Advanced Videography: Make Your Videos Look Better

1. Welcome to Our Advanced Videography Course: Welcome to our Advanced Videography course. We are so excited to have you here. In this class, you're going to learn how to make your videos look better. My name is Phil. I'm here with Will and Sam. Just thank you for being here. Will, what's this class all about? So this class for us is about moving your videography to the next levels. We want to teach you some tips and tricks to basically take what you know now and make it even better. So we're going to show you some examples of what you can do to make your videography look incredibly professional and make it look like a million bucks. Sam, how have we set up this course in terms of the sections and the projects that we're going to be actually doing in the class? Each of us is taking on a different type of video that we're going to make. We're going to each individually take the students through and go through the various ways that you can really take that videography. Really the cinematography of the types of shots you're getting to the next level. So Will is going to be tackling a documentary corporate video, Phil, you're doing the commercial, I'm doing a travel blog. Really, all these shots that we're doing, they can be applied to any type of video but we're just going to go through in these projects, make them the best we can to show you really, where can you start with a good shot, but how do you really take it to the next level and really make something that's epic. The goal is for you to come away with this course knowing, at this point, you might already know how to set up a basic shot, but how can I take it to that next level? When you see a documentary on Netflix or you see a film in the theaters, how are they able to get those shots that just look better? That's what this course is all about. One thing we always say is, it doesn't matter what camera you have, you can capture a great video with the camera that you already own. While we will be using some more advanced tools such as gimbals and drones to get different types of shots, what we want you to do and believe is that whatever camera you have, if you think about composition, if you're thinking about the story elements of your project, if you're looking at lighting and all these other elements, you're going to be able to get the shot that you want. Lastly, before we jump right in, if you ever have any questions, we're here to help. If you have feedback, if there's things that we didn't cover that you want us to cover, let us know. We're happy to continue to update this class to make it the best one for anyone wanting to improve their videography. Will, Sam, you're ready to go? All right. All right. We're going to jump into Project 1, starting next. 2. 15+ Quick Ways to Make Your Videos Better: Here are over 15 ways you can improve your videos. This lesson includes a downloadable and mobile-friendly inspiration guide to help you think more creatively whenever you are out on a shoot. We'll dive deeper into all of these concepts throughout the course. We hope this video will give you a jump-start on the core concepts you'll be learning and a great refresher if you ever need to come back for inspiration. [NOISE] Tip 1. Add motion. Static shots have their purpose and are a great way to establish a scene. But oftentimes, adding motion can take your video to a higher-level. Be thoughtful in the way you add movement. Do you want shaky handheld footage? Do you want smooth, subtle motion? Tools like gimbals and dollies can help achieve this look. Or try shooting in a higher frame rate to be able to slow down in post-production. If you need to be shooting handheld, shoot at a higher resolution than your desired output so you can add subtle zooms or pans while editing. [NOISE] Tip 2. Use foreground elements. Try framing your composition with elements in the foreground. Shoot through things, or around things, or perhaps even focus on the foreground element while the action takes place in the background. Try to add a slow rack focus from the foreground element to the action in the background. [NOISE] Tip 3. Switch up focal lengths. Your kit zoom lens is great for general shooting. To be honest, we could get away with a 24-70 millimeter lens for most shoots. But using a longer telephoto lens, adds a professional look with its compressed background and beautiful boca. This style of shot also lets the viewer focus in on a subject with fewer distractions. Conversely, if you're shooting something where you really want to show your subject in their environment, pop on a wide lens. [NOISE] Tip 4. Film at a different time. Try shooting the same shot at sunrise, high noon, and sunset. You'll notice dramatically different shots with naturally different lighting. Golden hour, the hour after sunrise and before sunset, and magic hour, the hour before sunrise and after sunset are great times to shoot. Skies get more dramatic, full of color and life. Well, it may take getting up a bit earlier than normal or coordination with your crew if you have one. This is one of the best ways to instantly improve a shot. [NOISE] Tip 5. Use proper lighting. Speaking of light, we love natural light, but there's also a time for using artificial light kits and trying to control natural light. Study up on three-point lighting and other common portrait photography lighting styles to really give a mood to your story. Lighting can instantly make your video feel happier, sadder, scarier. It can give a dreaming or clean corporate vibe. Well, lighting is an entire art form in itself. LED panels are cheaper and easier to use than ever and is likely going to be a worthwhile investment if you plan on doing professional video work. [NOISE] Tip 6. Capture the scene at multiple angles. One of the best ways to make your videos more visually dynamic is to capture scenes in multiple angles. For those of us who are typically solo videographers or vloggers, the extra effort of shooting something in different wide, medium, and close-up shots may seem like a lot of work, but it will pay off in the edit. Get creative with your angles, break the rules. Your viewers will appreciate the effort. [NOISE] Tip 7. Track motion. If you're trying to video something in motion like a person walking down the street or a car racing by, the easiest way to capture this is by panning your camera with the subject. Take this to a more advanced level by tracking the motion. Tracking means moving your camera along with the subject in motion. This may mean practicing your walking and shooting skills, using a gimbal or dolly, or even getting a buddy to drive a car while you shoot out the window. Tracking shots are some of the most iconic shots in film history and add a higher-quality to your cinematography. [NOISE] Tip 8. Capture for slow motion. Shooting at higher frame rates like 60, 120, or even 240 frames per second has become synonymous with many of the most popular cinematic YouTubers and video creators out there today. There's a reason for it. It's beautiful. There's something about seeing movement slowed down that is captivating for your audience. But the tip should really be, don't capture everything in slow motion. There's a time and place for it. Use it when you want to slow down fast motion like action sports, or when you want to show off the details of a moving subject like a product or when you want to add motion to your shot, but don't have stabilization like a gimbal. [NOISE] Tip 9. Set your scene with aerials. Is this a cop-out? Maybe. I know drones aren't available to everyone, but it's never been more affordable to up your video game with the epicness of an aerial shot. Aerials are perfect for setting the location and scenery of your video. They're also good for getting tracking shots that would be hard or impossible to do so without a drone. Just because you have a drone doesn't mean you can forget your principles like composition, lighting, and storytelling. You can take your drone shots to the next level with neutral density filters that allow you to shoot at a lower F-stop with a shallow depth of field. Remember to test at different times of the day, the light and color of the sky will dramatically change the way your shots come out. [NOISE] Tip 10. Compress time with a timelapse or hyperlapse. Another visually creative technique to add to your videography tool belt is the timelapse. You can do this the proper way by capturing photos at regular intervals. Many modern cameras have the capabilities of doing this internally. You would then take all of the photos into your editing software and edit them together sequentially, usually one frame at a time, or you can simply shoot a longer video and speed it up and post. Timelapses are a great way to help transition time in your video like from one day to the next. It's also a great way to quickly show the progression of something that takes a long time. Add motion to your timelapse to make it a hyperlapse. It'll take lots of practice to do this smoothly. If you want an easy way to get this effect, you can add subtle Zooms or pans in post-production if your resolution is high enough. [NOISE] Tip 11. Add an ND filter to your kit. If there's one piece of affordable equipment that you should add to your camera bag is the variable neutral density or ND filter. These typically screw onto the end of your lens and you'll need to get one that matches the diameter of your lens. ND filters cut down light entering your lens, and that helps you get cinematic shallow depth of field with a wide open aperture even during the bright daylight. [NOISE] Tip 12. Pay attention to your background. While your subject is the star of the show, your background is just as important for telling their story. The background should always add to your story not to track. Sometimes this means getting the cleanest, most abstract background possible so your subject can stand out. A shallow depth of field achieved with a wide open aperture and or a telephoto lens is a great way to do this with your camera or it might mean trying to find an environment where there's not many distractions in the background. Other times, your background should be a character of the video itself. Notice how most of your favorite YouTubers likely put a lot of time and effort into designing their backdrop. It's not something to skimp on. Also, when out in the field, look around. Sometimes simply moving your camera and 90 degrees can result in a completely different shot. [NOISE] Tip 13. Add a second camera. Shooting with two cameras gives you more options for the edit. This is really important for an interview or talking head based videos. Having a second shot gives you something to cut two, which will help cover any mistakes or when trying to condense what is being said. It also keeps your videos visually interesting for the viewer instead of watching one long shot. [NOISE] Tip 14. Think photo composition techniques. Studying photography is a great way to improve your videography eye. Several common rules include the rule of thirds, which is placing subjects at the intersection of the thirds lines, leading lines, using natural lines in your videos frame that lead the viewer's eyes to the subject and framing within a frame, finding natural frames to put your subject in. These composition techniques will naturally give your video a balanced and interesting look. But there's also a time to break these rules. Centering your subject is also a common composition nowadays and is often done when speaking directly to the camera. This is an engaging composition that helps build a direct connection with your viewer. [NOISE] Tip 15. Storyboard your project. Do your homework before the shoot starts. This includes, at the very least, writing out a shot list. Take this to the next level by coming up with a storyboard that can help you pre-visualize what shots you want to get. It will also help any crew members working with you know exactly what you're trying to achieve. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. A scrap of paper with your best doodles is just fine. [NOISE] Tip 16. Remember your story. At the end of the day we can throw out all of the previous tips if we don't think about story. Every video has a story, whether it's a promotional commercial, a travel blog, a documentary or music video, or a narrative short film. Every shot moves your story forward and helps to tell that story. Whenever you plan a shot, always think to yourself, how can that shot better tell your story? That's a wrap. I hope you've enjoyed these tips and that this video provides an actionable and inspirational list to fall back on if you ever feel in a creative [inaudible] . Now, keep going and enjoy the full course. Cheers. 3. Project 1 Overview: Commercial: Welcome to another project. This one is a commercial project that we're going to be doing. What I've come up with for this is a spec commercial that we're going to be doing for a local mountain biking trail system that's actually going to be used for, at this point, the upcoming 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics. It's the location for the Summer Olympics. What's going to be interesting and it's going to be fun is you guys, we're all going to be tasked with how can we make ourselves look cool riding these mountain bikes, being not pro mountain bikers. That's one aspect of it, but a lot of it, I think is going to come down to the cinematography of it. The other aspect is while this is going to be the 2028 Olympic mountain bike place, [LAUGHTER] it's not necessarily the best looking place for shooting mountain bike footage. They're going to be building a whole new trail system. It's going to be epic by the time this happens, but how do we take an okay situation and make it look awesome? That's the goal. With the commercial aspect of it, I've done a lot of prep to think about what shots do we need? How can we set up these shots? It could be applicable to narrative film. It's going to be documentary style footage, but, yeah, I'm excited about this one. When coming up with this commercial, the first thing I did was actually script out a little piece. The story, and I'll have the actual script up on the screen for you to read, is basically showing Los Angeles is this place known as this concrete jungle, Hollywood, the beaches, but behind the traffic and the smog is actual nature. That's what we're showcasing. There's some shots that we're not going to be covering in this class. We might actually be using some footage that I find and that's part of the storytelling element we have to get into and the editing, we need shots to cover, but today we're going to be just filming the mountain biking footage. In terms of storyboarding, I just have a variety of different types of shots you might want to get, such as an aerial shot, showing the location, a few different types of just general mountain biking shots from pans to tracking shots, to close up, slow motion shots. We're going to be doing some product and beauty shots of the actual mountain bike. This might not be as applicable to this commercial, but it's just going to be a fun shot to get into. Then also, I'm going to be doing a POV action cam shot as well. It'll be fun. You can see here that I did a couple of different storyboards. One is just the storyboard for the types of shots that I just drew. You don't have to be a great artist to be doing storyboards, [LAUGHTER] but it helps you come up with a plan of action. Then here's the actual storyboard for the commercial itself, going from some maybe cityscapes shots of LA, showing the traffic, to more of the nature mountain biking shots that we're going to be going at. This was all done in Canva. I just use the free photos that Canva had and a couple of shots that I took as well doing some location scouting. We're going to talk about location scouting in the next video, but any thoughts about the commercial aspect, what people should keep in mind in terms of going out there, doing a commercial, whether it's a product, whether it's like this for more of an event, what types of shots should people be intending to get? [OVERLAPPING] I think based on your storyboards and the pictures that you've chosen, there's a tone of the sunset in California colors, the blues against the warm sun. I think there's something to be cognizant of. Then thinking about advanced videography, especially with yours, Phil, is what is the professional aesthetic? A lot of that is aerial stuff. That looks professional because not a lot of people can get that and that looks professional or shallow depth of field. I imagine we'll be shooting with longer lenses. We're going to be shooting 2.8 wide open as much as we can to create that professional aesthetic. Then movement, which is huge. [OVERLAPPING] Yeah. Capturing movement, camera movement. I think this is going to be great if you're doing even sports or any action stuff or even events. The stuff that you're going to learn in this project can be applied to all of that as well. This is so important to also how much you're planned out, especially with your scripts that you have. You have the timing, you know exactly what you need to be, how long your clips need to be. Yeah. That's crucial, especially when you're doing such complicated movement type shots. Yeah. The storyboards really show that movement of LA's cityscapes and this urban jungle. Then also there's these nature shots. You see an LA mountain biking commercial, and I don't know, for me, at least I think of mountain bikers in streets and stuff, but then you have these nature shots and the storyboard. It helps, I think, a huge part with commercial work because it's precise. You're selling something, each thing is very focused. You painted the picture really well, we're going to move from these big cities and then we have details of bikes and then we have these trails. It starts to paint a visual in my head of what we're trying to achieve with it. That's exactly what a storyboard is all about. Another aspect is location scouting. Compared to what Sam is going to be doing with his travel Vlog, I wanted to go out ahead of time and make sure that, we have a shoot date on X date, we have a couple of hours to do it. We need to know exactly where we're going to be and have it all planned out ahead of time rather than just going out running gun, trying to figure it out on the fly. In the next video, I'm going to be looking at some locations that I scouted. I'm going to show it to you too and we'll come up with a plan of action for where we're actually going to be shooting. Sound good? Sweet. See you there. 4. How Location Scouting Can Improve Your Videos: If you're doing a commercial, documentary, narrative film, location scouting is probably an important step before you actually go out and film. This is going to look different in different cities, you might need to go out and get permits, you might have to run out a house or a space. For us, we're shooting out in a park and it's just commercial project for fun, so we're going to be able to go out and do it. But what I was trying to look for and you can see some photos that I have up here are some different spots where we can set up our shot, set up our scenes that look cinematic. As I touched on this park, when I watched the mountain bike films and videos, I watch a lot that are like these epic in the middle of the forest up in Canada or Utah, flying down these red mountains. How can we try to get some interesting looking setup? Because it's not just about the bike, it's about the trail, it's about how the trail flows. It's about how we're going to be going down the trail. How you shoot the trail. [LAUGHTER]. Like I said, how can we make us just regular people look cool on a bike? Here's a couple of ideas that I have. You can see there's trails that are going along the hill, there's trails going down the hill, there's scenes where we can set up with the lake and the mountains in the background. Here's a couple of ideas for spots where you can go through the trees or go through the brush and the trail winds through. I don't know if any of this call out to you guys, there's other options as well in terms of just looking at these photos, how would we go about shooting these? What's your first take? Just seeing these photos and the fact that you've been there, if you can location scalp before commercial or for any type of shoot, it's so helpful in certain envisioning what you're going to do this little S-curve into the trees. I think with making staphylococcus iMac, having things in the foreground, having things in the background, having that, it adds a movement of life to it. That is really appealing to me like someone whizzing around through the trees, breaking through. It wanted to be from this angle, I probably come over, get some more trees in the background. I was looking for that. I was looking for stumps on the ground that might be a foreground element that you've come out from with movement. Or you might even just be focused on that foreground element and see the bikers go by in the background out of focus or something like that. Or then being in that tall grass and just having that grass in the foreground and someone goes zipping by, there's a lot. It's so funny that that's what you guys think of automatically. In that same photo, what I thought automatically, was being on in that position that you're in on a 200 millimeter lens. Having very little and focus and just trying to follow the close-up action of the tires, the gears, the hands, the face, and it just going for like by you. All you need is like, I don't know, two seconds of clip, because it's going to be having a lot of energy in the edit, and that's something you'd be thinking about two of the location is like, I need to hit a lot of these locations, but I can shoot a differently to add all that different timing in the edit later. Well, and going back to this location right here on the right, you can see this trail going down to the mountain. Now, this is actually one of the steepest trails in the park. It's a bad at 20 percent grade, but is it going to be interesting to shoot that? Cameras takeaway, like they say, it takes away how epic a trail is, it slows it down, it's not as steep, it's not as efficacy actually writing it. So can we shoot this so it's interesting? Maybe we're off to the side, we're seeing the grade of the hill. Or maybe it's just not something that's going to look that great and something that's a little bit flatter might actually look more interesting, even though it's not as epic for a mountain biker to be [OVERLAPPING]. Right. I think a big thing with this an edit and with commercial is like, well, I was talking about. We have these quick cuts and we're just getting these quick details, and that we'll still find a good location for that. But what are those moments after going through the quick things? We're focused on some photography and videography right now. That's what this course is about. But I think to be a great videographer, you have to be thinking about the edit. What is that shot that is going to be that aerial shot? What is that big reveal shot? Yeah, maybe this is great because we can get a lot of speed and we can get details of the dirt flying off the wheels and we can get that energy. But is that a good shot to serve open up for? Probably not. Because it's not going to look that exciting. Yeah. Whereas maybe a more interesting wide shot will be in while these other photos that is a better time to serve like show a bit more of the landscape. Another thing you can do with this area of the downhill thing is if it doesn't look that great is that can be where we put the action cameras on the bike itself, and you get the fixed shot of the handlebars or like you or like down at the tire because then it'll give you all that movement in it,and it won't just be flat. Speaking of trying to find a spot like a good place to pull out and do an aerial, something that's super helpful is Google Earth or Google Maps. But go to earth.google.com and you can see aerial shots of the whole world now. Here you can see the park where we're going to be at. I was looking at this, I'm like, man, there's some trails that I haven't been on. This is dope. If the sun is setting, I think there's a couple of options for a last epic shot of [OVERLAPPING]. There's a trail that's going through these trees that we might be able to shoot with the sun in the background. There's also this hill over here where there's not as many trees, but it might be a little bit cleaner shot with a somewhat silhouetted bikers going down here with the sun in the background. That's one idea, so just using Google Maps, I was able to see those two options. It's such a big thing to be able to scout answers see this beforehand and Google with is such a powerful tool to do so. Yeah. I think if you do get the opportunity to location scout, we or I use app called photo pills, and you can see where the sun is going to be at different times. Because a lot of this is when is that sunset beauty shot? We're in LA typically, it's sunny here. Yeah. It might be a cloudy day, but still it's good to know where are we shooting? At what time? You can plan out your whole day and where you need to be, what gear you're going to need in those different locations? It just makes a day runs so much smoother. If you have a client, you're not posting around to figure out what's next. We're going to go here first and then we'll go here, we're going to be at this location. We can pin drop it, know everything exactly. In the details, we're like, okay, where are we going to park? There's some of these trails that are a little bit farther for us to hike in with our gear, but, okay, there's this spot that looks okay and there's a parking spot right there. We can just easily grab that shot or that we're going to be doing a shot where we're tracking through trees. I wanted to find a spot where we could be driving along, getting that shot. We need a space to be able to drive the car or if you have some other dolly or gimbal or something like that, but all that is great to do in pre-production. It'll save your production because you really want to get there and you want to be creative and having fun and focused on that, not stressing out because you don't know where to go to get the shot that you thought you were going to get. Hopefully, I've prepared enough we're going to see with this project, but we're going to dive right into getting our shots coming up next, so let's go do it. Let's do it. 5. How Adding Motion & Shooting at Multiple Angles Improve Your Video: We're here at a setup. We've got a cool little S curve coming through some trees. In this scene, we're trying to build a story, build out a scene. We're going to work our way up from a basic shot, something that you might just go grab if you're shooting a documentary, a promo, you just grab the shot, you leave. No, we don't want to do that. We want to take our time, build an actual scene with several shots. Well, how are we going to do that? The first shot is going to be, like you said, just locked off. We're going to let you guys pass right through. It looks great because they're coming really close to camera. That's awesome. The next shot we're going to do is we're going to punch in a little bit with the lens not digitally, we want to do it optically because it'll add that shallow depth to feel that really awesome aesthetic. The next shot we're going to do is we're going to slow everything down, frames per second. We're going to shoot at 120 frames per second, remembering to change our shutter. With a little bit of motion, with a little pan. That's right. We're going to do some panning. You want to add that pan and movement in before we add the frames per second, and then we're going to do a moving shot. With my hand, we're going to come off some foreground, then focus to you guys at a high frame rate, which will add a lot more energy and a lot more