacked out my phone and I'm just talking to it without even being able to

see myself. By the way, if you're interested in growing your business in platforms like Instagram, there is a wonderful little tool that my team and I have been using for the last year or so. It's called Stanley and it's created by Stan who are very kindly sponsoring this video. Stanley is your very own AI agent. And what it does is that it connects to your Instagram and it gives you insights into what content of yours is doing well and therefore gives you insights on how you can grow your business or your presence on Instagram. It also helps you create carousels and posts and captions in your voice. So it saves a bunch of time. If for example

you're posting a real and then you're spending ages trying to figure out like what to caption it, you can just ask Stanley to write the caption in your voice and it can save you a bunch of time. And it also shows you these really useful stats like a consistency score, a growth score, and a stand score that lets you see how well you're doing compared to other accounts and similar niches. So, if you're interested in growing your Instagram presence, you should definitely check out Stanley. And it's created by Stan, which is our recommended sort of online platform for selling anything as a creator on the internet. So, you can check that out as well. And there will be links down below

and on screen somewhere if you're interested in checking those things out. So, thank you Stan for sponsoring this video. And let's get back to it. To be honest, anything a handheld that doesn't have stabilization generally to me doesn't look particularly professional. So this is where tripods come in. Now there is one tripod that I always have attached to my phone at all times. It is this Peak Design phone tripod type situation. If you're doing like a Zoom call or reading a book at a coffee shop, it's kind of nice to just be able to do this and not have and can be able to go hands-free. Or if you want to film horizontally, you just like boom. And now you have this sort of situation

where you can prop your phone up. The issue with using a tripod on the phone with a selfie camera is that you're going to you're almost always going to end up with a situation where you know the phone is looking up at you, right? Because you know this is not this is not following the rule of eye level. It's not too bad. There's something about this that can still look quite professional. You don't give yourself too much headroom. Like this looks terrible and looks very unprofessional because I've given myself too much headroom. Similarly, I don't want to cut my headroom off. Obviously, this looks weird. This looks like some sort of secret filming for some sort of dodgy

interrogation. But if I do something like this where I've got just enough headroom to for this to seem reasonable, even though I'm a pro at this, it's still very tempting for me to look at myself rather than to look at you directly through the camera, you my dear viewer, thank you. Thank you for being still here in the video. I hope it's valuable. I hope it's kind of useful. And if I try and get this as like eye level as I possibly can and make sure I'm looking at the camera, you know what? This doesn't look too bad. Even though I'm just using a basic ass magnetic phone tripod that you can get on Amazon. You can get cheap knockoffs on Amazon for like $5 or something and

you can just always have it with you at all times, which means you're always able to film stuff on your phone. If I wanted to level this up a bit and I didn't have an actual tripod on me, what I might do is I'm going to be like, "Okay, are there any books or is there You know what? Let's grab this freaking box of tissues and use the box of tissues as a bit of a tripod so that if I stick the phone on top of the box of tissues, will that allow me to be a bit more eye level?" Possibly. Actually, that's not too bad. Can I go even straighter if I even further twizzle and tweak this little tripod? Yeah, that's pretty straight.

Okay, nice. And hopefully this also doesn't seem too bad. I have to worry about like shake because I know this box of tissues has not got much like stabilization on it. But I mean, for the most part, this doesn't actually look too bad. Phones, even with just the basic ass selfie camera these days, are actually pretty good. What happens if I try and switch to the proper camera? I'm trying to roughly get where I think the shot is going to be using the 1x lens. So, you can see on my Apple Watch, I can see exactly what's going on. And wow, that actually worked relatively reasonably. Oh, I think my head's being too cut off. And so I'd want to either lean forward. Is this reasonable? Have I

got something reasonable going on? Okay, this actually doesn't look too bad because I've done sensible things like, you know, I'm looking at the camera. Hopefully the lines are kind of somewhat straight in terms of the background. Like there's a lot of stuff going on in the background, which means the background is just kind of interesting compared to sitting against a wall and I just do it like this. Oh my god, this box of tissues is going to fall. I suspect this looks a lot less interesting than the previous shot. And this is actually a mistake I see a lot of our like lifestyle business academy or part-time YouTuber academy students

