Hey, excellent camcorder. And I hear you’ve got a laptop, too. Guess you’re inside the video enterprise!
Ah, however it is no longer that easy. As many could-be photographers can inform you, it’s no longer the gear that defines great; it’s the person using the tools.
Oh, you knew that.
Okay, what if I had been to offer you, say, $5000 to do a history of my existence? Would you realize what to do? Can you visualize the stop result? Or do you simply wish that the button marked “Ken Burns Effect” will shop your rear-end?
Sound cynical? Guilty as charged. But the proliferation of less expensive, respectable great video gear has convinced many a consumer they are able to do their very own business films or wedding ceremony videos, and plenty of a prosumer to make the fulltime leap into self-employment.
So here’s my provide. Read the next 5 paragraphs or so for my “video school in five minutes or much less”, and you’ll be one small step towards telling a compelling story, irrespective of what that story is.
FIVE MINUTE VIDEO SCHOOL… Beginning now!
1) Create an define of your project. What do you envision it to be? Despite all of the hype about interactive and non-linear media, storytelling is linear. The human brain desires a logical drift, and when it does not get it, it receives distracted… Begins daydreaming….. Zzzzzz. So, even before you start capturing or modifying, plot out your story. Let’s say that you’re doing a video for the engagement birthday celebration of a pair who have become married, and you need to tell their lifestyles testimonies. Here’s an ordinary outline:
Ancestry
Parents wedding ceremony
Birth of kids
Children developing up
High college or university years
Jobs
Some recreational high factors in their unmarried lives
The magic second–couple meets
Couple together
Couple receives engaged
Reprise of earlier shots (permit’s target audience understand its finishing)
Finale text, brand, “Congratulations” and photo of the happy couple.
2) Acquire the raw cloth. We have not even TOUCHED a camcorder but. You cannot without a doubt understand how this story will feel and what supplementary shooting you will need till you already know what raw cloth you will be running with.
Think in the box. If you take a look at a yearbook and just take a photograph of the yearbook, you’ve ignored the tale. Your “stars” are featured in that global… Get close-usaof pix from the book, pepper that with commercials of Pepsi, Coke, Hostess Cupcakes, the solid of “Saved by way of the Bell”– something they have been into at that age.
Important: take a look at for current audio or video recording of your stars, now not simply still snap shots. 8mm movie, old Betamax tapes, some thing. This can upload a treasure trove humor and expression. Plus, antique audio of voices lengthy gone can deliver the group to tears.
3) New Section? New Music. Your define quite a lot tells you ways often to alternate the music. Whenever the technology or situation changes, use a specific piece. It facilitates us understand the generation, it we could us realize we will circulate on in the story from what got here before, and it tells us how to experience. In different words, vary the track in line with the emotion, and remember your target audience. It doesn’t all should be hip-hop or electronica. Something heat and fuzzy is regularly extra appropriate.
4) Ditch the special effects. Transition results had been advanced for scene changes, and the maximum powerful one remains the dissolve. Page turns, circle wipes, shatters, and different “planet of the cheap computer graphics” stuff will force an target market to distraction– far from your tale. You’re not the celebrity, your difficulty or client is.
Five) Shoot for the editor. There are fundamental rules of enhancing, but what they come right down to is this: long shot, medium shot, close-up, cutaway. When you are capturing footage of the happy couple in the rose garden, we want to see the garden, them, their faces, their palms (and a close-up of the wedding ring, and a few signage telling us they’re within the rose garden. Oh, a near-up or scan of their newspaper wedding ceremony declaration is first-class, too.
Is it time? Put your pencils down. Follow those rues and pass to the next stage of video storytelling!
Good good fortune.
