Setting Up the Establishing Shot
You’ll always need at least one “establishing shot” that indicates where your movie takes place. This is often a wide shot that introduces your main characters and shows where they’re situated. Sometimes this is the first shot in your movie.
Establishing shots can be very creative. Think about shooting from up high, over your head, or through a window. You can even begin by shooting a sign that shows where your movie takes place.
Framing Your Shots
Pay attention to how tightly you frame your subject. Consider, for example, how large a person or object appears in the picture frame. Wide shots, such as shots of an entire football field or an expansive landscape, help to establish a scene. Close-up shots bring you closer to the characters and usually occur after a wide shot has identified where your movie takes place.
Incorporating Medium Shots
When working with a handheld video camera, it’s common to shoot everything as a close-up. The LCD screen on your video camera is often so small that it makes your subject look boring unless you get in really tight.
Fight this urge and trust that when you see the video on your television or Mac, filling the entire screen with just a face will make your audience a little uncomfortable. The medium shot, showing two or more characters onscreen or one character from the waist up, is the kind of image viewers are used to seeing in TV shows and movies.
Recording Sound
As you start making movies, you’ll quickly discover that it’s more enjoyable to watch poor-quality video with great sound quality than high-quality video with terrible sound. You’ll also discover that most handheld video cameras use omnidirectional microphones. They record sounds from beside, behind, and in front of the camera, resulting in ambient noise that can be very distracting.
To create movies with better sound:
1. When shooting landscapes and establishing shots, you may not need to record the audio associated with the video you’re capturing. In such cases, mute the audio track and replace it with music, sound effects, or dialog recorded separately.
2. When videotaping someone speaking or when shooting a conversation between two or more people, zoom out completely so you can move the camera as close to your subjects as possible while still maintaining a medium shot (not a close-up).
3. Consider getting either an external microphone you can have your subjects speak into or a unidirectional shotgun microphone you can attach to your video camera.
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