fun and interest in this. I think being able to capture all these shots allows whoever is editing the video to have different options in case one looks better than the other, but also to be able to cut between the shots and actually have a more interesting scene to look at. We're also going to to flip around and get another shot from a completely different angle of us entering the trail and we'll see if that adds to the story as well. I think when you're looking at him, when you look at the wide shot, when it's locked off, you guys are going through and you compare it to the moving shot of us moving across a foreground. Look at the difference between the energy, the aesthetic professionally. When you start to add more variables to what your shot looks like, it's not just locked off, it can really add a lot of production value. Also with our camera, we've got the ND filter on our lens which is cutting down the light so that we can open up that f-stop wider so we have that shallower depth of field. That's one thing. If you don't have an ND filter they're not that expensive and it's a great tool to have if you're shooting out in the middle of the day like this when it's bright and sunny, you just don't have any option to keep that F-stop wide open to get that shallow depth of field, so the ND filter is a great one. This is a variable ND. This is a variable. I really honestly think that if you're going to advance your videography, if you're going to push yourself into professionalism when you're outside, you want that shallow depth of field, that aesthetic you need to shoot at a 2.8, you need to use an ND filter. It's helpful to have a variable one because you can change it depending on your situation. But they do make solid ND3, ND6, ND9 steps. But you could also have a map box with filters on it but variable screw on ND for your specific lens. Super helpful. We're also going to have Sam riding with me just having both of us for the commercials that we're putting together adds to that story but also just for the shot, I think it's going to make it more interesting to have both of us in the shot. Something also helps too, we're talking about advanced videography, this cage on this camera. Huge help. I was able to grab onto this and you can create some movement instead of having to finagle it. Helpful, also your flip out screen. Super great. Cool, I guess. Here you can see in this first shot Will just set up on the side. We rode past him. As always, the first shot is a test shot. We're going to [NOISE] two of these shots that was just me going by and then he re-framed just a little bit. He was shooting in 4K, So we wouldn't be able to punch in just a little bit but still not that interesting of a shot. Next, Will did a similar framing, but added a little bit of a pan at the end. Just adding that little bit of motion just to attract us. Going by, I think helps. Although at the end of that shot, that tripod's sitting there, so that's not going to work. Here was another one, another attempt, and this was shot in the higher frames per second at 120. This is actually five times slower than normal speed, or about five times. Here you see he punched in quite a bit. You can see the expressions of our faces just a little bit. The autofocus was actually pretty good on this shot. It's a nice combination of different elements that he was able to capture from me going down to the bike, that same as riding, getting close up and punching in allowed him to get a decent shot of us riding away there as well instead of seeing that tripod on the side. So 120 frames definitely smooths it out, punching in was good. Then finally, here's the shot with him hand-held going behind that branch putting that foreground element. Now I liked the shot. There's definitely some elements that I like about it. It was on auto-focus, so it's trying to find focus here and there. Right about there I am happy that it locks onto focus on to us and actually having some of that stuff earlier on where it's focusing on the branches is nice to use. Although if I were to do this again, I would lock focus either on the branches and just get that shot with the foreground element in focus. Then also get the same shot locked onto us in the background or manually focus where it starts off on the branches and then right around here it racks to us and is a little bit slower because the autofocus, even though it did a decent job getting onto us it was a little bit abrupt and the slow motion helped it a little bit. There's actually settings depending on your camera, you can adjust how fast autofocus changes from focusing on one thing to the next and you can actually slow that down. That might be a setting that when I'm filming this action footage, I might change in the future. Something that we notice as soon as we came to this spot, because we're shooting, the sun's right in the middle of the sky and there's trees here. We've got bright sunny spots, and then we have dark shady spots. You have to make a decision. Are you going to expose for the brighter area of the trail or whatever you're shooting or are you going to expose for what's in the shadows? It might take playing around with, testing out the shot if you are exposing for the shadows, maybe it's going to be completely blown out in the sunlight and you don't want that. Generally you don't want to be overexposing your highlights. If you're shooting raw log footage, you can sometimes pull up some of those shadows to have enough information to make it look good even if you are shooting at a lower exposure, but you generally don't want to overexpose your highlights. Now with this shot just walking around it, looking this way up the hill which you can see now, we're going to see the bikes coming down right in the sunlight and we're going to expose to us coming down in the sunlight. Now flipping around, we're going to walk up there and there's a nice shot where you could see the trail and you can see the trees. Again, I think we're going to going to still expose for the sunlight, even though we're going to be in the shadows at the beginning of the shot. We're going to test it out. We'll see what it looks like and maybe play around with it. But just another thing to think about. This might also make you think well, I went to film maybe later in the day or when it's trying to shoot on a cloudy day or some time when the shadows aren't as harsh that can up your video quality as well. Here we see the hard work of filming mountain biking sequences. Here is more of that storytelling element. You see Sam and I, this is going to be a shot, just part of the commercial. Two buds meeting up to get on a ride together. Will had us do it a couple of times. This last one I thought was the best one. Then Will got behind us and he did a couple of different shots that can hopefully pair together with us going down that next part which we filmed previously. I like this one where we both went around him. Now this one is the one where he exposed to us in the shadow. It's not going to work with us down there on the trail below. Here is where he exposed to us down in the sun, and that one is going to work if we want to use that part of the shot from down there. Here you can see well, running after us in that shot. Are you ready? Action. That reverse shot, the full thing basically. Having all of these different shots to be able to piece together is going to be awesome for our edit. 6. Capturing Motion with Panning & Tracking Shots: We're out here on the trail and I'm going to be biking down this path behind us. One way to capture motion is to pan with motion or to track that motion. We're going to be doing both. If you're shooting action footage, sports, or even if it's a narrative film and you're filming someone walking across a scene, a pan is a basic camera move that allows you to capture that motion. On our camera, we have a 100-400 millimeter zoom lens. It's a mirrorless camera, so it's even tighter. Using that telephoto lens, it's going to make the action faster, a little bit more dynamic than using a wide lens. The first thing you can do to make your shots look better, or at least more dynamic, I think is to zoom in or use a more telephoto lens. First, Sam's going to get this panning shot, and then we're going to hop in the car and do the tracking shot and you'll be able to see the difference between these two types of shots. Go for it. I'm just going to talk over the shots that Sam is getting of me and you'll notice in this very first one that it was more of just a test run. Sam is getting used to the speed that I'm cycling [OVERLAPPING] and the focus and everything like that. Here's take 2, you'll see is a little bit better. This is in full speed shot at 59 frames per second. Sam's a little bit tight and we're going to change the setup in a second [OVERLAPPING] but here you can see in the slowed-down speed, which with shooting at 59 frames or 5994 technically, you can slow it down about half speed and still get buttery smooth video without any jitteriness. There's parts of this where there might be a moment or two where I could use that bit of the shot in an edit. I'm not necessarily looking for the entire shot to be perfectly in focus, perfectly framed, but it would be nice. We move Sam back so that he was shooting a little bit further away with this telephoto lens, I think it's going to help. Here's the third take at full speed. We'll do a last one. Being on the tripod is crucial for Sam to get a steady shot. Here I am, and he's starting with me and right about here when I peek out through this tree, I think is where there's a bit of the shot that can help. This is on autofocus and it does a decent job at sticking with me as I go across. Here is our fourth shot again at full speed to start out. You see Sam is actually zooming out a bit with the lens at the very beginning of the shot and that one is the best one by far, he stayed with me, my head wasn't getting cut off in the frame, here it is slowed down. You can see Sam punches in just a little bit with the lens. This one, he might have moved because a lot more of this is usable. What I was really going for was trying to get that movement of me going through the trees. I think that shot was decent. Speeding. Here's our fifth shot at full speed. You can see Sam zoomed out just a little bit. Starting out zoomed out seemed to help as I went by. I'm getting closer to the camera, so by the time I go towards the left of the frame, being a little bit wider at the beginning, helped out. Some of this was very usable and remember I'm shooting at 4K, so I can punch in if I'm going to be exporting at a 1920 by 1080 sequence, I can punch in 200 percent and still be full quality or full resolution and not lose any quality. A bit of that was actually pretty good for this shot. Now we're going to see the tracking shot with Will in the car this first time at full speed. This was shot at 5994 frames. Definitely faster, definitely a rough first attempt but pretty solid job, pretty solid camera work. This is all handheld and so the internal in-body stabilization helps quite a bit to smooth a little bit of those jerks but slowing it down is going to help and also adding some stabilization in post is going to be necessary. Here is that same shot slowed down. You can see what that looks like and again, I'm not looking for the entire shot to be perfect, I'm looking for a second here and there. One of the issues with this shot is the exposure is pretty wild going from sun to shade. I told Will to expose to the shadows so that the parts here look better than where I'm in the full sun although I don't like how some of this is being overexposed. Really, some of this stuff at the end is not what I was looking for is really more of those bits in the beginning that I might use. Completely overexposed here, and unless you're on auto exposure, that's just going to happen when you set yourself to one exposure. Now here is the next shot, the next attempt. We punched in, I told Will to punch in and I'm shooting at 120 frames per second. This is basically five times slow speed. Five times slower than normal speed. Here you're going to be able to get some just individual parts of the shot that are usable. You can see that the tracking option, it's a different type of shot. I think it's a much more advanced type of shot compared to the pan, but it did take having a car, having someone driving that car, having Will shooting with the camera. I think some of those earlier bits were more usable than this part where the focus wasn't as sharp on me, but more of it was a little bit shallow focusing on the trees. Now, when we see this video cut with the other wider shot, I think that edit is going to look pretty cool. I'm going to show you what that looks like right now just so you can get a sense of what we were going for with capturing the shot both the wider and also the close-up. [MUSIC] There you saw just a very very quick edit with a little bit of color correction and you can see how I might put these two or this variety of shots together, cutting from full scale to cropping in with that 4K footage using the 5994 full speed to slow motion using the 120 frames per second slow motion, also cutting together as you just saw there, the tracking shot to the panning shot. The panning shot is not a bad shot. That's not what this course or this lesson is supposed to tell you. It's just a different shot. I actually think that we could go back and get a smoother tracking shot and maybe even in a different location or with different lighting when it's cloudy out and it would be a lot better shot where I was actually exposed better for the entire shot. Because it was so bright out, I think that wasn't as good as I was hoping it to get. Although as you can see, there are bits and pieces here where I can cut it together in a sequence. For this shot action style footage, it's great to be able to cut short quick bits together. If it was a different type of shot, if I was tracking a person walking down a street or something like that, I would want it to be a lot smoother and better lighting in general and better exposure. But as you can see with these two shots that we got today in this scene, you can cut them together and come up with a pretty solid edit that's going to be in my actual bike promo video, which you'll see later on. Thank you so much for watching, and I hope you enjoyed this lesson and it gives you some ideas for what you can do. Cheers. 7. How Changing Your Background & Focal Length (Lens) Can Improve Your Video: We just got back from shooting one of our setups and what we were aiming to achieve is we started with a general wide shot and we had Sam and I coming down the trail towards the camera. You had framed it up pretty well, nice trees using us coming down on the lower third of the frame. Look. But then we were trying to think of how could we take, if we're stuck with this camera, stuck with this lens, what would we do to switch it up and make it better? I think the first thing we came up with was just panning over and changing the background [NOISE] for this shot and for this series of shots that we're doing for this project, I think panning over getting the shot of us profile going across the frame with [BACKGROUND] the mountains in the background, created a much more different setup or scene than what we've shot before, which I think might work well for the edit. We'll see if it actually cuts together because it's a static shot, [NOISE] but it just gives a completely different feel and it looks like a different place or location gives it a little broader appeal to the video. I think normally when you're in a situation like that, just simply panning or looking in a different direction or moving into a different composition can add a lot. Don't get fixated on what is in front of you. I think that's a basic, I don't want to say beginner move is just like, this is what's in front of me. No, get up, move your feet, pan over, look to the right, look to look behind you. Look up, look down change up the composition because you never know what can be around the corner. One of the things we ran into with this shot again with the others is just the lighting. Being actually out in the middle of the day, lots of shadows with the trees. Finding a space where [NOISE] both the cyclists, we were riding in the sun so that we weren't too dark looking at the background which is completely in the sun as well. That was, I think, something just to keep in mind, lighting [BACKGROUND] so important even if you're out shooting with natural light. The next thing we did to try to make the shot look better is swapping lenses. This is something that is a little bit more advanced if you don't have different lens. If you're shooting with one lens, you might not be able to do this. But we put on the 100 to 400 lens, which is super telephoto. You cranked it up. Was it at 400 or so? Yeah, I started at 400 and had you guys come down. I think I bumped out a little bit. But the main thing to think about here is that we're not lens specific, but we are millimeters specific, focal lengths specific. We jumped from fills like mid-range wide lens to a telephoto lens. If you're trying to do advance here videography, you need to think about getting those long lens because it created that crazy depth of field. Look at that shot and how things are very out of focus and vary in focus but it looks like a commercial. This is what we do as a cinematographer in big time commercials. We shoot long lenses at high frame rates and manner just look so pro. We needed a lot of space for you to backup. [OVERLAPPING] Way the heck back there. Seeing us coming down the hill. That lens, I personally use mostly for photography. I don't know if I've really used it at all for a video myself maybe out shooting some wildlife photos. I snapped at it over the video, but it looks good. [OVERLAPPING] Honestly it has the same look as a pro prime 400 millimeter lens or something like that. It just adds that shallow depth of field and the compression. Because the longer the lens, the more compressed your subjects look versus a wide, it looks a little bit more spaced. Yeah. That adds so much to the production value. Just simply changing your lens, which is like such a simple thing that we can just tweet or tell someone but until you see it and then until you take the action to pony up the money or rent a lens, you're just going to be stuck in this wide angle world. Talking about focus with the telephoto lens. We initially had it on auto focus, and [LAUGHTER] it's going to depend on what camera you're using. Some are better, some have settings within that you could change how it's trying to track objects. You could change as an object coming towards the camera, is it going all over the place? Is it going across? You can sometimes set that within your camera. Definitely look at that if you have autofocus. We found that it was a little spotty though. [BACKGROUND] We were shooting at 120 frames per second, so it's super slow mo and so for actual usable footage, there's going to be a lot of moments that are in focus. [OVERLAPPING] We going to need a couple of seconds. Even in those first autofocus shots and then we switched over to manual focus just to get a couple of where you were controlling the focus yourself. At home, I brought out the telephoto lens, the 100 to 400 to get a couple others sample shots. I just wanted to play around with the focus settings. I changed the tracking sensitivity on my camera, which might be an option for you. Here I can tell, I think it did a little bit better of a job tracking both my pup, Ashdy and one of my sons on the scooter coming at me. Then here are a couple of examples of just straight on still shots. You just see that compression versus a wide lens. A completely different style of shot. Not necessarily one being that much better, or you only have to use a telephoto shot but I just want to show you the difference in what a telephoto and a wide lens could look like. You can see that the telephoto lens, it just compresses everything and the background gets blurrier, and it does have that more cinematic quality to it. Even though with the wide lens on this particular one, I am able to open it up to an F 1.4 which allows a fairly blurry background. Still is just a different type of shot. Something to know about high-level cinematography in commercials and narratives and stuff like that in Hollywood, a lot of lenses that they use are manual focus. Not very many of them are auto-focus. You actually have a human dedicated to pulling focus. That's their sole job on a commercial or something like that. You as a videographer, if you're by yourself, autofocus is great if your camera can keep up with it, but keep in mind you can also do it manually yourself, but then you have to also pan, tilt, zoom, takes practice. Don't get frustrated right away if you're using manual. Also, a lot of these lenses are autofocus, which means when you try and pull focus with them, it's an electronic system that's trying to move the focus. It's not always as precise as these big time budgeted commercials where you literally have a person there manual pulling the barrel while someone else operates the camera. Practice takes a lot of practice. I mess up a couple of times the autofocus messes up a couple of times. It takes repetition and it takes Phil and Sam, walking their bike up and down [LAUGHTER] all day. The takeaways from this setup was, one, if you're stuck on one lens, the background can make a huge difference in the story you're telling with your shot. Then second, putting on a more telephoto lens also is something that can make your video look completely different, basically same exact setup, same line that we are coming down, but a completely different type of shot. This is great. Get out there, and I'd say do all those things but practice. You probably not going to get this on the first try, but that's how you become a pro. See you in the next one. Cheers. 8. Add Aerial / Drone Video to Improve Your Videography: Let's talk about one of our other setups, and this is our drone setup. Drones can add a completely different production value to your videos. The beautiful thing now is that drones are rather affordable to get yourself, it can be a great investment for you as a videographer if you're starting a production company, especially for certain types of videos. If you're doing business videos, if you're doing wedding films, if you're doing documentaries, pretty much any video, you can use a drone shot and it makes it look like a million bucks. But there's a lot that goes in with flying drones and not only how to fly them, but how to get an actual good shot. Flying the drones themselves, there's a lot of things you have to take into account. You have rules, like some countries, you might not be able to fly drones, some areas you might not be able to fly them. Some places you need to get advanced authorization. All of that, you have to do the research yourself ahead of time to know there's different weights in drones. Some they make micro drones that are under the weight limits in different places that you could fly anywhere. There's lots of things so drones, you do have to do your research to know if you can fly them where you want to fly them. Make sure that's probably the number one rule. Then the second rule is just safety drones. Can fall, they got blades that are spinning and so you've got to be super careful with them. I would say do not even go out to fly a drone until you've done the proper research for your specific area. Not just for safety, but you can get fined and a lot of places or get ticketed and that's no fun because then you'll just be paying money for the cost of buying some other equipment that you could be using. You look specifically up for where you're about to fly, know the rules, be safe about it. Make sure everyone else around you knows. Practice again in a safe area. They can be very dangerous. Now I say, we do this because we've all been flying drones for the past almost decade now at this point. As they came out. As they came out off and on so we're pretty seasoned at it. Phil checked in with the local authority about how we can fly, where we can fly, what our limits we're flying. We are allowed to do that. I think just knowing that stuff before you even get into the creativity is really important. I think one reason to use a drone because it's like a drone shot is going to look awesome so let's just use it. That's great. But I think a good reason to use a drone is to set the location a little bit better than what you can do with just another type of shot. That storytelling element of being able to backup and actually showcase the location of where you're at, I think is a great reason to use a drone. In terms of different types of shots you can get with the drone, it's pretty much anything you could follow people, you could track people, you could be shooting straight down having people or whatever it is you're shooting. People go across the frame and we're trying a variety of shots while we were at out filming today. Yeah, it's endless. That's the idea behind the drone is that you can get shots that most people can't. I think that's where drones hit advanced videography in the sense that if you go through the work to do it, you go through the practice of doing it, your video will stand so much higher in quality above other people who have not taken the time to practice, do the prep work, do the shots. Now some of the shots I was doing the Phil and Sam are really cool in the sense that I was trying to track them, follow them parallel so they'd be crossing frame. That was really fun. I was trying to follow and chase you guys as if it's an aerial view. There is another one where they were walking their bikes up a hill, they looked exhausted and I was just creeping behind them. I was just slowly pushing in like you would on a gimbal or a slider, but I don't have to be out there running. I can just use the drone. In that sense, that shot wasn't even up really that high, it was very low, but still creating a nice look to it. Drones have this huge versatility in different types of shots that will add this production value to what you're doing. In terms of different drones. Some will have a camera with a little gimbal on it that you could rotate, tilt up till down some. The cameras are more attached to just the body of the drone and you can maybe do a tilt up or down. In terms of just quick tips for movement of the drone, the first thing that comes to mind is don't move. Try not to move the camera too much. Certain drone with a gimbal and stuff, you can do subtle pans and tilts, but I think it's better to just set up your composition and then use the drones movement itself to get the movement so the drone can lift up, it can go forward, goes side to side, but not so much the rotation, I feel like it doesn't work as well. It depends as you start to get practice, you can do it. But if you think about it, like if your face is a drone, you're moving your body or the drone like this, sideways. That's how you basically do the moves. I will tilt every so often, but again, you have so many axial and tilting up and down and making sure you're keeping your subject and frame, it takes so much practice to get complicated moves. I think starting out if you're pushing yourself is just doing, like you said, lateral moves or push in or up and down using the body of the drone more so than the camera itself. I think another thing, just more advanced drone shots will include foreground elements that you're coming around, coming between, flying through it. One of the shots we got going through the trees, I think this looks pretty cool compared to just if we got that same shot following us with an open field or whatever, having things flying past the shot looks pretty cool. Yeah, so everything else that we've talked about in this class applies to the same camera on the drone. Like elements