making. They think that in order for a shot to look professional, it should have nothing in there. But nothing in a shot. I mean, even like even this is kind of interesting cuz there's a whiteboard. If I were to go even less interesting and just like have it straight up against a wall like I see a lot of people film, this is the sign of a total noob as it comes as it relates to being a creator where you're like I am going to be professional and therefore I'm going to film with nothing at all behind me. But this sort of feels like either you are some kind of teacher and you're filming like I don't know your the first time you've ever filmed a video lesson because it's the pandemic and you're like I need to film video

lessons for my students and you decide to have an empty wall or you're on some kind of interrogation or doing some sort of like interview. Even though this is a shitty background, I do whatever I can to make the shot look reasonable, but it's still, you know, it's just much nicer when you have something in the background. Speaking of, this is also generally why I don't like to shoot straight on against a wall. I like to shoot an oblique kind of angle because if we go back to do this sort of thing. This is sort of shooting into a corner. Shooting into a corner will just make your background more interesting than shooting straight on. If you're shooting straight on, then the background, I

mean, it obviously can still be interesting, but you just get a lot of interestingness vibes by just shooting into a corner, making sure you're looking at the camera, making sure the lines are as straight as they can be, making sure your head is just about brushing the top of the frame. Now, one thing that I actually forgot to do was uh changing the frames per second of the phone for stuff to look cinematic. Most movies are shot in either 24 or 25 frames per second, but iPhone footage and phone footage in general is often shot at 30. So it makes it look just a little bit more smooth than you would expect it to look if you were watching something legit on TV. And so in general, if you want your

footage to look a little bit more cinematic, you switch it to either 24 or 25 frames pers. I think this video that we're exporting is going to be in 25 frames per second anyway, so maybe you didn't quite notice the difference. But that's often one tell of like, oh, it was shot with a phone, which is that it's a little smoother than you would expect it to be. So if in doubt, switch your phone to 25 frames per second, which I personally forgot to do. Some people often ask the question of like, oh, should I film in like cinematic mode or should I film in like professional mode or should I film in like raw mode and any of this sort of stuff. And my take is that if you are a beginner

creator and you're doing video for the first time, don't worry about any of that stuff. You can just film things using the default camera app on your phone and you don't need to think about it. Once you've made a few dozen to a few hundred videos and you really think that like shooting log or whatever is going to drastically level up your production value or if you're not just doing talking head camera videos or you particularly want to make it give it a particular kind of cinematic look then yes you could film in like whatever the iPhone raw prores video file is. For most people I speak to who are doing basic educational content to try and either build their personal brand or try

to try and drive leads to a business to make some money. All of that is massively overkill and so you don't need a lot of that stuff unless you're actively interested in the art of like color grading. Phones these days have a lot of different focal lengths. So if Becky were to be my tripod, um let's do 0.5x uh using the general idea that my head is brushing the top of the frame. Okay. So you'll notice that the camera is very close to me. It's like I could basically touch it with my hand. I suspect what this does is that it makes it feel like you and I are very close together. The closer the camera is to

you, the more intimate an experience it's going to feel for the person on the other end. So, what happens if we switch to the 1x lens? Okay, so we have switched to the 1x lens. I would have to really reach out to like lean forward and reach out to touch the camera. Now, even though we can try our best to make the uh the framing look similar to the 0.5x lens, there's something about this that will feel a little bit less intimate than the 0.5x lens. The 0.5x lens really feels like sort of more up close and personal.

