By Anthony Gutierrez, Cadre Media
There are some video projects you’ll always want to entrust to a professional like (shameless plug) Cadre Media. But filmmaking today has evolved to a point where just about everyone has the tools and expertise to produce simple videos and to make them look and sound great.
In today’s post I’m going to go over a few basics to help you do great video work in-house and I’ll also address a few common mistakes I often see in political videos.
1.) Have a plan.
Unless you’re making an audition tape for a sketch comedy troupe you should never just turn on the camera without having a plan. The plans I write vary greatly according to the type of video and they can get extremely long and detailed but at the very least you should make sure you have a basic script and an idea of where the camera will be at all times throughout the shoot. Those two things will go a long way towards keeping you from wasting time and/or having your shoot go completely haywire while you try to figure out what your’e doing on the fly.
2.) Keep it short. There are plenty of scenarios in which people are tempted to make really political long videos but very few scenarios in which viewers will contemplate actually watching one. Having spent a long time experimenting with web videos and reading up on viewership I can tell ya that viewership falls off dramatically after one-minute. After two minutes it’s extremely unlikely that anyone who isn’t related to you is still watching or, at the very least, hasn’t started skipping ahead.
So, as a general rule, assume you have two minutes or less to work with. If you start out with that time limit in mind, you’ll discover that you can fit an awful lot of content into two minutes. But also be mindful that your viewers are watching on a laptop, tablet or smartphone so you can very easily use your video to hit the highlights and then direct your viewers elsewhere online for more details.
For videos that just can’t be condensed into two minutes, I suggest breaking up your one long video into several shorter ones. One of the things I like to do for clients’ press conferences is tape them then immediately afterwards I’ll excerpt a few highlights, throw an intro/outro on them and push those around online.
3.) On where/how to post your videos. If you’re an indie rock band trying to get a million views, become a viral sensation and get signed to a record deal – then you should only post your video on YouTube to rack up a high view count. For everyone else, post your video on YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook and then embed it on your website, blog, etc… Even though it’s pretty f-ing cool to score a high view count on YouTube, the objective here is to get eyeballs on your video and you have a better chance of making that happen if you post it all over the place.
Also, make sure you use tags. Tag your video with your name, nickname, office and every topical thing you can think of. Those tags go a long way towards making sure people searching for relevant topics see your video in their search results.
5.) Light and Sound. Getting these two things right can be incredibly complex but if you mess up either one of them too much your video will be completely unwatchable. Here are a few basic tips to avoid some common mistakes.
- Try as hard as possible to avoid ever shooting under florescent lights. Seriously, unless you’re intentionally aiming for a look similar to the first 20 minutes of the Matrix, stay away.
- If you can shoot using natural sunlight, do it. Find yourself a interior window with good lighting or an outdoor shot that doesn’t completely blow-out from sunlight. Sunlight looks great on camera and is quite a bit easier to manage than a professional lighting set-up. If you can’t get it to look quite right with direct sunlight use a bound board – grab a piece of white poster board or the sun visor from your car and use it to bounce sunlight to your target. It’ll provide great light but will also diffuse it a little so it won’t be as harsh as direct sunlight.
- If you have to be indoors, try to find yourself a lamp with an incandescent bulb. Yes, I know they’re bad for the environment but the light they put off looks waaaaay better than today’s more energy-effecient bulbs.
- Sound – Today’s smartphones can grab gorgeous video. However, they suck at sound. In fairness, just about all on-board camera mics suck for sound. You have two solutions. #1 – Get yourself something to record sound separate from the camera recording video. It can be a professional audio recorder, a digital audio recorder or even a second smartphone. Downside is that you’ll need to sync up your audio tracks later, which is not that hard but requires little bit of expertise. #2 – Find yourself a camera that has a mic plug so you can get the microphone close as possible to the sound source w/o moving your camera. #3 – If you can’t do either numbers 1 or 2, at the very least, shoot in a location as quiet as possible. You should really do this one regardless. When looking for a location to shoot, you want to find yourself a place where you can control ALL the sound. Air conditioners, heaters, refrigerators, ambient noise, people nearby, etc…
I see lots of videos that have great concepts and interesting content but if they mess up either the light or the sound, it makes the video utterly unwatchable. Viewers today are pretty sophisticated and have high standards for what they’ll watch online. Flipside, you yourself are a savvy viewer and know what looks and sounds good so just spend some time looking through your camera and experimenting until you figure out how to shoot your video in a way that’ll ensure it looks and sounds good.
This stuff can certainly get complicated but it’s really not too hard to learn the basics and start making videos people will want to watch. Filmmaking tools and techniques will be a topic I return to frequently on this blog so make sure ya check back often if this is a topic of interest. If there’s anything in particular you’d like me to cover feel free to shoot me an email at anthony@cadremedia.com or tweet me at @antgutierrez
Thank for reading and happy shooting!
[Image Via Lisa Padilla]