in the foreground, like Phil saying passing through like we did with the gimbal. Also having flares that look really nice. Then on top of it shooting with an open f-stop so that things can fall out of focus. I put an ND filter on the drone so that it would bring down the lights so that we're able to shoot at a two-way or four out there. Again, everything applies to the camera, same rules, but you're just in the air and operating a dangerous thing. We got some great shots at that one location and then we took the time and we waited for sunset or at least closer to a sunset, we got some better lighting and we were trying to think, how can we use this drone to tell the story of the commercial we're creating, which is about the juxtaposition of LA traffic to nature, mountain biking and luckily, there's a spot at the park where right next to the trails is the freeway. What we did is we went to that spot, took the drone out, was on the traffic on the freeway, pulled back to reveal, Sam and I cruising down the hill, that's the money shot right there in terms of thinking about other things, lighting and storytelling not just how do we compose a great drone shot, but how do we use the other skills like lighting and storytelling to make it better. It's only one shot, but it adds so much to this piece. Really we put a lot of effort into this, like what you used it for like a second or two seconds or whatever. We looked at Google Maps, so we looked where we wanted to fly, we waited for the right time of day, we had Sam and Phil get ready to roll down the hill, I was prepped, I formatted the card, we check the drone policy and it's two seconds. But that shot itself is what adds so much to that piece and this is where you really become an advanced filmmaker. Videographer is doing all that work just for two shots, but it makes a piece I think. That's a lot about drone footage, about getting aerials. If you have questions, let us know. But hopefully just some of these ideas help you get better drone shots when you go out and shoot, thanks so much for watching. See you. 9. Changing Your Lighting to Improve Product ' Beauty' Shots: Here we are in our product shot demonstration. What we're going to be doing is getting some product beauty shots of the bike here, and this is our example of an object that we're going to try to film to make look beautiful. We're going to do it in two scenarios. One is out here in the daylight. It's getting closer to golden hour. The sun is pretty close to the horizon, so it's pretty dramatic lighting on the bike here. But we're also going to be taking it inside our garage, and doing some actual artificial light to have more control, and show you the two different styles. Both, we're going to try to make look good, just completely different styles. Now, in terms of what I'm shooting with, I'm shooting with my Fuji camera. This is a crop sensor camera with an 80 millimeter lens. Because it's crop sensor and an 80 millimeter lens, it's going to be super tight. I'm not getting a whole shot of the bike. I'm getting shots of the components, getting shots of the branding, just different elements on the bike. Now, because I'm shooting with such a long lens, if I was doing this completely handheld at normal speed, you're going to see a lot of motion. Some cameras do have some internal stabilization inside the camera itself, and this camera does have it. A lot of modern mirrorless cameras do have some in-body stabilization, and that's going to help with a little bit of the jitters that you have in your hands. But on top of that, what I'm going to do to try to smooth out the motion without using a gimbal or a tripod is, one, I'm going to be using this rig that I have set up here. This gives me a little bit more control. If I'm holding it like this lower, I can hold this, and be a little bit more stable than trying to shoot like this. Just a preference, these cages are awesome because you can change the way that the grips are. You can put it on the side, on the left, right, top, and it just gives you a little bit more control. The other thing I'm going to be doing is shooting in slow motion. I'm actually going to push it all the way up to 120 frames per second, which is four times slow motion. Compared to normal speed, we're slowing it down four times. By shooting at a high frame rate, it's going to allow that motion to be even smoother when it's slowed down. Even if I have little motions back and forth, up and down, it's going to look pretty smooth when we're playing it back. I'm just going to go around the bike, get a few different shots. I'm going to have Will coming in here, spin our pedals to get some motion. Then, we're going to take it into the studio, and show you what it's going to look with proper lighting too. [MUSIC] The one thing I'm doing right now is I'm just doing a sway in and out. This is a cool move if you want to have not a rack focus, but have an element come into focus and/or come out of focus. I'm focusing on the logo right here, specialized right there, and I'm just starting from a little bit farther away. Because of this lens is so tight, I'm shooting at a F5.6 because there's so much light out here, and I don't have an ND filter for this lens, I have to bump up that F dot, but still, depth of view is pretty shallow. It makes a little bit more dynamic than just having a static shot. [MUSIC] I'm trying to get a good shot of this chain here going around. It's just in the shadow right now, so I'm going to try to position the bike where the sunlight is actually hitting that chain just to give it a little bit of sparkle. Because we're so tight on these components, even though I've moved the bike completely into a different spot, it's still going to be able to cut together. Go ahead and spin that. [NOISE] That's fine, but I'm shooting with the sun facing on it. I'm going to come around and shoot from the other side so that the sun is more of a back-light. Yeah, go ahead. [NOISE] Good. I think it helps having a buddy here to help just add that little bit of movement. I think you can tell from me hopping on the other side, with the sun as a backlight to the subject of our shot, which is the chain and the gears, I think that looked a lot better. Now, we're going to basically take the bike inside, and do the same exact shots, and do just a completely different style with actual lighting. Let's head into the garage and do that. We're inside, and what we've done is we've turned off all the lights except for right now we have this one LED panel that is currently being a backlight. We have another one that's going to be in front shining directly on the bike. Right now we have just a light for me. But once we turn that off, the light is going to be focused on our product, on our subject. What we're trying to do is get the background as dark as possible, so it's almost like we have a black backdrop. We're in a black void with just the product, and so we're trying to focus the light as bright as possible on the subjects. We brought the lights close. But the camera settings were actually similar to what we were outside. We're shooting at 120 frames per second, and 1-40th shutter speed, so that leaves our F-stop and our ISO to control our lighting and our exposure. The first thing I'm going to do is get the same exact shots just with the lights sitting still, and then we're going to take it to the next level with some actual movement of the light. We're going to enroll Sam and Will to help me with that. We're going to turn off this light, and we're just going to keep rolling though, and you'll see what we're working on as we get these shots. [MUSIC] While we're here, I guess l get on with it moving. Let set on three, 1, 2, 3. Let's do that again. Same speed? Yeah. Same speed. One, two, three go. Go ahead from here. There you can see a variety of shots that we got. In here, I started with the 80 millimeter lens. We got the same similar shots with the lighting. Some of them we had the light in the back, so you can see that light coming through the different components of the bike, and you could just see the totally different style. Sam had a great idea of moving the light. It cast a shadow on the logo and the different components as we move the camera as well. All that motion combined, I thought, made it look really awesome. Then, Will and Sam had a great idea of getting a hero shot of the whole bike. We were able to prop it up. We have the light coming overhead. It was just one light panel, Sam was holding it up. I thought that shot came out really cool. Then, we did the same light movement to make it even more dynamic. For that shot, l switched over to the 16 millimeter lens. I was a lot wider, but still handheld shooting in slow motion, and all in all, a pretty simple setup to get some pretty cool shots. I can't wait to take those shots into the editing room to see what some color correction can do to make them look even better. I hope you enjoyed this product shot setup, and it gives you some ideas for what you can do at your home to get some great shots. Cheers. [MUSIC] 10. Project 1 Recap: Watch the Commercial: I hope you've enjoyed this section and this project of the course. I had a lot of fun going out shooting, riding my mountain bike, something that I'm passionate about, and really looking at it from a different perspective. I hadn't really shot any mountain bike footage before and so working with Sam and Will to make sure we got enough shots and enough creative shots to put together, what I think is going to be a really awesome-looking promo commercial was really fun. Here I'm going to show you what our final product looks like. This is put together over a couple of weeks after shooting all the footage. You'll notice a couple of things that I want you to keep in mind that have helped make this video what it is. One is because of the storyline of the project, we actually use some stock footage. Now, there's lots of great stock footage websites out there. These come from storyblocks.com. I am not affiliated with them or sponsored by them, but I do appreciate that website for all the stock footage that they have. There's other ones out there like artgrid.com, there's so many out there. But I did use a premium service rather than try to find free footage out there. Also, this is something that maybe you potentially we could have gone out and filmed ourselves, but there are some shots in there that are pretty epic that I think pose a great introduction to this piece that would've taken a lot more effort than just purchasing it or downloading it with the license that Storyblocks has. Anyways, you'll see some stock footage to introduce it that runs into the footage that we shot. I tried to blend it together with color correction and things like that, so that the shots look somewhat similar in terms of style and look. The other thing we did is we hired a professional voice-over actor to read the script. It would've been one thing to have myself, Sam, or Will take a stab at reading through this script but I was going for a specific tone and style of voice for this project and so I think the voice-over artist did a really good job. Lastly, we added some music which was downloaded from Epidemic Sound and another service that I do use and recommend. There's again, lots of other stock music sites out there, but I found a great song that I thought, again, match the vibe that I was going for. Without further ado, you'll see how I edited together the shot that we got which when you are just shooting it and you're seeing it play back, it's like this sounds are okay. Maybe they're good, maybe they're not so great, but put together, I think it comes out as a really great piece that I'm excited to put out live and see how it does for the public viewing as well. Here you go. I'll finish it off with the video, enjoy, and I hope you enjoyed this project. See you in the next one. [MUSIC] Los Angeles, land of concrete and pavement. You might come for the glitz and glam, but if you stay long enough, you'll need an escape. Peak between the cracks and the pavement, and you might just find that even in LA, we've got nature in our backyard. Ready to play? [MUSIC] 11. Project 2 Overview: Cinematic Travel Vlog: Hi everyone, now we're going to get into my project and what I'm going to be doing is travel Vlog. The idea is that when I have a trip coming up here and we're going to go up to June Mountain to go on snowboarding trip. We're actually going up near a place that we've gone to work with a client, Hunewill Ranch. All right. My plan is that we'll go up stand by his cabin and we'll just do a little trip going, from June Lake up to the Hunewill Ranch in Bridgeport, California. Now, Eastern Sierra is one of my favorite places in this world and I think doing a travel Vlog around exploring that area will be really fun. There's a lot of beautiful shots in the wintertime, yourself in the valley floor and then you get to big mountains and there's a lot of shoot around there. The idea around this is to do both A-roll and the B-roll. I think for love Vloggers, it's figuring out the best way to talk to camera, whether it's doing it in a studio beforehand or after your trip, instead of doing this setup and then you put the footage over it or it's out in the streets in the moment where you're walking around with your camera and talking to the camera. With this, there's a lot of different things we've been thinking about. I've been doing a lot of planning of what's best way to approach that? How do you get the audio in those moments? A lot of this is reacting to the moment. Yeah. Because you're traveling, you have no control [LAUGHTER] over what actually happens. You don't get to say, it might be that you want to get sunrise shots, but you have to leave that morning and get to the next place, so you get that one sunrise and then you're onto the next thing and I'm coming opposed shot. It's a different type of project, so I'm excited to see how you go about being out on the field, coming up with a shot, you might have an idea of what the shot is going to be, but you're going to be in a new location, different compared to our projects where ours were a lot more controlled, a lot more planned out, so I'm excited. Different equipment too, because you'll be out in the field. You may be using different types of cameras, different lenses, filters, right? Well, and it's what can I travel with. Right. I'm trying to pare that down a little bit, not have all the toys, not have lights, it's going to be a little bit more minimal. Now thankfully, I'll have you, which is going to help a lot because at least we'll have extra set of hands. But it will be [LAUGHTER], it will be a lot of that. The shot ideas that I have initially planned out at least is so first-off that classic Vlog, go and talk a lot about how to get that shot both in the moment or after the fact, having your audio setup, monitoring all on your own to make sure you get that shot. The second one is that B-roll. You're traveling, you're in a car, you get to location, how do you get dynamic shots of the locations you get to and really getting the detail shots, but then also the wide shots. That's always my big thing when I'm doing these types of shoots, is you can get to a place like, here's the ranch. You see the ranch, then and you are done. [LAUGHTER] But to get the ranch and then to get the details and really good things that can build in the edit that can really make it look that much better, that much more like a professional travel documentary in a way. From there, I'm going to talk a little bit about action cams. I think that they are awesome tool and they've gone so incredibly advanced at this point. It is an extra piece of gear, but it's compact, it's lightweight, easy to travel with. Going up into the snow. Who knows? Maybe take a snowboarding or maybe take it into situations where a bigger camera wouldn't be able to be used. Then going to talk about time-lapses. I think I always have, since my early days, traveling and backpacking, I have enjoyed doing time-lapses. I think they're great way to show the passage of time or to just be used in a travel Vlog edit to really showcase the beauty of a place that you're getting to. I think a lot of traveling is to beautify these places you're traveling. Make it look like, I want to go to Iceland or I want to go to the Eastern Sierras, I think time-lapse is a great tool there. It's something that I have done a lot of bad time-lapses, and I've screwed up a lot of time-lapses and so going through the tips of how to make that really a powerful piece or a powerful addition to your video. Then the last one and the one I'm most excited for but also a little terrified of is the hyper-lapse. Because hyper-lapses take a lot of work and I've done them in the past and definitely even more than time-lapses have had my good ones and bad ones. What is a hyper-lapse for people who don't know? Yeah, what's a hyper-lapse? [LAUGHTER] Hyper lapse is essentially a moving time-lapse. Whether it's video or photo, which hopefully I'll do both of those. You take a video really is just a bunch of photos, but anyways [LAUGHTER], you take a time-lapse, but you're moving the camera throughout it. You have to move the camera slow enough or fast enough to then move with a time-lapse you're doing and it's a really fun trick if you can learn to master it, because it adds this dynamic side to your video. It really brings up the production value I guess. Yeah. Those are just running through these. These are my ideas they want to want to achieve while I'm out there, I know that the key is talking to the camera and the rest is just to document the trip. I'll get these cool shots setup in a few locations. But really being open deserve what happens on the road. How long are you aiming to have your video? I'm thinking around two or three minutes. I think what I learned, at least when I was doing a lot more of this type of work is that [LAUGHTER] what happens is going to take the length. Sure. Depending on if there's like a big moment and also I'm talking to the camera for 10 minutes. Maybe that's what it wants. I think a lot from me, like with traveling is if you try and control it too tightly, it's going to fall apart, so you just go with the flow. Drive me crazy too. Always have the camera, keep filming. Just document all the things that happen and find the story. I do think a big part of it as well is the after the fact. I think a lot of times talking to the camera at the moment is really great. I also think talking to the camera after the fact can be really powerful tool to fill in the gaps. Maybe you missed a moment filming and so you can fill it in later. Yeah. I think like we've talked about the different shots you're going to be getting are going to be applicable to other types of projects. Time lapses, hyper-lapses can be used for documentary, they can be used for music videos, they can be used for a narrative film. Just keep that in mind while you're watching this section. It's not purely for Vloggers, it's for all shootings. Absolutely. I think the purely Vlog thing is when I'm walking around with talking to the camera like this. I think that's the Vlog thing. Yeah. Everything else, these are all tools I've used in numerous other videos. They're just things that I think will be cool for Vlog. I mean, I could probably use a lot of shots that you guys are talking about as well, but these are just the ones that I came up with for this one. My favorite thing about yours is how technical it's going to be. It's like there's a lot of technical techniques that you're going to be able to use, you can feel sad if you don't apply to anything and any situation because you're just being thrown into like, here's the light, [inaudible] this is what we can do. Yeah. I think it's going to be a big part of it, I got to this location, it's midday, the sun's whatever. There's a bunch of snow around us. I mean, I don't know if you've ever done this on the snow, it's the thing. It's hard, isn't it? Yes. [LAUGHTER] I'm sure we're going to get in some situations that will be fun, but we'll get there. [LAUGHTER] We'll take you along for the ride. That's my project for this one and can't wait to get on the road and start making this thing a reality. Cool, I'm going to go get my beanie. [LAUGHTER]. 12. A Complete Vlogging Setup Breakdown & Tips: Hi everyone. We are now out at June Lake and we're just having a nice little early morning. Made some coffee, did time-lapse which we'll get to. But to start off, we wanted to talk about vlogging. This setup that I have here to talk to the camera, share a bit about the story. What's the setup? What we're doing to make sure that we get the shot to really share this part because this is where the storytelling element comes. Whether you're doing it out in the field or if you're doing it at home, this setup is really going to help you tell that story, talk to the camera by yourself. I'm lucky enough because I have Will here with me. Well, camera is focused on me, not him. But we're just going to talk about what the setup is, how we're doing this stuff and get some tips and tricks in there. Let's dive into it. Wow, it is cold. Good morning everyone. We are here in the beautiful June Lakes. We're lucky enough to be staying at my friend's house. What we're talking about right now is this setup that l'm talking to, which you can see in most cameras. Really, this is all around vlogging and what I consider the A-roll of vlogging. Opposed to B-roll, which is all the beauty shots and all the things that you put over to see yourself talking, this A-roll is whether you consider the interview setup or the you talking to the people, to the audience. This can really be achieved in a number of ways. I think a lot of people nowadays have their homes setups in which they're talking to the cameras. But they also have someone coming along with them to film their adventures. Or you just have your own setup and you're by yourself, but you want to be out traveling wherever you are, talking to camera. This is a great setup for that. Now, I will preface this with if I were exclusively doing vlogging, if I was going to go on a big trip and want to be doing this type of stuff, this I think it's amazing video rig. I think it's excellent for this type of talking with a tripod and whatnot. But I do think there are smaller rigs. You can see that this is a rather large setup, especially that's walking and talking. Build, this camera it gets heavy. There are cameras where you don't need the top monitor, you just have your flip out screen. But I think essentially this is a great setup. This is my at home talking to camera setup. This is a setup that we make our classes on and I think it's really great quality. To go over the gear aspect I think with a lot of this vlogging stuff, is really important to have a tripod. Now when you're traveling, you might not want a tripod, but having even a gorilla pod or some thing that you can hold onto here underneath the camera so that you have a grip as you move around with it is really important. They make some great small tripods now that can do that quite well. You could even take the center column of your tripod and just use that to walk around with. You don't even need to bring the legs at that point. Beyond that, having your camera here, which whatever brand or make model you want, they can all do really good jobs. I think the one thing with the Leica SLs is that they are quite heavy. There's other mirrorlesses that are lighter. You really don't need your big professional one for the vlogging work. You just need something that has auto-focus and that has some audio input. Just an eighth inch jack is really the essentials of it. Now, alongside this, it's getting brighter. We still are in the shade, but I do have a variable ND filter on here. That enables me to shoot at F2.8, F4 maybe and get this blurred background. It looks really nice and cinematic. That's really important. Most cameras nowadays will have some form of face detect, and that's what I have on right now and it's checking my face to make sure I stay in focus. Beyond that, some monitor or if you have a camera with a flip out screen, it's so important to be able to see yourself and know that you are recording, you're in focus, what's the framing, you're not getting some weird framing because you can't tell where you are in it. That's a really important thing. The last piece to all of this is audio. I think a lot of people when it comes to making videos, don't think too much about audio because it's of a different part of the brain, but it's hugely important for capturing these types of videos. What we have set up right now is we have these road Wireless GO II mics through these little packs that plug-in with an eighth inch into your camera. I have one of these little packs in my pocket and the lavalier coming up to my jacket here. That enables me, even if I were to walk away from the camera, I still get good audio. It's just regardless of what the camera's looking at, I can be talking and the camera's going to be recording that audio. Now the other setup is what we have on Will's camera right now, which is a Rode shotgun mic and that just goes right on top of the camera. This is audio from that and it's still pretty good. It's just not as close as the lav, and sometimes if there is other audio going on, it can be just not quite as clean. Now, a lot of professionals would say to have both a shotgun and a lav is the best. But when plugging into a camera, that's not always possible. You might only have, and most likely only have one eighth inch jack into your camera. Now we've used all sorts of audio setups. For a long time what we would use is a Zoom recorder and we'd put all the audio inputs into that. The thing with that is that you have to sync it later. Now this is really great because once we download the footage, it has the audio already in there. It's quick, it's easy and I think it's really the best way to go about doing this. Rode wireless mics aren't the only ones. There's tons of other options out there. These are just the ones that at the time of this filming, I think are really great. They're affordable, there's small, compact, and they have a lot of cool features. Will, if I could have you just unplug the Rode shotgun mic. I just want to show you really quick what it sounds like just recording to the internal microphone of a camera. Now, I'm about six feet away. It's a fairly quiet morning but you can tell the difference between that and then this lav mic and how much fuller, how much more rich the sound is. It's just going to make a huge difference when recording on the Rode. Maybe there's other people around, maybe you're in noisier settings. It's just going to make a big difference. Right now there's a car passing by and I'm going to keep talking. I'm sure you're hearing the background. But compared to that of Will's camera, right now there's a car passing by and I'm going to keep talking. I'm sure you're hearing the background, but compared to that, it's night and day difference, it's so much better. Ultimately what this is all about is getting that you talking to the camera. This is where the storytelling really comes to play in a vlog. I just want to touch on that because everything else we're going to be talking about for this is really around getting cool shots and making your videos stand out. Advanced videography in the sense of getting amazing B-roll, getting those amazing shots that are going to help you make incredible videos that really stand out. But I think a lot of people would say that one of the most important things to any video or film or movie is the story. That is what comes through this aspect. The talking to camera, sharing your travels, sharing the adventure you're on. Whether it's sharing your own story or bringing someone else in and interviewing them, it can be in the moment on the road or it can be after the fact, but it's the story that is good to really