I think the 1x lens on an iPhone is a 24 millimeter which is sort of like YouTuber classic kind of vibes and so you know this probably looks totally reasonable. Okay, so now we have switched to the 2x zoom. Now I think this is sort of like what a 50 mil equivalent or like whatever. But basically the camera is so far away from me it's like miles away. Well it's not miles away but it's like a couple of meters away from me. I there's no way I can reach out and touch the camera. This is what more of a this gives you more of like a presenter kind of feel. If you think of what the news looks like a newsreader does not feel like a YouTuber. a newsreader feels like the camera is miles away and they're reading

the news and they're sort of presenting the news. Even though the framing could be identical and my head is still brushing the top of the frame and I still look relatively the same size, everything is sort of sufficiently sort of zoomed in so that it feels like this is more of a presenter. If we go 4x, it's going to be even more like zoomed in than that. But there's literally not enough space in this room to do a 4x kind of zoom. I generally pref prefer the vibe of feeling like I can reach out of being able to reach out and touch the camera. So, if I'm filming with a phone, I would prefer to film with the 1x lens or even the 0.5x. It feels like a more friendly relationship

with the viewer on the other end rather than this, which feels like I'm a presenter doing a presenting type thing. Now, again, because we're filming with a phone, we don't have to think too hard about the lighting, the phone will compensate for most of the lighting. But, as long as we're doing sensible things, headbrushing the top of the frame, the lines are straight, there's something vaguely interesting going on in the background, so it doesn't look like I'm shooting against a wall like I'm being interrogated by the police or something, then we should be fine and it should look relatively okay. One thing we have not talked about at all is audio. So, right now I am recording

audio using this microphone over here, which is attached to the camera that Becky is using to film. The camera is the Sony ZV1. And this is like one of these little things that connects up to the camera. Um, back in the day, a few years ago, these like little pocket microphone things were either very hard to find or were super expensive. And so, you had to do elaborate setups like shotgun mics and all that kind of stuff like you see on TV. Now, I'm going to show you what the difference in audio is like. So, for this entire video so far, we've actually been using the audio from this microphone, which hopefully sounds like reasonable enough that if you're

watching at this point in the video, you haven't switched off. Basically, the main factor when it comes to audio is how close is the microphone to your mouth. This microphone is very close to my mouth, and so the audio should hopefully sound reasonable. So, this is what audio from the iPhone sounds like when we were at the 2x lens zoom. So, when the iPhone was miles away from me, I there's no way I can reach out and touch the camera. This is what more of a This gives you more of like a presenter kind of feel. As you can hear, that sounds absolutely terrible. Now, if we bring the iPhone quite a lot closer and we use the 1x lens, this is what the audio sounds like.

This is the sign of a total noob as it comes as it relates to being a creator where you're like, I am going to be professional and therefore I'm going to film with nothing at all behind me. And now, if we bring the iPhone even closer and we have it at 0.5x distance, so it's like right up close and personal. This is what the audio sounds like. The closer the camera is to you, the more intimate an experience it's going to feel for the person on the other end. So hopefully you can hear from that example that like the closer the iPhone is to me, the better the audio in the iPhone is going to sound. So if you happen to be filming with just a phone or just a camera and you don't have some kind of

external microphone, there is a lot of value in just using 0.5x and having the microphone or the audio as close to you as humanly possible because in general audio quality is more important than video quality. People wouldn't mind sitting through poor video quality, but very few people will sit through bad audio quality. So, anyway, audio is the most important thing. I always carry these like ear pods with me. You know, the old school wired Apple headphones cuz you never know when you might need some reasonable sounding audio. Uh, but here I'm going to record a voice memo using just this, you know, if it feel it feels a little Gen Z to be holding up a, you know, a wired thing like this. Hopefully, if

we've done this right, this audio should actually sound pretty good because the microphone is very close to my mouth. And yeah, I'm holding up a microphone, but like, you know, there's something cool and retro about it these days. Uh, I would rather do this than have really bad audio. What you can also do if you really care about audio, and sometimes I do this if I'm filming out and about, is like literally carry a proper microphone with you. Why would you bother carrying a proper microphone with you? I could totally record audio with just this microphone over here, but if you are willing to carry a laptop around, you can plug a microphone into a laptop. So, this is now a voice memo I'm recording

on my MacBook with this microphone plugged in. Now, the reason I sometimes do this is for the vibes, right? This here is the Mantis Pod. I quite like it. Um, I've had it for a few years. Uh, the Mantis Pod also has this sort of like iPhone tripod attachment. So, like I don't want to deal with like the box of tissues and stuff. So, I'm actually just going to set up my phone on a legit looking tripod. Okay, so I'm just going to use a selfie camera over here. Now, what I'm trying to do is set up the shot so that it looks reasonable. This is not reasonable because the lines are not straight. This looks like the most amateur thing you've ever seen in your life, right? It looks horrendous. The reason it looks horrend