help your video stand out. Yes, having epic visuals is going to go a long way, but without meaningful story, without sharing some background or some storyline, it's just going to fall flat. Making sure A, that you have the setup so that you can tell that story. It just turns into second nature and you can focus on the fun stuff of talking about where you are, where you're going, all that type of stuff. Now, we are at June Lake right now, this is our starting point for this trip, since being at Phil's house, and what we're getting into now is, that road trip mentality. What you would do is you'd have this setup and do little like morning. Talking to camera, hop in the car, shoots in B-roll, and then just along the way, keep filming yourself talking to camera. Now, that's one style of it and I think it's fun to be out in the field. It's definitely something I enjoy doing to help your audience really feel they're with you. Having a self where you don't have to think about that too much. I just leave this live mic on, check all the batteries because there are the live mic can run on battery, the monitor can run on battery, and you've just got to be monitoring these things. But as you go along, the battery just slow down. But as you get going along, all you have to do is turn it on, hit record and you know the setup is there, it's good. It's not going to distract from everything else you're trying to do which is make this video. Really having a setup that you're comfortable with, that you've had time to practice with, to really get used to kneel. There are some cameras that will have better face detection with auto-focus, and so knowing if I move too quick with this camera, it's not as good as like the Sony's or the Canons. I think those do have better auto focus. I know the limitations of my camera to some extent. Now, what's really cool though, is that as you get more comfortable with these things, it's just second nature. These are just tools to tell your story. I think that's what it really comes down to is knowing what you're doing. See, now getting in focus. I have to click it. Soft tap, gets in focus, we're good to go. Making sure the audio levels on this monitor, I can see the audio levels. If you have a flip out screen, you'd be able to see those. You have to always be monitoring these things and it's a lot to take in, while you're also trying to be creative. I think it's for this reason that a lot of people have this setup at their home office or at their home studio where they're going to be doing this type of filming. Because it's really easy to just enter or cut of that voice over or that storytelling aspect after the fact. I'll highly recommend as you do these types of videos that you go out there and you attempt this, you try this. But at the same time, know that you can always go home, see what the story line was, see what shots you got, and do that voice over after the fact and really dial it into exactly what you're trying to tell. Now, obviously we're out here just in our friends driveway, so the world is starting to wake up. We have trash cans, we have people working on things, and again, this is a huge aspect where having the live mic is going to help a lot opposed to just shotgun mic or even just internal mic. It's just going to pick up a lot more noise. I'm just going talk through this because there's a trash truck going by, it's noisy and I just want to show you. It's just going to pick up a lot more noise. I'm just going to talk through it because; that's a trash truck going by, it's noisy, and I just want to show you having this microphone is going to make a big difference. It's going to catch less of that ambient sound. Now, another thing I want to bring up in terms of gear and serve these setups. There's so many setups out there and I suggest that you go onto YouTube and maybe your favorite You Tuber go and see what their setup are, everyone does videos on what's my gear this year, how am I shooting these videos? I think this is a great setup for at home. But what I think is also really cool thing is that using action cams like go pros or the Osmo action cams. Those are so much lighter, so easy, they're super wide angle. This is a 28 millimeter, and I think that's right on the edge of being; just almost too, not wide-angle enough to really do the walk and talks. You can do it, but having something a bit more wide angled really helps with that. Now, when you're doing that with a GoPro and stuff, the hard part then becomes audio. Now, they've gotten a lot better with their audio inputs. But what it might turn into is that you have a audio recorder in your pocket and you attach this live to that, and then you have the GoPro and you sync the audio after the fact. You'd have an audio unit that's separate from your camera and you just have to sync it afterwards. Which it works. It's totally something that works really well and plenty of people do it. I just really liked this setup because I don't have to do that after the fact. But what I'm sacrificing is the size and weight versus the ease of use. Pick your poison in that case. Let's just do a quick little walk and talk, show what this is all about. I personally think that when you're by yourself, it's a little bit easier to have the tripod be talking to the camera. You can see yourself, it's easier. But, what we're going to talk about with a lot of the B-roll stuff in live. The other footage is that, that movement, that walking and talking, adds a lot of energy, adds a little bit of life to it, and it's a Travel vlog. We're talking about making something showing you going from A to B to C to D. Let's quickly show you that. Basically, I'm just going to use the center column of my tripod here as my selfie stick, and then walk around like that. Again, just the size, it's little bit big, but let's see what we can do. Pop this off. Everything will a bit more difficult with gloves on. If I were to just have a straight stick, I can do that, but it's just a bit harder, it's necessary hold it down here. Having this ball head, you could also just have a video head, but be able to tilt it. This is where I think gorilla pods really shine as well because you can curve them. There we go. Now in selfie mode, get focus. What I think is really cool with this is that it's a bit more one-on-one, and it just adds this cool aspect when you're on the road that if you're walking around somewhere, you can walk and talk. Now, I'm walking on gravel right now, so you probably hear a little bit of that and that is something to be aware of. Another thing is, getting to that under angle just not nearly as flattering, so holding it a little bit up and above is going to be far more flattering. Lets get focus here. Holding it a little higher than your eyeline is going to look a bit more flattering. This has a great element of that movement, that thing that with a lot of the B-roll in the time lapses and just traveling. It's that movement and that personal space that you're creating along your travels. I think this is a really great thing to have. Now as I'm doing this, mom is getting heavy. This is a really large setup ultimately. It's great. It's high-quality, I'm shooting at I think at 2.8, has a variable ND, so it's shallow depth of field and it looks really good. But ultimately there are larger cameras that are going to do the same job. The main thing is, I think the audio in here is really nice because I've loved setup, going stranded camera. I'm able to also to jump between Will's camera over here and my personal camera here, which if you're traveling with people, can be really cool effect in a cool look to switch between the two. Now, there are other cameras with a flip out screen. You wouldn't need the monitor that saves some way. This is a 20 millimeter rather large autofocus lens. Most of them are bigger these days. But maybe I just need to work out some more. This is also a photo ball head, it's a little bit heavier than this some ways to cut down on weight. But I think that this is such a cool look for travel blogging setup. Now, as I'm going around, I'm talking to camera and I'm sharing with you, Hey guys here in June Lake going to hit the road soon, just packing up. You do all this other stuff. It's fun, it's interactive. At the same time, I know in the back of my mind I can get back home. I'm going to use the same setup and I can continue to tell the story there. It doesn't all need to be captured out here necessarily. I just think it's f fun to be like we're here and I'm filming with Will well, we're having a good time. It's a bit more personal than talking to a tripod in static and still you can get the perfect composition and it's still can be a good shot, but there's just something about this. Being able to go off. Will can't keep up with me now. It just has a great personal side to it. I would really recommend if you're going to do travel blogging take find a setup in, play with it, mess around with it before you go on your trip. Figure out what pieces you might be missing. I'm just going to put this back on here. I really think that you can travel with just your mirrorless camera and it can be a great setup for this kind of thing. I also think that there are plenty of smaller point shoots, go pros action cams. They'll do a great job as well. The main thing is figuring out audio. I think Sony and I think Canon and all the brands have smallest mirrorless cameras these days that do a great job of this. They have flip out there making cameras for vlogging. You really don't need the 4K120 or the 10 bit necessarily for this aspect. Now, the rest of the stuff we're talking about, getting time-lapses, hyper lapses is really cool B-roll. Having the more professional or just a nice to mirrorless will go a long way. Because they'll enable you to get certain shots that you couldn't get with other cameras. Another thing I will say is that I'm shooting all this in 4K, which I think goes a really long way when it comes to editing in whatnot, especially when it's just myself now I could jump cut and that'll work just as well. But if I move a little bit, it's like little jump cuts fun. But what you can do with 4K is that I can be talking and I do something weird. I can then cut that out and just a jump cut to this point. It just adds a lot to the additive. You'll be able to punch in, make it feel a slightly different shot. I think they can help also when walking around, you can stabilize a little bit. Say you don't have the steadiness of hands, you can do sites stabilization. But with that, you're going to watch you a little bit wider so that when you stabilize, which is essentially going to crop it in, you're not cropping in, so it's just on your face. Ultimately, this is more or less what I'd recommend as an overall setup. Some form of mirrorless camera, and autofocus lens that is probably maybe 35, I'd say 28 millimeters or wider. A variable ND can help a lot being able to get that shallow depth of field while you're talking to camera. Some form of monitoring so that you can see yourself while talking. Whether that's on your camera that you're screened can flip out or getting external monitor here. Then the microphone setup, I just really think that laves can go a long way. The shotgun microphone is great as well, especially when you're out in quiet places. But there's just times where it's going to be beneficial to have that lav mic tripod of sorts. If you're going to be talking to the camera like this, you will need a larger camera or a larger tripod. But if you're going to do the walk and talks, a gorilla pod or some form of just smaller tripod will go really long way just to be able to walk around with. Beyond that though, it really comes down to your creativity. This is such an important aspect of the vlog because this is really a rule. This is really storytelling, this is where all of the information is going to come from. Whether you're doing this out in the field, which I personally think is really cool. Or doing it back at home in your studio, it's just such an essential piece to then take all the B-roll you get on your trip to put over that. You can do the montages with an epic time lapses and hyper lapses and all the beautiful B-roll you get. But ultimately, and I think a lot of people will tell you this, like I said before, the story and what you share is such an important aspect. Getting a clean shot where you can tell that story, having good audio so that people can hear you well. That it's also not going to take away from your creative process. You don't want this to be too complicated , it's getting convoluted, or just taking more time to get the shot than it is to just talk to the camera and share the story. This is such important piece of the puzzle for all this type of logging stuff. That is the last piece of all of this. This is sharing that blogging aspects. We're now going to pack up the car, get going, get some of these B-roll shots along the way and just document this little chip that we're doing from June Lake up to a Hunewill Ranch in Bridgeport along the 395 13. Capturing Great B-roll Video for Your Vlog: Everyone, we have now made it up to Bridgeport. This is actually a place, Hunewill ranch, that Will and I have shot with several times. He's been coming here since he was a kid actually. We figured on our way up from June, we would swing by here and just do a walk. We've never seen this landscape in the snow, so it's exciting. But in this video, we want to talk about B-roll. Like we talked about earlier, you still have that A-roll which is the vlog and talking to camera. As you're doing that, you want to have videos to put over whatever you're talking about, so that's where the B-roll comes in. Now the entire drive up here, I was getting very shots of the journey, the traveling and that was all out the car just filming the road filming Will while he's driving, we got some gas. A big thing that really helps with that, or I think just makes your edits for this vlog or the travel vlog more interesting is to have match cuts or having a way that they seamlessly in a cut and show progression of the trip. For that while we were driving, at least I was filming outside the window and had the rear view mirror in there and just have matched that same shot multiple times and that way it can go boom, boom, boom, and inner cut those various shots. Also looking straight out the window, this is personal preference. If you want to show the car, I always trying to get as clean of a shot as possible so as moving the camera really close to the windshield. As lining up the white line of the side of the road in the bottom right of my frame. That way I knew every time is going to be a similar shot. I could again match cut of these various things and show progression in the road trip. I think this is a really important thing that's really easy to show that you're moving, that you're traveling. Whether you're in a plane, a train, a car, it's easy to just find those things and just match cut them as you go along in your trip. Now of course, once you get somewhere, there's another type of B-roll. This is the other thing that we're going to do is just we got here to Hunewill, go and walk around and get different types of B-roll shots. Now, going into this, I know there's a couple of things I'm already thinking of. We stopped at this pit stop and I was just going through it in my mind of you want to have a variety of shots. By that I mean, not only wide shots and also close-up shots, but also maybe slow motion and non-slow motion. Shooting both either 2398 or 2997 or if you shoot 25, if you're in Europe, different frame rates. Those are good things to do normal motion, but then also shoot some slow motion and that way you can serve mix up the why to the close-ups, but also then have different types of frame rates if you have different types of motion. The other really important thing is to always have motion in your shots. I think especially with travel videos it's more energetic. It adds a certain life to it and it's like you're going somewhere, you're moving, you're not just static wide shot of these mountains, and then a static wide shot of a building. It gets repetitive and old after so long. Having that variety is really important and so always have paying attention to, I'm going to move left to right as I shoot the shot or I'm going to tilt downs or tilt ups to reveal things. You keep that movement going and it has a lot of life to your video. Now, if you want to get really creative, you start match cutting those. That's when the foresight as you shoot of having those rules that you put on yourself can be really beneficial for the edit. Now, another thing to also turn here though, is when you come and talk to the camera, you're doing a travel vlogs. You might do a couple of shots where you're walking around and talking and you just think of how you're approaching that because there are times it can be fun to all of a sudden cut too and it's a static shot. That will typically be something more impactful. Like arriving here to the Hunewill ranch, I'm going to get some shots of the signage here, we're going to walk down and just get a variety of shots and all those things I'm thinking about while shootings. Now I just wanted to touch really quickly on gear. I know that we've talked about gear in the various videos and we'll probably talk about gear every time. Just so you know what I'm using, what I'm thinking about, what are the reasons. Really I think when shooting B-roll, it's really, really useful to have ND filter or variable ND filter. Mirrorless camera fixed prime lens, 28 millimeter F1.4. When I'm shooting this various B-roll and stuff, I want to have the ability at least to shoot at an F2 or F4 and that would not be possible without a variable ND filter. I'm shooting mostly at 2398, so my shutter speed is going to be 1/50th. But sometimes they'll shoot slow mo and so it'll go up to my shutter being 1/125 when I'm shooting 60 frames per second. Now, I'm glossing over this. Most of the stuff you can look up and figure out on your own in terms of the settings. But the main thing is that I'm using a variable ND filter so that I can get those cinematic shots. I can get showered up the field, I can make things disappear in the background. Now with this though, I'm going to shoot this sign and you have this beautiful mountains in the background. For that, I want to probably have a higher f-stop just so that I can see that but still have some depth there. Now, as we go on this walk, bringing my backpack, I have various lenses are probably mainly go between my 28 millimeter, which is nice wide-angle lens, and my 75 millimeter just to punch it on things. But what I love about this lens is that you can get the wide shot and then if you can walk up close enough, you can get really shallow depth of field, really up-close shots there, those great detail videos. Now, one thing that is coming up and even setting up this shot to film me here, we're in the snow. It's afternoon, so there's a lot of sunlight, there's not really cloud coverage, and the snow reflects so much light. We're having to really stop down because there's just so much ambient light out here. Now, this is just something you run into. This is another reason, it's great to have that ND filters because if I want to get details of the snow, I'm going to need to have probably a higher f-stop have that ND on there to really stop down and still gets somewhat shallow depth of field. I'm going to line up the shot now and just talk you through what I'm thinking. The main thing and I want to just reiterate this is keeping the movement alive. Whether it's little swaying, whether it's tilting, whatever it is. For me, travel photography doesn't do great on a tripod. The main time photo tripod would be in the time lapses. But outside of that, I like being handled. Let's just take a look at the shot. Pretty sure you'll be able to see me as I walk over here. Let's see. Walk up onto the snow. Now, this is another thing where talking to camera, having this law of if I were to set up the shot and say, well, it's not here, I don't have this lavalier. There's no way I could get the shot and you still be able to hear me well. The internal mic on here, it just went too well. Now there's certain point in case of the lavalier being a great thing to have for travel blogging. Just looking at this highest snow, we have these barbed wire fences, this looks really cool. Right off the back, take off my glasses. Have to backup a little bit. Cool. Wow, it is so bright out here. I'm shooting log footage, meaning my base eye, so on this camera at least is 400. I'm at an F4, 1/50th shutter speed. I'm just going to roll on this. I have the ND filter in here. But it is so bright out here. Now, I could walk up, get that wide shot, just static. Got it. It's nice composition, but that's it. It's just that wide shot. Now I won't get a little bit of motion in there, so go up to the sky. Just gently tilt down. Now, I pause there at the end just because they have a little bit of footage there on the end so that if I do edit, if I do cross-dissolves, I have some of that extra information. I also shot the sky for a little bit with nothing in frame so that as I came down, it really revealed what it was that I was looking at. Now that as a wide shot is fine, it sets it up. But how do we do something beyond that? I think when doing all this, it's just good to get options. I just try and shoot as much as I can. I'm going to hop down here now and just get a nice different angle on this sign. I just wanted to get a slightly different shot. With wide-angle lenses, I think it's sometimes cool to really get up close, 28 is not that wide, but it's wide enough. I'll try this out. Always standing in this height, isn't always the best thing. Actually, there's barbed wire fence here. This is a cool detail shot. I'm just going to crouch down. What I'm going to do here is just slowly move the camera along this barbed wire fence. Now, this has nothing to do with the sign, but it's part of this atmosphere and it's going to help to edit, all come together. I'm just pulling out, pause, and I'm just going to slowly do a push in. This is really just to have options for the edit. That's cool. Now I'm going to get the sign again, and this time what I'm going to do is a rack focus. Now, rack focus is a way where you can be static but still add some life, movement to the shot. That's basically, I'm in manual focus mode. I'm going to close focus, so everything's out of focus, then I'm going to slowly rack the focus so that the sign is in focus, so to go out-of-focus and slowly into focus. Try that again. This time I'm going to add the tilt down, rack focus. Nice. Now you can see it just adds a bit of dynamicness to the shot. Now, if I do a tilt, the other option would be if I move left to right in the wide shot and then I could enter cut with a tighter lens left to right. This again, it's just all options for the edit room. The more you think about this stuff, the more it's going to help you shoot less and be more precise with what you're getting. Compare the sunglasses. The sun is so bright right now, it's causing my eyes to water a little bit. We're just going to walk around now, I'm going to get some various shots. Again, thinking about when do I want to go slow-mo? If you don't have really steady hands, I think it's beneficial to shoot a lot of slow-mo stuff, but at the same time, having your entire edit be slow motion can get a little boring. Switching up is good, but I do think if you're just walking around, shooting your B-roll in slow-mo can really help it. Even if you have an ND filter and if you have enough light, it's a way to increase that shutter speed so that you can have less light coming in. Once you are into low-light, shooting someone is going to be a bit harder unless you have a camera that does really well with low-light situations. One more thing I wanted to talk about, I threw on my other lens here, it's a 75 millimeter. I've just gotten used to shooting with prime lenses. I think primes can be great for travel. They're lightweight, this is a tiny lens compared to a 24/70, but it's also manual focus. Now, I prefer that even for my photo work. This 28 millimeter being autofocus is really nice to have the option. Like we talked about with taking the camera, that autofocus will be a huge help. But when it's getting the shot, just want to bring up one last thing. I am shooting in 4K, and I think if you have the hard drive space, if you have the computer power, if you have the memory cards, when traveling, it can be beneficial to shoot 1080 simply for the fact that you don't use up so much storage so quickly. If you're going on a long trip, that can be a big factor. Now, we're just doing this shorter trip, and I know I have the space, I know have the power to edit 4K, and I think it makes a big difference in the editing room, either because to some extent, future proofing down the road, it's cool to see a 4K video online. But also because 75 millimeter to get that sign, I won't be a little bit closer and I know that if I punch in, I'll be able to do that, 4K and then exporting in 1080 it's a really powerful tool. We're not getting too much into editing in this course, but something I wanted to bring up of choosing your resolution. This is one point where I think having that flexibility to punch in later can be really helpful. Now the other option for extending that shot would be that I could go to APS-C mode. Instead of 35-millimeter mode, this is a full-frame camera, so I can switch to APS-C, which effectively punches us in times and a half, so this 75 becomes closer to a 1/10. Another option, just something to think about in terms of diversity of shots, I just really liked really wide to the really tight, so just thinking of those things. But enough with a sign, we're going to continue on and get some other shots. Well, because I can't get close to that, Hunewill sign. For this one, super fun shooting in the snow. It makes everything harder. Just looking at the composition, got this long road here. Have the sun behind, take off the sunglasses. Now, I'm personally a big fan of manual focusing when I shoot video, but cameras are getting so good these days, you don't really need to. I'm going to start out here. Just slowly creep in. You can do more extreme movements like that. I am shooting in slow-mo, so having a bit more movement is good there. It doesn't have to be anything that crazy though. It's just a little swaying while you're going, making sure you keep in focus, because as you move, things are going to fall out of focus. Now, here out at the ranch. It's just cool, this building from 1880 and living out here. There's something very romantic about being out here in the snow time. We had to walk through this snowy hill to get out here. It's just some beautiful imagery. We're just going to walk around and just wanted to drive home these points of, really, what this class is all about and what this particular one is all about is making your videography better. I know I've been going through all the different ways that you can shoot in all these different things. But that's really what it takes. It's about being active in your filming. It's not getting here, taking the wide shot and then you're done. You saw the place, you got a shot, you're done. It's building the elements. It's getting close-up detailed shots. It's getting the wide shot and then also punching in and getting the closer shots. It's having that movement, always being a little bit moving which is a style. You can do an all static piece, but I just think that for the movement of traveling, it just fits. Doing that little swaying, doing those little push pins. Really when you're at home, when you're doing this class, figure out how your camera, because every camera is going to be different, but how you can achieve those shots and not be missing focus or exposure or whatever it is. Whether it's needing to get a variable ND filter, if it's learning how to set up continuous autofocus and setting a point so that that point stays in focus as you move or manual focusing, practicing how to move from something up close to something far away. It takes time to learn these skills and to get good at them to then also be out here in the field and making a good product, making a good video. Really at the end of the day, the idea with advanced videography is that you're wanting to push yourself in your video making, and that the biggest thing is that you take that element of you talking to camera or talking to a microphone, and you're building all the imagery that people are going to see over that. It's not just a talking head. If you show up and you just get shot of the location and then that's it, that's not going to be able to build enough. Getting all these little elements, shooting in slow motion, shooting in normal speed, getting detailed shots of the trees, getting detailed shots of the building while also getting the wide shot, they're all going to add into a better video. 14. Reviewing My B-Roll Videos: Just to really quickly go through some of these shots, just wanted to share with you a couple of things that were going through my mind in this sequence of events. These are just the raw audio clips and you can see that I was just thinking, okay, we stop at a gas station, let's just get each of the little things so that we can put together an edit later of a quick gas station stop. Now, each of these shots, I've trimmed a little bit but there, you can see myself. These would all be super quick, maybe a 10-second edit but it's just okay. We stop here, we get this, that. Really is just in the time of stopping to get gas that we went and got all these shots here, how the door close so I open it and close it. That's really it. That was building a sequence right there of just being at the gas station and then we're on the road again. One thing with this, with the highlights of the bright snow and we had this fog come in. Just wanted to note that I do expose. I look at my histogram and I expose it so that it's right on the edge of being overexposed. Now, this is all log footage that you're seeing. It hasn't been colored yet. It doesn't have that saturation or contrast yet. But for exposing, I'm really trying to make it so that the highlights don't blow out. Now we got to this spot right here. That's beautiful overlook of Mono Lake. Again, the snow was so bright. You can see the contrast just in the log footage. But again, just trying to build out service sequence of events. I got that initial sign and then there's this plaque. That wide jaw was not doing it for me so I went in close. I've tried to do these tracking shots. This is at 2398 and they went to 60. You can see just how much smoother and cinematic it looks. I really think shooting slow-mo for this stuff really helps. I then went and did a wide shot. I got those details of the signs like something people hanging out. Then here's that opening wide shot. I'd probably start the edit with that. Maybe end it with that, I'm not sure. Then I serve that first one, but I came back to the sign. The nice thing here is that there's no people in it so I could actually reverse this shot as well to start up top and then move down if I wanted. But just wanted to get the opening shot. I could also go from this shot coming up and then cut to that earlier one with the son that was cool-looking. It's all about using those movements and transitions. Then some of that other stuff with just Will hanging out here. Just other B-roll that can fit into the whole edit and just make it a bit more interesting. Now, just a server transition, I then went back out to the landscape and started there. Then I shot this 60 frames a second, just to have a nice slow-mo. But then I move over and reveal Will. That's just instead of just having the cut go straight to a shot of him, it's now something that's moving where it's like that landscape and we move over to see him looking at the camera. He caught me stealing that shot. Then after going from him, I go back out to landscape because who knows, maybe I want to start with them and then go landscape or start landscape and then go to him. I don't have a set notion of what the edit is going to be so it's just getting as many shots, as many transitions, movement, all that type of stuff. Again, came back to this placard. I didn't really like that initial wide shot and I knew that. Instead of just that tight initial close up, I moved and did something a bit tighter that I think it's just a bit more interesting here. Then did a little tilt down just to reveal the rest of it. Here again, just a couple more shots. Got Will taking a picture with our buddy's camera. A little wobbly there, but again, just some filler stuff. How many times can we look out without that vista? Probably not that many times in the edit, but it's okay. Now here we are at the Honeywell Ranch. This was served after going through and getting the shots of the sign. You can see here just the close-up details of the snow. Again, none of those highlights are blown out and we're looking at very bright white snow with direct sun on it. The second we go in and color this log footage, it's going to pop a lot more. But again, it is log footage. It can be a little boring to look at but it's important, I think, for the coloring process because you retain so much more information. I'm just doing little push ins of moving back and forth on the snow, try and get some interesting shots. Here we had a little bush and again, it's not necessarily that this is anything that important to Honeywell Ranch, but it's just good B-roll to have and all I'm doing here is, again, all at 60 frames a second and I'm just doing side-to-side swaying. This is something that would probably cut in for just a few seconds ultimately. We then made it over to the ranch house. Here you can see just the standards of static wide shot. Nothing too fancy there. Then moving to this low tracking shot that I think is far more interesting. Ultimately, just got down on one knee a little bit lower and just move the camera left to right. I also moved it back the other way. I think I opened up the exposure a little bit just to hold those shadows. Then just went around and got some shots of the trees just again, slow movements left and right, right and left, up and down. Just getting as many different movements in there that could build the scenery, build the setting of this place, and then reveal the house. This is all about building that sequence for the edit later on and getting a bunch of footage for that. Then I knew I wanted to come in and get the 1880, established in 1880 and come down on the house. This could even be where it starts and then it pulls out to the wide shot. Start on the wide shot come down. Now one thing you can see, there's some mirroring off the screen which I didn't see while shooting, but kind of inevitable there. Here, just various buildings throughout the property. I wanted to get some different looking shots here. Tilt down from those trees. Again, I got those details of the trees and then I could come here and this is where their front office building that could use our first shot. Then here, I wanted to play with some rack focusing so starting the focus on the tree and then coming over to reveal the house. You saw this shot earlier on, but here's the entire clip and you hold there for a few seconds just to have those handles on either side. Came back to the main house here and just wanted to do a little tilt down somewhere between that really wide shot and that board close-up shot. The other nice thing is that this is on 4k. Now if I want output in 4k, obviously I won't be cropping in not only on these, but if I'm ultimately going to output at 1080, I can punch into a lot of these shots. You can see I've really hold both in the beginning and ending to have those handles to move into the edit. If I'm going to do cross resolve, if I'm going to do anything different. Always good to shoot a little bit more than you actually think you'll need. Here's just a perspective shot walking through the snow. This was such a big part of this day, was trudging through the snow. I wanted to make sure to get that perspective of myself walking through it. Then ultimately on our way out, I had seen this sign when we came in and I was like, I really want to get this shot of the bridge port sign. That was just, I'm just going to stand here and get this boring shot and then I was like, okay, what else can I can do. I got up really close. I was like, okay, let's do a little tilt down, a little bit closer up. But then when I did that, I was like, I can't get the whole side in there quiet and I want the whole thing. I just took a few steps back, obviously over zoom lens you wouldn't need to do that, but I just took a few steps back then did a little tilt down, reveal the sign probably a little wobbly there. Could have done this in 60 frames, but this was just a quick thing I wanted to grab. I can definitely use Warp Stabilizer. Then just instead of just doing the top-down, I wanted to come over and pain from the road. All these movement points can be transition edits. I'm not going to probably use when I'm looking at the road, I would use that movement of coming to the sign in the edit, and then just a little push in on the bridge port there. That is more or less it. This is, I think in terms of travel vlog, it's always good to serve these more random moments of just walking to the car, who you're traveling with. All of this stuff is a bit more of the personal fun stuff. The main thing is just being consistent with it and trying to get similar shots throughout the edit. But I hope this has been helpful for you and I'll see you in the next section. 15. Drone B-roll: Reviewing My Aerial Videos: Just to add one last thing, I want to talk about drones. Because ultimately, in today's day and age, I think a lot of people are using drones for all types of videos but especially travel videos. We have the DJI Mavic Pro 2. It's a little bit larger than the spark and some of the newer ones coming out these days but these are great, compact, little, incredible cameras that can fly. We've had a lot of fun using them on various projects and whatnot. First thing first, there's a lot of rules and regulations around drones, where you fly them. We're at the Hunewill Ranch, we have permission to be here and to be flying, and so I'm not too worried about putting it up, it's to your own discretion but DJI at least has gotten really good about putting those maps in where you're allowed to fly, where you're not allowed to fly, and letting you know those things. Just a little thing to do in there at the beginning. The great thing about drone though, is with the style of [inaudible], was talking about earlier, of always moving and having them that little bit of movement. Drones just compliment that because you can do those long push-ins, you can do those tilts, those pans, all sorts of different movements that match that energetic travel vlog style, and that's what we're going after here. This is just another great tool to have. Obviously, not everyone has a drone, but you'll see in the edit how much it can add. Even just establishing first shot of like, we're here in the beautiful Eastern Sierras in wintertime. You'll get that all from this one shot, and I think it's a really powerful tool for that. If you're really wanting to be more advanced in your videography, this is one of those tools that does go a long way and can really add to your overall production value. It's something that a lot of people look for nowadays in shots. The entire video is not going to be used on this, you can pop it up once or twice and it will go a long way these shots. Let's pop this thing up, we're going to get some shots. I'm going to fly down to the ranch, fly around it, the sun serve going behind the mountains over there, so exposure is probably going to be a little tricky. That is one thing these cameras, while amazing, they are smaller, they're dynamic range, isn't that of a mirrorless camera. So you just got to be aware of where the sun is and what the exposure is. This is another huge time where time of day really matters. Now, I think looking this way is going to be really beautiful, but it's something if you really want to get a certain shot, know where the sun is going to be, and that's going to determine when you want to go to that place to put the drone up to get that shot. Let's get up there and take a look at a couple of shots, and then ultimately this will go in there and edit. Here we're just going to take a look at a couple of drone shots, serve talk through at least my process when doing this. Now, sometimes when you put up the drone, even if you set the settings while on the ground, you pop it up and the exposure, different things aren't quite right. So initially I like to pop it up, look in the direction I'm going to be going, and so I set the settings accordingly. We're shooting 4K2398. There's pretty limited in terms of shutter, I tried to keep it around 150, we actually have a polarizer on our drone that enables us to keep it at that slower shutter speed. Then, we typically have to crank up the f-stop, which for this, is totally fine, I've rarely needed a shallow depth of field when it comes to drone work. Now, as you can see, I just had that little pause there. I think something that is really important when it comes to drone work, it serves setting up the shot and then trying to hold it for at least 10 seconds, to really allow it to live. You can see right there are a couple of shakes, like getting the serve, just coming around the barn. But now, I'm just holding the position, really letting it be one continuous motion, and I think that's a really nice shot that can be used in the edit. Now, right there again, I wiggled my fingers just a little bit and it creates a little stutter that when you're flying you don't notice as much as after the fact upon watching. Now, you can see here I'm adjusting it again, and this is where I think where drone videography really shines, is when you just allow the shot to really move. I went around the farm a couple of times and then as I came down to that opening shot, I was like, I'm just from this point just going to pull back, and same speed going back, same speed going up, and I just held it there for so many seconds. Now, because it's relatively low movement in the shot, in terms of people or cars on the street, I could speed this up and it can be a really nice frame ramp that would show you really quickly this big pullout, and this serve reveal of the space. It can also be used for service slower, maybe narration point or something. But it's really nice because it just keeps revealing more and more and more, and it's just such a cool effect to have in your video, whether you're starting it off, taking a break from them were on the ground stuff or ending it. For credits and stuff, you can put that over this. Now, all this has been focused around the barn, but I also want to share this landscape where we are. This could be served intercut with the footage on the road or different things, and the barn is directly behind us now and we're actually hanging out right where these three roads come together. But we're so small and frame, it's such a big vista that you can't actually see that, which is a nice effect. Again, this is just a slow, consistent moving, not changing too much in terms of positioning and whatnot. One thing I will say because you can do so much with drones, is that there's so many settings now, and especially with the DJI ones, along with others. See that low corrections have ruined that shot right there [LAUGHTER]. But all these things have smart tracking and you can do hyper lapses with them, you can do so much with this. This is really just us flying around to get a couple of shots. Right there you can see our car, and now we're out of frame. So I would probably use this shot again just to have a pause in the video, just showing the expansive barren landscape, it's just a really nice moment. But you can get into a lot of the features that these drones own these days, and it'll add so much production value to what you are doing. Now, another really cool thing, and we were able to do this because there's relatively no one around, I brought the drone down really low and then flew along the snow, and then slowly started coming up, and I think it adds this great dynamics of nature to the shot that, I will say, it needs to be lower when there needs to not be people around. If you're doing it over water, make sure it's calm water, you don't want water splashing up. But it's such a cool way to go from that lower thing, and then we can speed up, and then come up to this shot here, which I think is just a cool surf perspective change. Something that is really cool with drones, is that vertical change that you can have when shooting. I think it's really cool to again, start lower, I could've been held that shallow little longer, and maybe you don't know it's a drone shot and then starts to pick up and you can come up to the larger view. That's a really important key I think to join shots. Again, you can just get the big wide shot, and it looks really cool. But it's that movement and it's that dynamicness of moving from high to low, you can do those orbitals tracking around an object. That just really serve higher production value, more dynamic energy, and just looks cool. [LAUGHTER] I'll say that throughout all this, looking this way, the sun is almost indirectly in front of a camera, and these drones, their dynamic range is so good. I mean, this snow is so bright, and you can see it clipping in some parts there, but looking towards the sun, it looks so good. Now, if you get this thing up at sunrise or at sunset, it's going to do amazing things for your video and really just up that production value. Hope this has been helpful for all of you, and I will see you in the next section. 16. Building Sequences in Your Video to Tell Better Stories: [MUSIC] Hi everyone. We are now here lakeside next to June Lake, which is actually frozen. It's really pretty. We are going to be doing some other stuff later on, but really quick we wanted to do a little just addition to the B-roll section, talking about making those segments. I was talking about match cutting of in different things as you go down your journey. But there can also be this fun way of when you get to a place or if you just want a little break in your vlog of doing these really fun high-energy montages. What we're going to do here is make some coffee. Will is going to make the coffee. I'm going to film it and we're just going to play around with it. But the idea here is again, lots of movement, we're going to shoot it with a higher frame rate. We can do some speed ramping, some slow-mo to fast motion, all that stuff, and just entire time moving. Now, while we do in our very ready frozen coffee, I'm going to have Will take it step-by-step and we're going to really make sure we nail the shot. I'm shooting with my SL2 with a 28 millimeter. I'm going to do manual focus just because I really want to get precise shots and don't want the autofocus going where it's not supposed to go. Then because we have all the sun out, I do have a variable ND filter on here to get that nice shallow depth of field. Now, I'm choosing a 20 millimeter, I guess for some of the stuff maybe you'd want to go a longer focal length, but I really like this lens and you can get really close at really close focus, which I think will look cool. Let's hop into it. [MUSIC] Now we're going to wait and watch some water boil. But while we do that just wanted to quickly mention what was just going through the motions. I think some of the most interesting things like, while I'm moving or pushing in or going around is when there's an action he's doing as well, so the pouring of the water looks really nice, spinning it on looks really cool. All those little things I think add a lot of the life to these types of shots. Now the one thing that takes some practice and getting used to is pulling that manual focus. I'm shooting at a F2, so it's very shallow depth of field, I'm really close, so I'm just searching for that. Now, this is one point where I do think having a larger external monitor might be nice for some people when shooting video. I think it helps you really nail that focus. But yeah, so just going to keep going waiting for this and continue to get some shots [NOISE]. [MUSIC] That's really all there is to it. I think building these types of sequences or thinking about them beforehand is a really great tool to have when doing these travel vlogs, whether it's making coffee, getting gas, getting food, just whatever it is. If you have something where you can film each detail, you can do these really fun edits. But it is something you have to think of in advance. It really is, I think a powerful tool of advanced videography or being a great videographer is that you're thinking about the edit while you shoot. It's a really important piece of the puzzle. With this B-roll type of stuff is a huge thing to pay attention to. We got some coffee now and we're feeling pretty good, but [LAUGHTER] we'll see you in the next section and hope this has been helpful for you. 17. Action Cameras: Capturing Great Video with GoPros and Similar Action Cameras: Hi everyone. In this video, we are talking about these little cameras, action cams because these are a wonderful tool especially when traveling and doing this type of work, travel blogging. Now, we talked about doing the actual talking to camera vlogging aspect with a mirrorless camera, we had the monitor, we had the lava of all the bells and whistles and obviously you can tell the massive size difference that comes with these smaller cameras. I think really that's the biggest selling point just a usability of these because when you're traveling around, when you're going to maybe a national park or different places, bringing these can be a bit more cumbersome, they are lot heavier, it's very clear you're filming something when you have one of these. Some people nowadays might be used to that, but these are just you can turn your backpack, you don't have to worry about it they're waterproof, you can shoot all sorts resolutions these days. This is an Osmo action cam but the newer go pros as well. You can do 4K, you can shoot slow motion, you can shoot time lapses with them, almost everything you can do with this camera, just in a smaller form factor. Now, there are obviously limitations. The quality of video you're going to get from these larger cameras is going to be better but you can do so much with these little cameras. We're here at June Lake today and before hitting the road, we're going to get up onto the mountain , do some snowboarding, going to walk through town, just do different things to showcase how well these cameras work alongside. This is all about creating that great travel vlog alongside these larger mirrorless cameras. This is really all part of the toolkit, so you have a large mirrorless camera, you have a drone, you have an action cam and these are all different tools to make that video for you. There's not really a need for just one of these, but rather they all complement each other. Now, that being said, maybe you want to just be at home talk to this camera, but not bring this on your trip, you can use just these little cameras. Now as we go out into the field, we are going to field tests, not only the video quality, but also the audio quality. Because I do see some people vlogging with just using the audio from these cameras, the other set that you can do, of course, is loving yourself having a audio recorder in your pocket and then talking just to the action cam and then you synch that too later in post. Now, what I'm most excited for is we're going to go from the mountain, I can throw this in my backpack, I'm not worried about falling or anything with my big camera, these are really durable low guys, really quick. Wanted to do a quick audio demonstration. I'm going to do this up on the mountains where it's a lot louder, but right here it's really quiet. Best-case scenario, if you can find a good quiet spot. The difference between talking to this camera and this is the Osmo Action Cam audio and what's really nice is that it's just this. You can see in the other camera that this is a very minimal setup. But the audio compared to the love, which is sync to our mirrorless camera is a lot different. We're going to test this throughout the day, see in louder scenarios, but what I do think is interesting and we're going to find this out, but I think that this camera, the microphone's have gone exponentially better. Obviously you can see this setup is much more minimal than when I was walking around with this on the tripod arm. Both were great, both have different functions, but this is really easy to do. They've gotten the quality is just so good. You don't have to do crazy fish eye, you can do different things but anyways, let's get onto the mountain, get that B-roll, and we'll get back to you later. [MUSIC] Hi everyone. We are now up on June Mountain, headed up the lift to get up to the top and again, relatively quiet here so just so showing what's possible with these little action cameras. Again, there's probably with each reiteration of these, they're just going to get better and better. But what I love about this, for example, I was just in the shade, non direct sunlight , it's all auto. You don't have to worry or think too much when using these they are self-sufficient. You can get into more manual settings but outside of setting, I said 4K 24 frames a second, everything else is just automatic in terms of shutter and I've stop and all that stuff. It's really easy, just got on this little selfie stick here and go in and take it up. I probably would never bring my big camera up here, that's a main reason to use one of these is that they're more discrete, they're easy to use up here, like I said earlier and just excited to see what we can do with this. Obviously, the audio is going to be a little different during this when I talk to you but later on we'll do an audio comparison to show you the difference. Really the main thing with this camera, I think having a selfie stick at least while snowboarding or doing action stuff or even just walking around is really useful because instead of having my arm here, it's just on the pole and I can talk to you like this. But getting creative with this, trying different frame rates, getting some high-speed stuff so we can slow it down later in post, getting it low to the ground it's wide-angle so really playing with that depth and stuff is a really fun thing to do. Let's see how it goes and got we'll back there. Yeah. Just going to have a fun day today. [MUSIC] Hi everyone. Well, we're up on the mountain just having some fun getting some shots, trying some different frame rates and resolutions did 4K 24 which is this just a standard normal talking. Depending on how you output your videos maybe you shoot 25 if you're in Europe, or maybe shoot 30 because a lot of people are switching to that in the digital age. But also shooting some 60 frames a second in 4K and then also did a little 1080 in 240, which is crazy so much. Love fun to just play with these things, what's fun about these cameras just on the lift I saw change settings and try something different each time. But again, it's just a fun tool to use quick and easy. We'll see how the shots stack up, but just trying to get as much, not only at the snowboarding, but also the scenery, the signage, different things that can go into the edit. It's all about creating those sequences, like I talked about with the B-roll section. Just going to keep having some fun here on the mountain and we'll be back with you shortly. See you. Just really quickly wanted to go through some of these shots. I think a really cool part of the action cam is being able to get those more unique angles. Here I am snowboarding you can see actually in my shadow the poll that I have the camera attached to. What's really cool with this is just getting it unique angles, getting really close to the ground. I was trying to put the camera right in the spray of my snowboard really get that action shot. You can see right there, just covering it in snow and that's what's so cool about these, they're waterproof you can throw them into the elements. Then trying to get some sort of diversity of shots and for the edit, this would probably be a much quicker clip but wanting to see myself in the edit to some degree just going along, you don't get the full sense. Maybe I could go a little farther out in that shot. Then just getting the other footage, filming friends there I served tried to do a tilt down just to get it to reveal well there but going along and one thing has focused on the shot, which I think looks good, but I ended up falling. Then switched over to the 240 frames per second. Again, a big part of these action cameras is to put it down there into the action and really get that cool unique angle. Now, clearly low much there. But it's all about finding those moments of like right there. The piece of snow goes flying at the lens, that'd be such a great edit point. Now another thing that I will say that you got to be really careful with these is whether it's snow or water. You can see now how the lens got covered in snow and it's dirty is the shot which isn't always great. You can be going along thinking again, great shot and then realize, oh, there's a water droplet or snow on there can be really frustrating. Then just going around wanting to get some other shots, this is all shot in 2398 and it's just I want to get something in slow mode just to make it really smooth. There you can see that push onto the map at 60 frames a second just really made it that much smoother, made it that much more, I think cool looking in right there, I could've gone farther. You just get all sky but coming down straight at the June logo. This is all that B-roll, that's our filler stuff, it's not just about the snowboarding, but it's about this stuff. It's about getting the signage, getting the time on the lift with friends, just trying different things to have some fun with it, pop it behind. This is where that selfie pull. Those cameras are so incredibly powerful. You can get, this is on 4K really, nice exposures, don't have to think too much and can just mess around and try getting different unique angles with it. This is obviously something I couldn't do with a mirrorless camera. It was fun to just mess around trying different angles, different shots. I will say getting that poll for the action cam is really useful. It has really impressed with the law of the audio actually was pretty useful. But also sometimes you just get shots that don't really work out. Then finally just going up the lift again and you've seen some of the shots throughout this but the main thing is to just get coverage. Not only shooting this snowboarding, but also showing the time on the lift, time with friends looking outwards during the travel or the follow camera and then also looking back at myself. I hope this was helpful, see you in the next lesson. 