horrendous is cuz the lines are not straight. So, what I'm doing is as I'm like tweaking the leveling of this tripod so that line over there is the same sort of angle as sort of like the edge of the iPhone. So, on an iPhone, you have straight lines. You have that line over there and you have that line over there. These are straight lines. If there's wonkiness, you look at the angle between that line and that line, there's an angle. That means it's not straight. Whereas like what would be straight? Well, that looks more straight cuz you can see that line on the wall. This line over here is kind of like lining up with like the edge of the iPhone. Now, obviously, if you like pan or tilt and stuff, you can sort

of get the illusion of straightness, but like straight is what I'm going for. or straight is the primary thing I go for because that's the primary thing that people subconsciously uh look at when they are deciding like how professional something looks. And what I'm trying to do is create a kind of foreground element using my laptop and using this microphone. It just makes the shot a little bit more interesting. Part of why I have this like colorful Dbrand skin on my laptop which we designed in collaboration with Dbrand. It's the pallet skin is because this splash of color in the foreground makes anything look nicer in my opinion. At least that's kind of the vibe that I go for. And so when I do this sort of

thing, I'm like I'm I'm spending a while I say, "Well, it's it's not that long." I'm spending some amount of time making sure that the laptop looks reasonable. Now, right now, this doesn't look great because it sort of looks like the laptop screen is just coming out of thin air because you can't actually see the laptop thingy. I also have quite a lot of headroom. Maybe if we go down a little bit over here, something. Okay, that's not too bad. Um, I do have the effect of like the camera is looking down on me a little bit like this, but I don't think that's too much of a problem. All of this is about trade-offs. I'm like, where can I position the laptop so it looks reasonable? Where can I position the

microphone so it looks reasonable? I'm in a random room, the worst conference room in terms of lighting and in terms of decor in this entire building. But this shot hopefully doesn't look too bad and hopefully doesn't sound too bad because I'm recording the audio from here directly. I've got this in the back in the foreground. You know what? Should I put it over here just to make it more interesting cuz we've got that plant is Yeah, you know what? it. That plant is interesting. So, I want to put this here so it looks reasonable. Now, if I was shooting an entire YouTube video like this, this actually totally reasonable. I have my phone on a tripod. You can get a cheap

ass tripod if you want. I'm literally connected my laptop to like a, you know, you probably have a laptop. You can get a cheap microphone that you connect it to. This is why I generally like microphones that look nice because, you know, if it's part of like the look of the shot, even if there are microphones out there that sound a little bit better, but you can totally imagine having an entire filming setup and building an entire YouTube channel just off of filming a video like this, filming with a phone, just using the selfie camera, recording audio on my laptop with a microphone, and this looks totally reasonable. The lines are more or less straight. I'm looking I'm attempting to look at the lens and not just

looking at myself. The background is like fine. The lighting really sucks. This would be terri like it's going top down. It's yellow. It's horrendous. What happens if I turn the light off? Maybe actually that looks a little bit better cuz the iPhone will compensate for poor lighting. It will add some noise to the recording. Some people would say that this looks a little bit better. Do I agree? Do I think this looks better? Eh, versus actually having the light on. There's much more harsh shadows on my face. Whatever. I think this is fine. So, if I was recording videos for one of my courses or even for the main channel or for anything I'm doing, this would actually be a totally reasonable setup. And we've seen that there's there's

there's nothing fancy about this. I don't have any fancy lights. I'm not even using the fancy camera. I don't have a fancy microphone. I'm just making do with what I happen to have in my bag and the shot looks relatively okay. If I didn't even have one of these microphones, but I had a spare laptop on me or I had a spare phone or whatever, then I can totally just plug this thing in and hide it, hide this earphones in under my top and now I have relatively reasonable sounding audio. Of course, if I just wanted to straight up plug this into the iPhone, I could do that as well. Uh the iPhone is a little bit far away right now, so I think with this focal length, maybe I can't reach.