18. Timelapses: How to Shoot a Timelapse for Your Video: Good morning, everyone. It is a very brisk morning here at June Lake. Our starting point of this adventure, we're staying at a friend's cabin here. We just want to wake up this morning. I think something that's really powerful for travel Vlogs and maybe it's something you're already doing is time-lapses. Now, why I think is really cool about time lapses is that, A, it's a good transition moment when you're moving from one place to the next, it's a good moment to say, I don't know, it's a good thing that's fulfilling that people enjoy watching and it shows the passage of time really well. In a lot of these things that we're doing in this course, it's all about showing your story. Building on that story, but also showing the movement or the passage of time from one place to the next. It's traveling. Time-lapses are a great embodiment of that. Now, we've woken up really early because I think there's a few ways you can do a time-lapse poorly, and a few ways you can do it really well. I think along the way you might just get time-lapses that are throughout the day and you get clouds moving, or you get cars moving, people moving, which are all really cool. But there's something about waking up for sunrise. If you have a vista,or getting to a vista, setting up a camera and getting that first breakthrough of sunlight, and seeing it really moving across the land. It's seamless sunsets. Sunsets you can get this as well. If it's at the end of the day or in the beginning of the day, and they are great tools to use in a video to really showcase that change of day or the beginning. We're going to do this time-lapse, so we'd start the vlog off with we're going hang the road this morning and maybe we make a little coffee. Then you see a time-lapse and the days starting, and then you get in the car and you continue on the road. This is probably one of the few time-lapses I'm going to do just to show different things that we're looking for. One thing here, we have a completely blue sky. With time-lapses a lot of times, seeing cloud movement is really cool. It adds a lot of life to your video, or to your time-lapse. Just the one we've set up here we're looking at Carson's peak here in June Lake, and in the early morning the sun hits that peak before it hits here. We want to just get that sun first hitting the mountain and then as it cascades down the mountain, showing the day has started. Now a few just technical things really quick about time lapses. Tripod, 100 percent necessary. Now, we're on icy snow and even stepping around this little vibrations can be picked up in your camera. It's best to serve stay away from the tripod or at least give it some space, make sure it's secure, that it's not shifting because people are walking or whatever it is. The other tip that I have I guess, especially with this one. We'll see how this goes. But we started filming before the sun hit, because there's really to get the idea of the sun moving down the mountain. I just guessed what the exposure was going to be as the sun hit the mountain. This is a gamble when you're doing sunset or sunrise. Because there's going to be huge exposure shift in your image. Now, maybe I'm getting a little ahead of myself. At the very core of it what is the time-lapse? What are we talking about here? A time-lapse, it's the passage of time being captured by your camera. This is done in two different ways for the most part. One is that you shoot video and you more or less going to spend 20, 30 minutes. I recommend at least, I think 20 minutes as a great point to show that movement. But you're just allowing the camera to sit still and capture the changes in light, the changes in clouds, the movement of cars or people. Then you bring that into your editing software and you speed it up a bunch. That 20 minute-long clip becomes five seconds or 10 seconds, and it's just really quickly going through it. You can also do this and at the core is the same thing, but you can also do this with a photo interferometer. Some cameras have that built-in. We will take a photo every so many seconds or every so many minutes, and you show the passage of time to photo. Now, this is doing 24 frames a second, and I'm going to do for 20 minutes. There's a lot more range I could go from that, sped up time-lapse to real-time. You can use all that video footage in real-time or sped up, which I really like. With photos, it's typically you're trying to show a much longer passage of time, so you need less photos per second, not 24 frames per second. Maybe you'll take two photos a second. What that means is that, you're going to have a lot less frames, but you can do it over the course of the entire day or over the course of the entire night. That's how you get star lapses. When you get the whole sky moving with the stars. That's when photos can be really good. You need a lot more photos though. That can be a bit more time-consuming. If you wanted to play in real-time as 2398, it's just an absurd amount photos you'll need to get that video movement. It depends what you're doing. I think for this type of stuff, doing a video is great. One thing I do, and this is another benefit of photo I guess. I shouldn't 4K, which enables me to be able to punch in, maybe do a little digital move with the footage. If you shoot 1080, wherever your shot is, is what you get. Obviously, the benefit is you're doing a 20-minute long clip, 1080 is going to be a lot less data. It's going to take a lot less room on your card. Whereas the 4K one is going to take up a lot of memory space. It might be harder for your computer to process once you bring it in and you speed it up, It's a lot of computing process. That's where at times the photo one can be beneficial because if you bring in all those photos, you edit them, you convert them down, you put them into your video editing. That can essentially be an AK file, but you can export it from your photo editor to any size and make it a little less heavy on your computer processing. Now that's a lot of technical stuff. But really at the core of it is that, if you shoot 1080 less memory space, but you're going to be stuck with the shot that you can post, not a bad thing. Or if you shoot 4K, you get a bit more flexibility in being able to do maybe a digital zoom or have a little movement crop after the fact. But it is going to take up more space. You really do need a computer that can process that. Because if you put a 4K time-lapse in with a whole sequence of you talking, and traveling, and doing all the other things, it's going to get a little tricky. Really we're just going to sit here with 20 minutes. I'm just watching as the sun comes out and hits the mountain here. We're getting some clouds coming over so that's what I really love about this. We're just going to hang out, wait for the surf morning to get started, and I really don't have to do anything, I just sit here and watch the camera, make sure it doesn't fall over. It's still in focus, the exposure since we've started has increased one full stop of light so we'll see how far that goes. Now another important thing to know is that when shooting time-lapse, as I highly recommend shooting, your white balance as a set thing, not using auto white balance. Auto white balance has come a long way and it's really good but when shooting a time-lapse, the color of the light is going to change, most likely. You might have clouds moving, you might get direct sunlight, you might go from direct sunlight to shady and the auto white balance is going to be correcting along the way. If you have auto white balance on, you'll see service shifting colors as your time-lapse continuous, and I've had to try and color this. It is so difficult to make it all look normal. It can be a huge pain in the butt. Now that being said, some cameras will react differently with auto white balance. They might not shift once you hit record. Also, if you're shooting in log technically that shouldn't make a difference because log you're changing the color after the fact. But still, something that I've just run into that I would recommend staying away from. Just even if you shoot it at daylight or at cloudy, you'll be able to shift it in post when you do your coloring. Another tip, if you are doing photo time lapses, you can use aperture priority and with that, what you're essentially doing is the shutter speed will change, but it makes it so that your overall exposure is going to stay the same for every single photo. That way over the course of a long day when you're going from day to night, these cameras have gotten so good. It's a subtle change because it's only happening every couple of seconds, every second really. But it's enough to serve keep your exposures similar and then that way you can fade in and show that revealing of the daylight or as it goes out. You're actually having all that information in your photo and your cameras just changing the shutter speed so maybe it's doing longer shutters and then really fast shutters, but it's keeping the same image more or less, at least the same exposure as the light changes in your image. That can be really beneficial tool when doing photo-ones. I personally think when shooting video ones, I like shooting with just in manual mode. I'm currently at ISO 400, which is the base ISO for these cameras. I'm at 1/50th shutter speed just because that's what I shoot video at. I'm at an F/16 because this morning with an ND filter is a little too dark and I wasn't sure once the sun came up. I remembered yesterday I was shooting with the ND filter, but I was still able to shoot at a pretty high F/stop when I wanted to. This again is something that maybe when you first get there, just look at what the exposure is, take notes, and then come the morning time or come sunset, you can self set those numbers to reflect that. Because it is ultimately, the goal is to seek, go from pretty dark to light, at least for a sunrise like we wanted it to feel early morning and then the sun comes out and it's bright and beautiful but it's still exposed correctly. It's not overexposing in that moment. Now, there's a lot that you can do with time-lapses and we will be getting into hyper lapses, which is essentially a moving time-lapse, but I think the important thing with time lapses, especially for when you're vlogging, is that once you get somewhere or if there's a beautiful vista, just pullover, set up your camera, it doesn't have to be for sunrise it can be middle of the day, it can be whatever time of day, and just let your camera find a composition that you like that showcases where you are. This is really to show the landscape, to show maybe the view from your hotel room, maybe to show you doing something. But just set it up and let it go for 20 minutes. Obviously, stay nearby, but not so close that you're going to cause it to shift, and just surf stack these. I think they're really beneficial for any edit and you can use them at any point serve as a break of the talking as just have a moment of pause. That's more or less time-lapse in photography or videography, I guess, is really just allowing your camera to do its thing to find a good composition where you can really showcase landscape or just the movement of something, whether it's you doing chores in your room or loading up the car, a busy intersection, clouds moving in the sky, suns moving across a mountain. It's just to show progression or movement in some way and it's a great tool alongside the rest of the things we'll be talking about in this travel vlogging section. Because it's all about having that movement, having that energetic excitement of travel and going from A to B to C to D. This is something that although this is static, you get the movement through whatever sending a frame, whether it's nature or yourself doing something. It's really easy you don't have to do too much outside of figuring out your exposure, what's going to work as it gets lighter or darker, or if you're just in a place where the exposure is not going to change, you don't even need to worry about it. You had just being mindful of it's going to take 20 minutes, so get comfortable or find a nice place to sit to do it and make sure your battery is charged. Another thing is to make sure your memory card has enough space for that time-lapse. Now, a 20-minute 4k time-lapse is going to take up a lot of space. Most cameras will tell you how much recording time you have left and just be mindful of that. Also, if you're going to do a time-lapse in the morning, maybe dump your cards, back them up on your computer before you get going on your road trip or on your travel because you will run out of space very quickly when doing time-lapses. But I'll say that I think they're great tool to have. I'll see you in the next section. 19. Project 2 Recap: Watch the Cinematic Travel Vlog: [MUSIC] That's a wrap on the travel vlog section. I hope that you enjoyed Sam's teachings. I think that being able to see Sam out in the field on in actual travel shoot on location was really interesting and to see that real behind the scenes process. What Sam is thinking about throughout all of these shoots, I hope was really interesting and educational for you. I'm excited to share with you the final product of that travel vlog because there's a lot of shots and footage that you didn't get to see in the actual lessons of the section, so I'm going to pass it over to Sam. It's a little bit of a longer travel vlog compared to the other projects that we're doing in this class, and so enjoy it. Most importantly just take in the beauty of the shots that Sam was able to get and just try to remember from the lessons that you just watched from him whether it's talking about different ways that he adds subtle motion to a video, to composing and framing a shot, depth of field, and things like that. Try to remember those things as you watch this video. Anyways enjoy, and we'll see you in the next project afterwards. Cheers. [NOISE] All right everyone. Just got to Will's house and got everything loaded up in his car, so we are now going to hit the road but really quickly I just want to say how excited I'm for this trip. We've been talking about getting up into this part of the world for a minute now. While there isn't any fresh know forecasted, I still think we're going to get some awesome landscapes and just a fun road trip with a friend, see some beautiful scenery, and get up to the Hunewill Ranch in the snow which I've never seen. I don't think Will's ever seen in the snow. We've only been up there in the summertime, so very excited to see that. Let's not delay any longer. Let's go. [MUSIC] All right, everyone. We are now out at June Lake, and we're just having a nice little early morning. I made some coffee, the time-lapse switch will get to; but we're now going to pack up the car, get going, get some of these B-roll shots along the way, and just document this little chip that we're doing from June Lake up to a Honeywell Ranch in Bridgeport along the 395. [MUSIC] 20. Project 3 Overview: Documentary Promo: Welcome to my video. I'm going to be doing a promotional video or a promotional documentary is what I like to call it. Basically, this kind of video is something where you'd find a company and you create a video to promote the company whether that means showing what they do, trying to find new followers, trying to find new clients, anything that you can do to basically promote the company. Now we've chosen Photography and Friends, which you guys may know is a group. Would you call it group or community? It's like our community for our photography students. We want to create a 30-second, two-minute-long promotional video that will attract new users and followers. Now, typically what you would do for that would be to interview someone talking about the project or talking about what they are doing exactly, and then you would show exactly what they're doing. For Photography and Friends, it's an online community so we're making it difficult for ourselves. It's not like we're shooting a baker or a woodworker or something. Someone that's doing stuff with their hands, which is easy. It's easy, you can just see something. But everything we talk about in this, you can apply to almost any business. But basically, I've built a little shot list that we're going to go through and we're going to try and push ourselves as far as that goes. Are you guys ready to hear what I got? Yeah. Yeah, let's hear it. In creating this, there are two things that I want to talk to you about first, and that's A-roll versus B-roll. Now in advanced videography, we want to make sure that we're planning this stuff out. A-roll is basically going to be the spine or the video that is going to take you all the way through your video. In our sense, it's going to be an interview. A-roll is going to be an interview with the person that is in charge of the company or the person that is the front-facing face of the company. In our case, it's going to be Phil. Oh, man, I have to do that. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. We're going to set up an interview and we're going to interview Phil. We're going to talk more about the interview in a little bit, but that will be our A-roll. Now he's going to guide us through what is Photography and Friends, what do they do? How do they do it? We're going to use that voiceover in the interview to guide us through this 30-second, two-minute video. Now, after that, we're going to shoot some B-roll. Now you've probably heard this a lot like B-roll is basically just beautiful shots that's going to go over the A-roll. Now typically when you're interviewing someone, my style in promotional documentaries is to not hear the interviewer, you just want to hear the interviewee. Now that means there's going to be a lot of cutting, we're going to need to cover some stuff. It's boring just seeing someone sit there and talk so the B-roll is going to cover those edits so we can hide it and make it seem more seamless and professional. We're also going to be able to show pretty things and not just look at Phil's face the entire time. Which is a pretty thing too. Not pretty enough for a whole [LAUGHTER] 30-second promo though. But typically you see this when you're watching commercials on TV or you go to a website and you're looking at non-profits. Really any company has a promotional video where there's someone talking and then they cut to what they're doing or what they're about with the beautiful B-roll. I mean, I think just to add onto what this project could be applicable to, it's really any non-narrative type film. Even if you're a YouTuber and you're making videos yourself or if you're doing vlogs or anything, this is going to take your video to the next level compared to just shooting yourself at your computer talking to your webcam. Adding the B-roll, nice-looking B-roll. YouTube is a really good example of this like when someone is talking and then they cover it with what they're talking about. But our goal is to make it look better than just a normal setup. We're going to do five different setups and I'm going to show you some tips and tricks to make those better than they would just be normally. We're going to show you just a basic version of each one of those scenarios would be and then I'm going to show you how to push yourself and make those even better and look professional. Because there are certain aesthetics that we can do to make things look more professional and that's what we want to teach you. So what are the five things we're going to do? One, the interview, the A-roll. I'm going to show you a basic interview shot which is fine and we're going to add a second camera to the interview shot to make it a little bit more interesting. You see this a lot in Netflix documentaries where there's multiple shots of an interview, one of them is profile or lower or different angle and that helps us a lot. You can see in our storyboards that the first two frames are the normal shot as in shot 1 and then I have under shot 1, which I've labeled number 1C, is a profile shot of my little head, sorry, the chicken scratches. But you'll see that there's two different ways of shooting the interview that we'll be able to edit back and forth. Our second shot is going to be a video portrait. Now, that's been a new thing developing. Basically, we want to see the person who we're talking about, which is Phil, and he's going to look all proper. Normally you can just shoot that, just normally just like a photo portrait. But we're going to push you to do something else and that means pushing in. We're going to try and push in on someone which is a little bit more of a cinematic move. It's such a simple thing that you can do that'll make it look so good. We're going to use a gimbal for that, but you can use a dolly, you can push a tripod if it's smooth enough. You can see in my storyboard I've put arrows from the wide frame down to the, the smaller circle is the second frame. The cool thing about that too is we're going to talk about frame rates. Because at that point we're going to shoot a little bit of slow-mo and it'll add this really beautiful crisp commercial-looking push-in. That aesthetic is what I'm talking about as far as it looking professional, that can really add to what you're doing. Shot 3 is going to be Phil working at his computer. He's going to be talking to people on the Facebook group or he's going to be working on blogs or setting up Photography and Friends doing the lessons. Very exciting stuff. Typically that's boring. [LAUGHTER] How do I make that look good? How do you make that look good? Well, we're going to add movement to it. Now you can see in the storyboard, we're going to come across the computer in front of it on Phil's face. That simple act of adding movement is going to make everything look so much more professional. It doesn't take a ton of work to do and it doesn't take a ton of equipment to do. We're also in that same setup going to shoot a bunch of inserts of Phil's hands, of the computer, of things in foreground. We'll dive more deeply into this but that's going to be like cool-looking B-roll. Yeah. I think one thing you're thinking about is a lot about editing. As a video creator, you have to think about what shots do I need for the edit? You already talked about how with the A-roll with the different shots or B-roll covering the A-roll, you can cut out mistakes, you can cut out the interviewer asking questions, and things like that. It takes practice and it takes practice actually editing to know, with this I need that kind of shot. But when you're in a setup like you're talking about, if I'm working on my computer, I might as well get a few different shots in that one setup. Exactly. Knock things off pretty quickly. We'll dive deeply into that one when we get there. To continue with the movement, the next shot is going to be Phil doing a podcast with someone. Now we have a podcast on Photography and Friends although we don't keep up with it often. That is going to build off of the movement that we've already created in the video portrait and moving off the foreground and we're going to do a podcast. These two are going to make a mock podcast or they're going to be talking to each other and we'll add that same movement and show you how you can edit within moving and keep up the momentum of your video. Because we want to create excitement, we want users to be engaged, we want to show them how exciting it is to be part of Photography and Friends. The last shot is going to be of a camera or hopefully of Phil or Sam holding up a camera and shooting, and we're going to make it look like a movie. My goal with that is to make it look cinematic. I want flares, I want depth of focus to be shallow. I want movement, I want all these things that are going to make it look professional. We'll talk about those aesthetics that are really pushing yourself as a videographer. I think in a basic video sense, just having a camera, everything in focus, and locked off is boring. The aesthetics of making things look professional, big movies and commercials have very little things in focus, they have movement, they have flares, and slow motion. All these things are what makes a video look more professional, more advanced. You can do that with what you've got. It's really not that hard you just have to set yourself up for success and do that. Those are our five shots. In the meantime, I'm also going to be talking about some quick lighting techniques for those. Because of all the three videos that we're doing, I think I have a lot of control over the lighting. That being said, if you're put in a situation where you're in a place where you don't have control of the lighting, there are some things that you can do to kick up what looks like a professional lighting setup very easily with minimal lights. All this being said, this is one of my favorite projects to be doing. Sam and I actually have a video production company and doing this type of video is basically what we get paid to do. This is a tried and true process and the term talking head where it would just be Phil talking, gets boring and that's not fun, that's not advanced. We actually don't want to see that much of Phil in the interview at all, but we want his voice to cover beautiful, wonderful shots. I think people end up just getting lazy. If you're out there you're trying to make your, I'm talking to YouTubers out there because that's what a lot of people are now. You've got a YouTube channel and you want to make it better, it's just taking the extra effort to get B-roll for whatever video you're doing. I think it's easy to say, I'm just going to put out another piece of content, just film it really quickly, it's just going to be me talking. But spending the time to think about B-roll is super important and will take you to the next level. Planning it out like this. I mean, having a shot list is something that Sam and I do all the time when we're doing documentaries or promo videos. Pre-production is such a big part of it. Also, what I love about this as well is that seeing both these are documentary side, like here's Phil working on his computer, we're going to get that stuff. But then it's also the commercial side, it's also more like, let's set up a situation where he's out taking photos. Yes, it's staged, but we're going to make it feel natural, we're going to make it fit within this context. It's something that if you are working with a client or you work in a company and you're working this kind of thing, it takes that creativity of both he's just doing the actual thing but also, let's get creative. Let's have some fun with this. Let's set up something that's going to be more engaging to look at than us sitting here talking. The last thing I'll add too is if you're out there watching this and you want a career in video creation like you just talked about, this is one of the best ways to start getting paid to make videos. Every town wherever you live is going to have a variety of businesses that want video content now. I need it. So get out there, literally just go out and talk to people. What I've done here where I live is in conjunction with my wife who started a local newspaper, we started just profiling local businesses and this was for free. We started making videos just showcasing businesses exactly what we're doing, we're talking about these corporate documentaries. But from that, I get people asking me to do all kinds of videos from their business to their campaign videos, to all kinds of things. This is a great type of video to learn and to actually get paid to do what you love. The concepts from the non-profits we've worked with to big multinational corporations to small mom-and-pop shops, we've done the same. Same formula. Same formula. A lot of this is pre-production that we're talking about now so that when you go out and shoot, you're effective. It's all the things that we've done for what? The last decade? Decade, probably, yeah. [LAUGHTER] It's the same thing we've been doing and we're just going to give you all that information right now. Are you guys ready to do it? Let's do it. I'm excited. Let's go. 21. Tips for Interviewing on Video: Before we get into our first shot, which is our interview shot, something to be prepared with is the questions. We're going to be interviewing Phil about Photography and Friends. Now the goal with the A role is to make sure that Phil talks deeply about the journey of Photography and Friends and what it is and what it's about. We need to be asking him questions that prompt that, but we also don't want to be too pushy. We want to make it sound conversational because when someone's just answering robotic questions in one word, it's not very fun. Another thing to be telling Phil to do is to try and rephrase the question in his answer. If he doesn't do that, it would sound something like, what's your dog's name? Ashby. If we just cut me out and we just cut to Phil going Ashby, there's no context. [LAUGHTER] You have to say my dog's name is Ashby. We want to have people trying to repeat the question. Sometimes it's very hard because a lot of people that you're interviewing aren't used to being interviewed. You have to calmly work your way into that and prompt them. It helps to have questions ready to go. Now I have a list of questions here that I've made that will help with that. They're simple, they're not too complicated, but they should prompt Phil in talking about his company. Some of the questions are, what is Photography and Friends? Basically, what is it? What is Photography and Friends? What is the website? That's going to be a great question for him. What does it provide? We want to know exactly what he's doing and he'll answer with Photography and Friends provides blah-blah-blah. Another one is, who is it targeted towards? Why is it so great? Now these questions are going from the specific to more of the ethereal big general questions, which is good because we want to be able to hone in on exactly what Photography and Friends is and we also want to make it broad enough that it will include a lot of people in it. It's good to get as much information in your A roll interviewee as possible because we can always cut it out. We can't add to it, but we can cut it out. From interviewing a lot of people, making videos, a couple of things that I always keep in mind, one good piece of advice is sometimes just let them answer the question and just wait and you don't have to, one for audio, just try not to talk over who you're interviewing, but in another sense, sometimes just not talking right away. They might come up with more things, corporate documentary is one thing. But if you're doing more of a personal story documentary, just let them talk. Sometimes just pause, let them talk. The other thing, maybe more with the corporate side is, and you're going to learn how to do this as you edit videos. Sometimes you hear the way someone says something and it's okay to ask them to say it again or say it in a different way. What I find a lot is people actually talk too much and you know you just need that 10 seconds soundbite. I feel comfortable with asking the person to say, oh, can you just say it this way? It depends on the project, but if it's a short 30-second spot, sometimes you just need that short soundbite. I would say it's okay to just ask them. Because you're looking for those soundbites. That's such an important piece of especially I think with interviews is that, you're sitting down with a person that you're ultimately making this video for. You're here to tell their story. They've entrusted you to do what you do, make this video. If you're saying," hey, that's not really great, could you say it again and focus in on this one piece because we're here to do a video on Photo and Friends. You just spent 10 minutes talking about your dog. But you said this great thing about Photo and Friends, let's focus in on that". I think that's such an important thing and leaving that space. Many times I've been in interviews and there's a camera, there's lights. I've never been in front of a camera. I'm sweating and this person is talking to me, but I don't remember what I just said. But sometimes if you just give them that time and that space, they'll just keep talking all of a sudden. They're like, actually there's this other thing and really you don't need to be pushing too much. Let them say what they're going to say and then just, "do you have anything else you want to say or is there more you'd want to share?" Sometimes they just need that moment of pause to really find what they're trying to say. Interviewing is an art form in its own way. Tying it back to the cinematography of actually being able to video and get an interview. It's best if you can have either a second shooter who is helping you with the camera, who's paying attention to the camera and the audio so that you can just be focused on the person. Those interviews are just going to come out better. Then I have a question because I watch a lot of documentaries now and when we went to film school, you don't look at the camera and you don't center the subject. This might be saying you talk a little bit more about in the next lessons where we're setting up our interview shot. But what are your thoughts about how do someone get that interview shot where they're looking at the camera and then also framing or any quick tips before we dive into it? I think it depends on the style of what you're going with. I think in an odd von guard documentary where there's a lot of intense drama, talking straight into camera in a interview can be really effective. But that's a tool that you're using as a filmmaker and people do that where they put a camera and they have a video screen and fry and they're basically zooming with you on the other side or like framing and you just see their head or you just see the back of their head or something like that. It's a stylistic choice. I don't think that that's great for a promo commercial because it's not speaking to general amount of people, It's making a statement or something. But there are tools. I completely agree. There's so many documentaries out there that we watch these days and people are getting real fancy. Their second shots are low and behind them it's like you can't even see their face or it's showing the whole interview setup. There's always the good style. [OVERLAPPING] There's all these cool different ways, but the traditional 2011 we are getting the shots. But to have that moment where the person looks to a camera, even if it's just for the final shot, all of a sudden you cut to and then they're centered and they're looking straight on camera. It can be an effective tool. That's what all these things are. There's learning these different techniques and then thinking about them beforehand while you're shooting to then make the edit that much more powerful. That's such a big part of all this storytelling, the creative process of interviewing. You can see we started talking about what the questions are and it led to another conversation and that's the whole point of having the list of questions is you want to have it as a road-map so that you can create a conversation in your interview and that's what's going to be most natural, which is literally what just happened here what you saw. My last few questions are more of getting people to basically give you that soundbite. Specifically the last one, what are your hopes and dreams for the future of Photography and Friends? He just heard that question now so he's going to be thinking about it. But typically the first time someone hears that they're like," oh my gosh, the hopes and dreams of my company I want them to be", and that is going to create such a good sound bite for you. Keeping in mind these questions are a road-map. Let the conversation breathe, let people talk. I've seen Sam so many times after they answer a question, he just smiles and looks at the person. [LAUGHTER] Then they say something else and it's wonderful and he's really good at that. That takes a lot of practice, which I think is really good. Quick question though, do we send our people questions ahead of time? I do. I've done both. It depends on who you're interviewing. I only do it if they ask. I never have. I almost refuse to. [OVERLAPPING] Even if I do, I don't actually send them all the questions I'll ask. If someone asked for it, I will send it to them. But typically what just happen is you won't even get to all the questions. You'll just start having a conversation which is going make for a better interview for this type of video. I will say on the document is broad term that I've done both the corporate side and the other side, but with this, when you're making those questions, such a big part is, at the beginning of all this we said we're making a 30 to one-minute video on Photo and Friends. You've agreed with your client, what are we making a video for? What is the purpose of this? Those questions should reflect that because at the end of the day, this is to make that video. If we're going to do promo on 2021 for Photo and Friends. Then all of a sudden we're talking about 1983, it needs to have the context to really make sense for the video. That's such an important part of creating those questions is to be focused on that. I think the last tip that I would give is something I was saying with Sam, listening to someone talk is being present with your interviewee. You don't want to necessarily have a laptop in front of you unless you're looking at questions, but maybe you want it off to the side. Maybe a piece of paper that's not making noise. But being engaged with your interviewee is going to create such a better environment, such better answers. You really want to be focused. Like Phil said, if you have someone else that can be looking at the camera, watching the sound, you can do this all by yourself. It's incredibly difficult and it takes a lot of juggling many things. But having someone to help look at all that stuff is super-helpful. I'd highly recommend not having the questions on your phone. I've done that and even though I tell them before, it's like you were talking and also I'm looking at my phone to look at the next question and it breaks it. It's so bad. [OVERLAPPING]. All right. Let's get into it. Let's do an interview. Oh, man. 22. 2-Camera Interview Setup with Lighting & Audio Tips: We're here in Phil's garage, and we're about to do our first shot. Now we're going to shoot on this mirrorless camera. I have myself lit right now so you guys can see me, and we want to compose a nice shot to start with. I'm going to run you through three things. We're going to run through the camera settings, we're going to run through the audio settings, and we're going to talk about the lighting, not necessarily in that order. Let's cut to this camera first, so we see that we're in a wide boring shot we have my hand is in front, the booms in shot, and also we're seeing the house lights. Let's start by composing a nice shot, so we're going to go ahead and zoom in a little bit. I have this camera, our A-roll main camera on a 24-70 zoom so that I can adjust in camera as we see fit. You never know what situation you're going to be in, so you want to be able to adjust on the fly if you had a prime lens you can move the camera itself and that will also allow some more depth of field, but we'll get into that. I actually want to shoot closer to 70 millimeters because of that aesthetically professional look of shallow depth of field. I want less in focus and more out of focus because that's the aesthetic that looks professional, and that's the first thing you can do to up your game. How do we achieve that? Well, we shoot wide open at a 2.8, or we shoot it a long lens like a 70, or we shoot on a prime lens wide open. Now, that's going to add that cool shallow depth of field. Let's go to 70, we've adjusted the camera to a 2.8, and now we see Phil dead center. That's okay, but when we talk to Phil we're going to be interviewing him. Phil, look at me. It looks a little off kilter. Now remember the rule of thirds that we talked about composition. We're going to move it a little bit to the left here. Now, Phil is looking in this direction and there's more space on the right side, so it's leading room. We can also if we ever wanted to throw up graphics next to him, or we can punch in. We're shooting 4K so that we can punch in. If we're going to deliver in 1080, we will not lose any resolution. Now, if we're going to deliver in 4K, we can't necessarily do that shooting at 4K because the resolution will be the same. Let's look at Phil. Phil, let's go ahead and look at me. Hi, Phil. How is it going? I know that we're going to deliver in 1080, so I'm going to back out a little bit so that I have room to punch in on 4K since I'm recording at that. Now that our composition's good, let's check focus. I like to focus in manual mode on interviews like this, you can do autofocus if you like, but sometimes I don't necessarily trust the cameras so personally because I know Phil is not going to be moving around a lot, and I'm going to ask him, hey Phil, don't move around a lot. I know that the focus will stay the same on him the whole entire time. I'm going to go ahead and check my manual focus, see that he's in focus, having an external monitor like I have here, is super helpful for that. Typically, you'd be using a small screen and stuff. If you start to use this as a job, they're going to get paid for, you need to show clients onset what you're shooting it's really helpful to have a nice external monitor that you can show your clients, and it's just easier on your eyes. I can get focused a little bit better. I can also spin this around and have Phil look at it if I needed him to. That's our main composition for our main A-camera. This is like our hero shot that's going to be throughout the whole entire thing. Composition is looking fine, the lighting however does not look great. We just have overhead lights you can see we lose his shirt a little bit in the darkness, we can't even tell what those objects are in the back. Basically what I'm going to do, is my way of lighting interviews is to have one key light, one nice key light which I'm lit by right now. We're going to give Phil that, and I want to have on the opposite side a backlight to break up him from the background. Now, it'll give him a ring light, and it'll give him a highlight that pops him out from the background. Let's start by turning off the house lights. Now, it probably doesn't look all that great right now because our light that I'm lighting myself looks like a spotty light, and we don't see Phil. I'm going to start by turning on the key light for him , there we go. You can see now that Phil is lit by one big light. Now, these are LED lights and they are daylight balanced. My camera right here is shooting log, which means I'm going to color it later. Now, you can see because it's showing us not necessarily the log, it's showing us the white balance that is doing. It's an auto white balance. You can watch it as it just went from balancing itself to those overhead lights to now balancing itself to these daylights, and it's creating actual white. This light itself is being shot through two pieces of diffusion. That to me is beautiful on Phil's skin, and now we can see the color in his shirt it's a soft light that's falling on him, it's actually giving them a reflection in his eyeball, which is called an eye light, which looks really nice. Again, this is the aesthetic that looks professional. Now, we've also lit up the background a little bit. I still feel like he's just falling into the background. Let's turn on a backlight and show that highlight behind him. Can you see the difference between the backlight this is on, this is off, this is on, and it's getting his hair light and inside of his light. Now, I like to do opposites. I have the key light on that side and opposite of that is the backlight. If I had the backlight on this side, it would be fighting with the key light. The advanced way to do this is to have an opposed side, key light, backlight, and you can see what it's doing here if I move my hand up and down. That looks great. Now, we've brought some shape to this side of Phil's face, we have the key light. This looks like a professionally lit interview. Now let's compare this to what it was with the house lights. Huge advancement and we're only using two lights, just two lights and some diffusion, this one's a one-by-one LED panel and that one is half that, and I have it closed down, so it's only hitting this side of Phil. I think it looks great. Phil, you look amazing. Thank you. Let's talk about audio. Now for an interview, I like to have backups. I'm using a wireless system. There's plenty of mics that you can connect that have a wired. I prefer the wireless system because it keeps wires off the ground. People are moving around. You don't want to be tripping on things. You don't want to pull something out on accident. Now, I'm using a Wireless Go II by RODE. The cool thing about this one is it has two transmitters to one receiver. To make it easier on me in editing, I have both my channels going into my camera, so I don't have to record it separately. The cool thing is I have one transmitter on a lavalier for Phil, and I have one transmitter above him on a boom. This way I get two nice sounding channels. I could use either one or I can use a combination of those in editing, that's more of a post thing, but I'm trying to set myself up for success. If the lav is there and for some reason he moves around and start scratching or he starts touching his chest, like I'm doing, I can use the boom as a backup to make it sound good. Or adversely if the boom mic fails, or it's picking up some outdoor sound, I can use the lav, that'll be a clean audio. It's great to have a backup. This is something that you should think about, especially if you're going to be out making money for corporate clients, you want to make sure you get good audio. If you don't have an audio person that's specifically doing audio, this is the best way to do it by yourself. Now it's plugged into the camera. I plugged headphones in so I can listen to it. I had Phil talk. Let's do that again. Phil, just let me know what you had for breakfast. Yeah. This morning I actually had a pretty good breakfast. I made myself an egg and bagel half sandwich. Let's have him say that again, and I'll switch between the boom and the lav. This morning for breakfast I had an egg and bagel sandwich, even with some avocado on it. That's awesome. It sounds good to me. You can tell the difference between the two style of mics. This is a great little kit that you can put together. The boom is faced right at him. It's just out of our frame, you can see and the lav is hidden in his buttons, which is good if you're subject has a button shirt like I'm wearing. An advanced step here is if you're doing audio yourself, if you don't have someone dedicated to running your audio recording, keep in mind that external noises will mess up your interviews. While you're interviewing someone, you have to be cognizant of outdoor train noises, or an airplane, or a leaf blower, or anything like that. You have to remember keep an eye on that, keep an ear on that more likely. Maybe wearing your headphones during the interview would help, or just thinking about being cognizant. Also, your cameras can do auto gain. Now, what that means is it will auto adjust the levels of what is happening, and that could mess you up too. Typically, I like to do manual control just like the autofocus. We don't want to give the camera the option to mess with you. Setting your audio to a manual mode, checking your levels, and you can see here on the close-up. Phil, can you talk a little bit? We can see the levels on the actual camera, making sure they're not peaking. Yeah, here's what I'm going to be saying. Yeah, it's a good idea to have your talent talk. Talk a little bit louder and quieter than they might talk just so you're not peaking. We already done that and we've made sure that that little meter isn't pushing into the red. On other camera devices and other recording devices, you can actually see the numbers and checking it back. Then in post we can take a look at that and we can raise it or we can lower it depending, as long as it's not being destroyed. Very similar to the shadows in the highlights when you're shooting, audio has lows and highs as well. Now that we have our audio set, our lighting set, our A-camera set as our good A-roll composition, we're going to up our game. Now, let's advance to adding a second camera just over my left shoulder here. We have the same mirrorless cameras set up, shooting Phil from a profile position. Now this is a little more icy, a little bit more avant-garde, but it gives us a second thing to cut to. Honestly, it gives us a third thing that cut to. If we consider delivering in 1,080, we have a 4K file here that we can punch in on. Now we have three different A-roll camera positions that we can cut to, to hide over our B-roll or hide over any mistakes Phil makes. Or we can also use these to cut out my question asking, which is really great. Let's go over and look at the camera and make sure it's okay. We got Phil here and we're going to make sure he's in focus. Phil go ahead and talk to the camera in front of you as if I was there. I'm going to be talking, looking around in this direction. I probably won't be moving my head too much. Something like this feels more natural. Yeah. This is really cool because we have a second camera setup that we can cut to. It looks cool. This can really be anything you want. We could move it over here so it's behind him. The background is not as good as what it was over here. Or if you just want to have a better close-up shot, you can have that too. Just got to keep in mind your screen direction, and how that will work. In thinking about the edit, this position is great, but the screen direction isn't the same. If we cut between these two shots, Phil is on the left in our main camera, but he's on the right in this camera. When we cut between the two, it might not make a lot of sense. While this shot is great, I think we're going to need to move it to the other side or we can flip it in post. Now that will get you some issues potentially with wordage if that was on a shirt, or if he has certain takes or he moves a hand up or down, they'll be opposites. You want to try and minimize the work you need to do in post, minimize the problems you might end with. Let's just off the bat, go ahead and move this camera to that side of our setup so that the screen direction is correct and Phil is on the left in both shots. Now, Phil is looking left to right in both of our shots. The background isn't as great over here. I'm actually going to move this, and add a laptop that's out of focus in this shot. You can see now that Phil can be talking to camera and we can cut between the two and the background is completely out of focus in that shot, and it looks a little different. This lighting setup and this compositional setup is way more of a traditional documentary commercial style. Now, if you want it to be a more darker documentary, or you felt like it needed to be a little bit moodier, you can build off of this. This is really the building blocks of what an interview may be. We can turn off this front light and have it be very dark and a little bit more spooky. Or maybe you've seen those videos where they're doing unsolved mysteries or something like that, where they can't show the face of the person and the voice is all changed. These are really just the building blocks for you to build out the style of whatever you're shooting as far as documentary or commercial. Now, I'm going to go ahead and sit down, and I'm going to ask Phil a bunch of questions that we talked about earlier, and start to build out this really awesome A-roll for the video. 