Actually, no, I kind of can to be honest. if I didn't have any of this and I just plugged these ear pods into my iPhone. I'm just like holding it up like this. This is like a super low tech setup that anyone can do with just their phone and a cheap tripod or just propping up the phone on a bunch of books and using one of these like magnetic tripods or if you don't have a tripod, you prop it up on some books or a tissue box. You stick a mug or a glass behind it and you sort of prop up your phone against the mug or the glass and you can get a setup that looks totally reasonable. Gear is not an excuse to not be doing content if the thing you're trying to do for your business or for

your life or for your side hustle involves doing content to some degree. If you're doing vertical content, this becomes a totally reasonable setup for filming like Instagram reels or something and giving myself enough headroom. Uh but generally when it comes to vertical content, people are much more forgiving of poor production value. When it comes to vertical content, like right now, I'm not looking at you, I'm looking at myself. But if I look at you through the lens, it just looks a little bit nicer. So, if you're doing Instagram reels, if you're doing Tik Toks, if you're doing YouTube shorts, there is something to be said for like lower production value filmed with just a phone in a way feeling more authentic than doing it properly. It kind of

depends on what brand you're going for. Like most of my Instagram reels, we film properly with a proper camera and we have fancy editing on them because that is kind of one of our unfair advantages that we can lean into. But certainly, if I was like trying to do content and I wanted to I wanted to feel natural. I wanted to feel raw, I wouldn't even be concerned about lighting. I would be concerned about audio because audio is important which is why you see all these people holding up microphones and stuff but I would actually just be able to walk around doing this sort of thing and this would look totally reasonable. The thing I would still be mindful of is to keep the lines relatively straight

because as soon as I do this sort of thing now this well it looks a bit artsy but generally straight lines straight lines across the board works very nicely and making sure your audio sounds reasonable which you can do with a simple pair of ear pods like this. You know, back in the day, having like high production value, like something looking really good and looking professional was a flex. And it was a thing that let you separate yourself from the mass masses of amateurs who were producing poor quality content with poor quality like microphones and cameras and stuff. Right now, we're in an era where having less good production value is actually fine because it feels authentic. And right

now, we have a crisis of authenticity. No one knows what's real anymore. No one knows what's fake anymore. Everyone's like, "Oh, is this AI?" And so we've actually found with our stuff that if our editing is too good, sometimes people in the comments are like, "Oh, he's just using AI in the editing." Even though we're not, it's very easy for normal people who don't understand video editing and animation to think if something looks good, oh, it must be AI. And that means that if your brand is leaning into authenticity as a thing, you might want to experiment with not using a camera, a fancy camera to film your videos. I know creators who deliberately like who film with a fancy

camera, but who deliberately add grain and noise to their videos so that it feels as if it was filmed with like a less fancy camera and a less fancy lens. There are general rules of thumb. You know, things like the straight lines is a rule of thumb. Things like eye level is a rule of thumb. Things like head brushing the top of the frame is a rule of thumb. But if you know what the rules are and you know that's generally what is accepted and what's considered looking professional, you can then artistically and artfully break those rules, you could make the camera really wonky if you wanted to. You could do something that my friend Daniel Dalen

does and have the camera super high and looking down at you from a super wide angle. Now, this sort of breaks the laws of breaks the rules of like video creation and stuff and it doesn't look particularly cinematic, but this creates a different kind of vibe and creates more of a, you know, he's leaning into the point of view vibe. And so, if he's like working away and then he's talking to the camera over there and he's working away, talking to the camera over there, like some people artistically do things like this to create a different vibe in their videos. The key thing is if you know that's what you're doing, then it tends to work. But if you're just randomly doing it without

knowing what the rules are or what the rules of thumb are, then generally the thing tends to look unprofessional rather than artistic. Now, if you enjoyed this video and you are interested in how I set up my actual YouTube studio, I have a video right over here. So yeah, if you want to see the process of exactly how that happened, how I turned my tiny ass Hong Kong apartment bedroom into like a YouTube studio that looks pretty reasonable, then check out that video over there. Thank you so much for watching. Have a great time and I'll see you in the next video. Am