23. Video Portrait: Shooting a Beautiful Shot for Promo & Documentary Projects: For this shot, we're going to do a video portrait. Well, I guess there's three things I want to talk to you about as far as video portrait goes. We're going to talk about lighting, we're going to talk about movement, and we're going to talk about frames per second. Now to start with, let's talk about lighting. Now, this is our main lighting commercial setup. We've got a nice even bright light on Phil. I don't have the camera up yet, but let's just with our eye look at Phil. He's got a key light, he's got a fill light, and he's got a backlight, and we can see all three of those. Now, that's a really nice setup if you're going to start carrying lights with you, having a three-point lighting system is wonderful. Here's the nice commercial light. Now I think I'd like to add a little bit of drama to it. Let's kill his fill light and see what that looks like. Just with our eyes, we can see that Phil now has a nice shadow right here. He's got a backlight from this side, and he's got his key light from his left side. That's definitely a little bit more dramatic, and I think that that's a little bit more intense and awesome for our shoot. We'll shoot all three, and we'll compare here in a second. Let's make it even more dramatic. We're going to kill the key light on him, which is the light on his left side, and see how dramatic that looks. [NOISE] Definitely more dramatic. You're still getting some spill light from the light that we're using to light me. You can see how if I block that light, all he's getting is his backlight and that's a little bit more dramatic. Now, let's go ahead and shoot all three in just a static shot, and we can compare all three to each other. [MUSIC] Let's go with the dramatic first. I'm going to kill the fill light because I think that that's a little bit more interesting and honestly that matches our A-roll interview. Remember we did a key light and a backlight and that was it. We're back to Phil in our lighting setup, and now we want to do a video portrait of him. Now we can do a static video where it's just him, just nothing moving, and we'll give him some action, and let's see what that looks like and see how we feel about it. Phil, we're going to shoot you. If you can just smile into camera, bring up your camera that you have and take a picture of us. Awesome. Then smile into camera, awesome. If you'd look down at your camera and then back up at us. Awesome. Thanks. I just had Phil run through a couple of actions in a static video mode. I use the gimbal, but we're just staying static. There's no movement. Now we gave them some action to do which is always good to direct your subjects, especially with what they're doing. Depending on what they are, they can fold their arms, they can put their hands in the pockets. He's got a camera because it's about cameras, so he held up the camera. Giving your person some direction is really great. That was good enough. But now let's add some movement to it. I think doing a push-in with the gimbal will add a little bit more kinetic energy, and it'll be a little bit more interesting. It's also again that aesthetic that I keep talking about. It's much more Hollywood cinema when you're pushing in. Think about big movies like Spielberg movies where there's a dramatic pushing. That's what we're going to try and achieve with the gimbal. Let's have Phil do the same action and we'll do the same framing, but we'll push in as we go. Ready. [NOISE] We're going to start a little bit wide and when I say action Phil, you're going to pick up your camera, take a picture and then pull it down and look into the camera and smile. Am I looking at the camera right now? Always looking at a camera. Yeah. Get ready and 3, 2, 1, action. [NOISE] Awesome. Let's do it one more time, 3, 2, 1, action. [NOISE] Very cool. We're using the gimbal as movement towards it. Now, I'm remembering to stay very still because the gimbal does stabilize like that, but it doesn't stabilize my steps. You can still be moving it up and down, so you have to still give yourself a little bit of make sure you're straight movement. Otherwise, you'll start to see this bump. It also helps to have it on autofocus. Again, we're moving, and we can't adjust the focus because we'll mess with the framing, and sometimes you don't want to use your other hand to do it. Having autofocus on and face recognition is almost crucial when you're doing a push-in like that. Phil look great, and we use sort of a wider angle on our zoom lens. Now, I'm going to punch in a little bit on the zoom lens to add more of that shallow depth of field and make it look a little bit more professional. This is going to cause the camera's autofocus to potentially struggle a little bit depending on the type of camera you have, but it won't be moving slow enough that hopefully it'll catch it, and we'll have Phil do the same direction. Here we illustrate. Phil. Now we're at 55 millimeter, and we're going to start lowing out, and we're going to do Phil the same direction, ready, and 3, 2, 1, action. [NOISE] Awesome. We're going to back out just so we have it 3, 2, 1, action. [NOISE] Cool. You can see how this adds a little bit more shallow depth. It's upping our game. It looks a little bit more professional, a little bit more Hollywood aesthetic. Now, I want to do one more thing. I want to shoot at a higher frame rate. Now, we're going to change our frames per second. Now what that does is we're going to slow down what we're shooting and by doing that, we need to shoot at a higher frame rate in the camera. What you're seeing, what we just shot was at 23.98 and now to add more frames to it, so we can slow it down in a 23.98 time-based, we're going to shoot a 59.94. Because we're running more frames through the camera in order to slow it down, it means that the frames are going to be in front of the light for less amount of time, which means we're going to lose light, so we need to adjust the variable in upping our frames per second. I'm going to up the frames per second to 59.94, but I'm actually going to bump my ISO up, so I can compensate for losing that light. You got to remember to do this because if you don't, you'll start to lose light. Something to think about too, when you're shooting in dark areas that you won't always be able to get more light. Just remember you're going to lose about half the light when you start shooting at a higher frame rate. We also need to remember to adjust our shutter speed. If we're going to up our frame rate, you need to match your shutter to that frame rate. A good rule of thumb is doubling your frame rate to get to your shutter, so for shooting a 23.98, you want to aim for getting a one over 48th-second shutter. Not all cameras can do exactly one over 48 so 1/50 would be good, 1/55. If we're doubling our frame rate to do a slow-motion at 59.94, we want to be aiming for close to 100 or one over 120 or if your camera can only do one over 125, that'll work too. This is very crucial. There have been times where I've shot 59.94, and I've forgotten to change the shutter, and it causes a flicker in your footage, which makes it completely unusable so remember to do this, it's very good to get into the practice of as soon as you go to a higher frame rate, double-check all your settings, your exposure, and your shutter, very important. I've changed our frame rate to 59.94. I've adjusted my shutter to one over 125, I've up my ISO to 1600, I'm staying at a 55 millimeter on my lens because I liked that look, we're keeping our lights the same, we've got all our variables dialed in. Now, remember when we do this on Phil, we're doing twice the amount of time in camera. You don't want to be quick, but you don't want to be too slow because you'll start to eat up footage. Same reason is I don't want to roll this until right, we're going to go because you'll start to eat up data. Just keep that in mind. Here we go. You're ready, Phil? I'm ready. Let me make sure the camera is focus. I'm rolling and 3, 2, 1 action. [NOISE] Awesome. Let's compare the two. You can see on the right side of your screen, the higher frame per second push-in is a little bit more smooth, a little bit more ethereal like a nice buttery push-in, and on the left side of your screen is our normal real-time push in. I really like doing video portraits, especially in some of these promo doc works because you can really see the personality of the person. It also gives you a really good introduction or an end cap. It really gives you more opportunity to use it in post-editing. Now, just remember, select your lighting, select your composition, select your movements, select your frames per second. There's a lot of variables that you can do here. It's up to you to figure out your style and what you're trying to do. Let's move on to our next shot. 24. Cinematic B-roll: Adding Movement & Focus Pulls to Your Video Shots: For this shot, we're going to be focusing on Phil at his computer, which isn't necessarily the most interesting thing, no offense, Phil. [LAUGHTER] But photography and friends is an online community, it's an online website. We need to feature it somehow, we need to show that we are on the computer somehow thinking and talking about photography. Now I don't want to necessarily have a static shot. This is what a static shot would look like on sticks with him just looking at the computer. Pretty boring. Not that exciting. We're going to use the gimbal here to basically add some movement. Again, it's about working our foreground into our subject. We're going to do two different types of shots on the gimbal, and then we're going to switch over to the tripod and get some really interesting close-up, B-roll, lock-off shots. Let's start with the gimbal, since we got on the gimbal already, and add some movement. The great thing about the gimbal is that we're going to be able to add movement. It'll look even more interesting if we have something in the foreground while we are moving past it. Now, Phil can just go ahead and continue to work on his computer but I want him to have a happy disposition. Just love my work. [LAUGHTER] We'll go ahead and do two different gimbal shots with it. Let's turn on the camera. We'll start rolling, and we're going to do a boom upshot, which I think is really interesting. Big tip with a gimbal. Again, I can't say this enough, when you're on a gimbal auto-focus is probably the best thing for you to do because you cannot adjust it while you're manually doing it. We're going to start down on his laptop because look, there is a Photography and Friends logo. We're going to adjust this a little bit, sorry Phil. All right. We're going to start there and we're just going to boom up, and booming up means just moving up laterally. We're going to start here and go to his face. Boom, look at that. You see our auto-focus went right to his face and we use some foreground to come off of. I can be a little bit smoother. I'm trying to talk to you but I'll book you right here, we're going to start on Photography and Friends. Let the camera get focus, and very slowly move up. Ready, 1, 2, 3, smile, Phil. Great, look at that. That's a really nice movement. We had some foreground, we had some movement. Maybe we'll go a little bit slower this time. Cool. You see the auto-focus on my cameras struggled just a little bit there. I'll probably use one of the earlier takes. But you can see how cool that movement is while he's just working on a computer, it gives us some movement. Now let's do a lateral move from the left side here, and we're going do the same thing. Tilt up a little bit. We're going to use the computer to come off of the logo. Here we go. Auto-focus is a little slow but it got what we wanted to do. We came off the logo onto Phil. I've brought this up because I want the laptop to be on level with his eyes when I come around, and I'm going to zoom in a little bit on the actual camera. I don't need to see these books. Remember, the people watching your video only see what you show them, so I'm going to avoid looking at these books and I'm just going to have a nice move from right to left on Phil. I can use both those shots somewhere in the video. Same thing. We're going to start this way. We're going to zoom in until around a 55 millimeter. I'm going to start on the computer. Looks like we're still going to have to boom up a little bit as we're moving. Man. How buttery is that? That looks so good. We got a really cool movement shot, we get two of them actually where the auto-focus adjusts from here to there, we moved around his computer and we boomed up. Those are really two great shots. But now again, since Photography and Friends is online, I want to get some more B-roll shots of him on his computer doing stuff on Photography and Friends. I want those to be locked off and I want to make those compositions really interesting. Let's get onto the tripod with the camera and shoot a couple of those. We're off the gimbal now and we're onto a tripod. Now something to think about is using a video tripod. Now, you can have photography ball head tripods that will statically lock off shots but it's good to be able to move your head around. This is a fluid head, so I can tilt, I can pan. If we roll, you can see the cool, nice smooth movement that we would use in a pan and a tilt. We're going to be using that in some of these B-roll shots. Again, with the movement but it's smooth. It's got resistance in the head and it's letting it be a really smooth shot. Let's do some B-roll shots of Phil. I've got my camera here, I've got the fluid head. We're at a wide-angle lens on the zoom and I think it helps to be on a zoom angle lens sometimes, so you can move a little quicker with your subject. I can zoom in, and we can avoid the background and we can also have some more interesting shots. Now, I've also moved my camera to manual focus because I want to be able to adjust the focus myself on the fly. Now, I want to be able to pull focus from one section to the other. Again, with the aesthetic being that there's very little in-focus and more out-of-focus because that looks a little bit more professional. Let's start by getting a really tight shot of the Photography and Friends logo, and we're going to start out-of-focus. We'll roll and we're going to come into focus, just like that, and that adds a really cool, fun movement aesthetic that we can use in the video. We'll start the other direction. It will be really out-of-focus. I'll make it really interesting, and then we'll slowly focus in on the Photography and Friends. That's really cool. That's an awesome shot. Let's talk about shooting Phil's hands on the keyboard. Photography and Friends is a website, and he's working on his computer. We want to get that a lot. I'm shooting on this side because the back-light looks really cool against his hands. I'm going to punch in a little bit here, [NOISE] and we're going to focus on his hands. Cool. We'll stick there, and because I'm on the fluid head, I'm going to add a pan. We're going to pan from left to right. This gives you a little bit of movement. It's smooth, it's nice. Then I'm going to add a focus rack to the photography friends in the background on his shirt. Let's try that one more time. We can add a lot of focus pulls in this. This is a lot to think about in your advanced videography. Panning, tilting, and changing focus all at the same time takes practice but it looks really cool. We're going to start on the logo. We're going to pan right. We're going to send focus to his hands, and then up to his shirt, and we're going to land on Photography and Friends t-shirt. That'll be a really great B-roll shot that we can use amongst our other B-roll shots. Let's do another one where we're on his face because he looks so focused; right Phil? Again, I can start out of focus because it's really interesting to go from out-of-focus into focus. This is a very cool aesthetic and it looks very Hollywood cinematic. We're going to have Phil smile. Go on and smile Phil like you're working on something good, right into focus, and it looks good. I like this type of framing. I think it's a little bit more interesting where you can put his face towards the end of the frame and leave some negative space on the right. We can also do this by just being in a wide shot, and putting him on one side of the frame and making sure it's focused. It's a little bit more interesting than your typical shot, and we can also end up adding more things to the right of the frame if we ever wanted to. Now let's go on the other side of him, and see what he's doing. I'm behind Phil's shoulder now and we're shooting what he's looking at on his computer. But I want to add more movement to again without using a gimbal, we're on the fluid head, I'm going to add a pan in. Let's start. It doesn't matter that we're starting over here and we're seeing behind his back because I know in the edit, the editor will cut in when we see what we want to see. We're giving some handles, so let's pan left. We're slowly moving. We've already checked focus on the computer, and bam, look at that. What a nice, pretty shot of what he's doing. He's editing on his computer for Photography and Friends. Really cool. Now if you want to get super interesting with this and a little bit more artsy, let's have him pull up the Photography and Friends site like he already has, [LAUGHTER] and we'll get really close. [NOISE] We're just going to shoot a little bit of the keyboard, a little bit of the table, and a lot of bit of the Photography and Friends. Improve your photography and have him roll through the site a little bit. Oh man, there's a picture of me. We'll just have him scroll through this. Now I think that's pretty cool. I think that this is also a way to be capturing a screenshot or a screen recording of the actual website itself. But this is also really cool way to show a website, especially on a laptop with a user, much more interesting and kinetic. Those are some examples of some nice, tight, interesting B-roll shots with some movement, with some tilting, with some panning, and also pulling focus. Now I think that adding these focused poles, adding these movements, and tilts, and pans, really adds to the production value of your piece. Having the movement of the tilt, and how smooth the movement of the gimbal really makes it look more professional than shakiness or just static shots. I think static shots will go a long way if the compositions are interesting but movement and focus pulling looks really good. 25. Steadicam Video with a Gimbal: Welcome, to our next shot. One of the things that Photography and Friends does is they like to do podcasts. One of the things that we want to shoot is them doing a podcast. Now, this isn't necessarily all that active or interesting because they're just sitting there. How do we make it more interesting? Well, we're going to add movement to our shot. We have a gimbal here. Our mirrorless camera is on the gimbal and what the gimbal does is it stabilizes the camera so it's a very smooth shot. Now, what I want to do is use some foreground off of Sam shoulder so I can see Phil and we're going to move around. Now again that's not professional aesthetic. We could just shoot it like this where it's just the two of them right there. But it's not as interesting, it doesn't create a lot of motion or energy, so movement will do that. Let's go ahead and pick up the gimbal. You can see here how this gimbal will respond to my movements like this, and it keeps the camera totally steady like so. Now the idea behind this is to basically we're just going to coast along and create movement. Now, you can do that in a wide shot but having something closer to the camera you'll be able to see the movement even more because there's something prospectively very close to the camera. I'm going to turn this on so you can see it, and we're going to go behind Sam shoulder and we're going to ask them to pretend like they're in a podcast. We're not recording sound, let's just raw. You guys can talk quietly or mimic talking. [LAUGHTER] Hi, welcome to the Photography and Friends Podcast [inaudible] 372. We've been doing this consistently every week for the past few years. We've got a static shot here of Phil and Sam laughing and it's fun, it's interesting. But look as soon as I add some movement here. I'm cruising behind Sam, [BACKGROUND] over his shoulder as [BACKGROUND] they're talking, and look how cool that looks. It looks really interesting. There's a lot more movement and kinetic energy, as they're pretending to talk. We're only going to use this shot for a couple of seconds. But look how fun and excited they are, and it's so much more interesting than just a static shot. Now, we can also come out here and do a push-in of the two of them. [BACKGROUND] Which is also an interesting shot but it doesn't give you as much movement because there's no foreground to see that it's moving as much. I'd rather preserve the pushing for that video portrait. Again, let's do it one more time. Let's have them have some energy, laugh, maybe let's just see if we can have Sam tell Phil a joke. Knock, knock. Who is it? Banana. Banana. [LAUGHTER] Banana, you love me. You can see how I tried to nail Phil's laughing with me coming right off of Sam shoulder. This is a really easy and efficient way to get some movement and make your video interesting. Now, you could do this with a slider, and those are the little rails that your camera would move on. But how fun is it to do with this? It does get a little heavy and I would recommend that you practice with your gimbal before showing up to a job with it. You're going to have to balance it, there's a lot of things that go into it. Every gimbal is different, it can hold different weight it depends on your camera and your lens. But practice makes perfect with it and there's so many applications that can use this tool that will really up your videography and it will really make it look like a million bucks. Another thing to keep into consideration is that, because you're moving this and touching the camera itself will offset the stabilization it's doing. You're probably going to want to have a camera and a lens that will do autofocus. Right now we have it set to be on facial focus so that it stays on Phil. [BACKGROUND] Because you're moving around, you don't have another hand to adjust the focus, and even if you did you'd be messing and bumping up the camera. Autofocus on a mirrorless camera or a bigger camera on a gimbal is crucial, so you need to have that. Something to think about when you're doing gimbal is to think about your lens choice. Now, let's look at as a wide-angle lens, this is a 24. You can see that there's movement but we're seeing on the other side of Sam. We're focused on Phil, we're moving, we're practicing, we're panning with him. It's cool looking but imagine if we went and did like a 50 or even a 70. Now, doing this will create a more shallow depth of field but it'll also will create more movement because your lens is longer the perspective is going to look like you're moving faster. [BACKGROUND] [LAUGHTER] You can see how just that slight movement it was making it look a lot quicker and a lot faster, and that will even up your speed of what you're shooting. 26. Naturally Lit Beauty Shot: We're at our last shot. Now, this shot is going to be the cherry on the top of all our shots. For me it's always good about doing a shot where you can have something really beautiful to show. Now, I was waiting all day for the sun to get in the right spot so that we can get some flares. I'm going to add in everything that we've talked about and flares. Again, aesthetic of very little in focus, lots out of focus, shallow depth of field, movement in our camera and flares. We're also going to do that with Phil in his wonderful Hawaiian shirt and our new camera here he's going to be holding up. What I'm going to do is I'm going to move around Phil as he holds up the camera because we want to focus on photography. That's what his business is about; it's about photography. We're going to add in the flares from behind him. I've put him so the sun is behind us. See how it's backlighting us? I'm going to try and expose more for his face while maintaining the highlights in the back so we can color it later and post. I'm on the Gimbal, I also have a variable ND filter on the lens. I set it at 50 millimeters and per our frame per second talk earlier, I'm at a higher frame rate; I'm at 59.94 frame rate. I've changed my shutter to 1/125 and we're shooting at a 2:8 so we can get the shallow depth of field. Is there any more settings I can think of? I don't think so. Let's go ahead and do a shot. I'm going to move around Phil. I'm going to have them hold his camera up like he did before. I'm going to ask him, don't look into the camera. Don't look into camera and have him smile because this shot, to me, is something that it can be at the head or the end of your video, it can be a preview, it can be a thumbnail. Something beautiful; something that just looks awesome. Let's try it. I'm going to roll my camera here. Phil, why don't you start by with your camera down and looking at the back of the camera, and then go ahead and hold up the camera when I say to. Three, 2 1, go ahead. Cool. Here's what I'm doing; I am moving the camera on him at an angle up into the sun and having Phil move the camera up. He's a little squinty-eyed though, so I asked him to just hold his eyes up when we get there. Close your eyes for now, you don't have to squint right now. But this movement with the flare in the background focus on the beautiful camera. Cherry on top. Here we go. Let's try this again. No squinty eyes. No squinty eyes. Hold on. Let me make sure we got focus. When you're ready, and 3, 2, 1. When you pull the camera down, go ahead and smile when you're looking at it. Exactly. Let's see that one more time. Ready, 3, 2, 1. Pull your camera down, smile. There it is. Cool. That's the shot. I'm going to end up using that shot for a lot of things. It's pretty blown out in the background because we're looking right into the sun but it's going to look really beautiful as a really quick clip. We're shooting at a higher frame rate, so we can slow it down a little bit. 27. Project 3 Recap: Watch the Promo Doc: Well, we've finished up this project. Will went out and he edited it together. All in all, I think it came out as a pretty good little documentary promotional piece. We'll talk about this is a style of video that pretty much any business or brand could use. It's a style that really personalizes a business, showing the face of the business. In just literally like five different setups, we were able to get enough shots to put together a nice little piece. You'll notice that in the edit, Will also added a couple of other screen casts, or shots recorded of the computer screen to fill it out because we did find that it was a little bit slow without it with more of the talking head video. That helps fill it out. He added music, added a couple of graphics. I think when we get into the post-production course, which is going to follow this one, we're going to dive even deeper into other ways we can make the graphics look more engaging, better, and also maybe some editing techniques as well. This is the first pass, the fine cut or the rough to find cut, which is in the middle of the process. We'll put some final touches later on in the editing course. I hope you enjoy the video and now you can see what we were all working towards when we were getting all of our different shots. Enjoy. I'm Phil Ebiner. I helped start Photography and Friends. It's a community for anybody wanting to learn how to take better photos. [MUSIC] Photography and Friends is our community where we teach people how to be a better photographer. We created it for beginners who are just getting started with photography or people who know a little bit but want to advance their skills. What separates us is it's a place for complete beginners. We don't want you to feel like there's pressure to be a certain type of photographer. It's really there for you to learn in your own way. The main aspect is a group where you join thousands of other students learning photography, is a place where you can post photos. You can ask questions. We do live streams, contest, giveaways, we share resources, is just sort one-stop shop for you to learn to be a better photographer. There is now tens of thousands of people in this group that we've created, and how can we use that power to just make the world a better, more creative place. That's what I hope we can do.