iPhone Filmmaking: Create Cinematic Video With Your Phone

1. Introduction: What's up everybody? [inaudible]. What's up everyone? My name is Caleb. I'm Niles. We're filmmakers at Moment. So in this class, we want to talk about mobile film making, specifically shooting on your iPhone and really taking the object that you have probably in your pocket every single day and shooting pretty awesome video on it. This is like such a little powerhouse of a camera, and I think just like in any other camera, you have to know how to use it. There's a ton of different avenues for film making, and I think that the most important thing is just starting. Just start learning, just start shooting, just start editing, and as you go down that road, you're going to make a lot mistakes, and you're going to get a lot better. Back in the day, you needed access to cameras. That was the biggest pain point, if you wanted to become a filmmaker. Now, everything seems to have a camera on it. There's a ton of access. So along with this class, we will be making a short edit. We filmed some of Caleb's skating in the rain. I don't advise skating in the rain, but I do advice finding something cool to film. We'll run through tips and tricks of how we shoot, we'll run through different apps, different settings. The rolls will be downloadable so either you can go take what you learn, shoot your own film or practice your editing, and download the footage of us. If we sound dumb, now take some stuff and just don't troll us. We're super excited you guys decided to join this class. Let's get started. Yeah. 2. Limitations and Advantages: Welcome to Lesson 2. This is all about the limitations and advantages of your phone. Basically what it is really good at and what it isn't as good at. Just like any other camera on your phone excels in some areas and not in others. You wouldn't log on a really heavy movie camera, you would choose the right camera for that project. So just like any other camera, there are stuff your phone rocks at, stuff it doesn't. So let's get into it. So some of the limitations that you might run into if you're starting to shoot on your phone a lot. The first one you might notice is the battery draining quickly. That's just the thing with phones, I mean, it's powering a whole network connection, you're running e-mail, Instagram, whatever. So if you do shoot a lot on your phone, I suggest a backup battery. Power banks are pretty cheep to come by, so having that on the go for a full day of shooting is super nice. The second thing I would recommend, is making sure you're shooting in good light. Because the limitation to the phone is the sensor size, which the sensor is the little thing that sits write behind the lens and accepts the light and makes the image. It really likes to have good lighting. If you're shooting in the middle of the day, you're going to notice a really nice, like not grainy, very clear, sharp image. Or if you're shooting in a little bit lower light, you can turn on a light or go by a window if you're indoors, and just give it good light and the image will look that much better. In cinema cameras, you often will notice a nice depth of field, which is a blurry background, because there's a large sensor with a big glass lens in front of that. On phones, little bit smaller sensors so the depth of field isn't quite as there. But we'll show you later in this lesson how to mitigate that with good composition and a few lenses that you can get. So now that we've gone over some limitations, let's dive into some advantages. The first being how small, accessible and light your phone is. You rarely leave your house without your phone, and if you known how to use it well, you can get some amazing footage. With bigger cameras you need a ton of rigging and they're heavy. There's some shots that are just so hard to get because you need so much gear. With a phone, you get rid of that need because of how light it is. So if you want to mount this to a car, put it on a gimbal, hold it over your head, do all these crazy shots, it's a way easier with a phone. Another huge advantage for me is if you're out shooting in public, if you're shooting skateboarding or on the subway, you're not going to get looked at weird because you have this massive rig, that you're filming with. Probably won't get kicked out of the public space as quick. Your phone offers a really powerful, shooting 4K, just non in a discrete way, it's pretty fun. Another advantage is the fact that the phones footage looks like phones footage, and you can play that into an advantage of the style of the story you're telling. It's hard to recreate that look with a super expensive cinema camera. So if you're going for that home video documentary feel in a bigger project, is actually is perfect because of that unique look. The next advantage that we want to touch on is just how easy to use and consumer friendly it is. It is as simple as opening your app and hitting record. There are some deeper features that we'll get into later with manual settings and you're going to learn all that. But I think the best part about it is you can literally open your app and hit record and start filming. Because it is a smartphone and not a dumb cinema camera, you can literally shoot and upload it straight to social media or wherever you want and immediately share it. Some of the practices that we'll teach you in this lesson, will also transfer over to a bigger camera just in practical scenarios. So we don't mean to say all cameras are dumb, but this is all about fun. But can your DSLR call people? No, no. Whether you want to be a filmmaker, a YouTuber, or a tiktoker, If you want to post on y2.o, Facebook, Instagram, wherever, your phone is a great place to start doing that. Basically, because it's so accessible, you can now venture into that world and start testing the waters of, "Do I want to do this? Do I want to grow an audience? What kind of films do I want to make?" Knowing the limitations and advantages of your phone is important to know, just so as you move forward and create those films, you know what those advantages are. I think those outweigh the limitations all day long. In the next lesson, we are going to talk about the gear and apps that we use to make your footage look amazing. 3. Gear and Apps: So in this lesson, we are going to dive in the gear and apps that are essential for shooting good cinematic footage on your phone. Let's start with what app you need. The Moment-Pro Camera app is our go-to. Not only is it the app that our company makes that we use, but we give them feedback constantly. As filmmakers, what you want from your phone is full manual controls. So the team has done a great job putting that. It's like the dial on a regular DSLR or camera. You're having access to those controls now right on your phone. So the app has a lot of features packed right in and we'll go over a few of those that you need to know. Basically, when you open up the app, you have the bottom, which is essentially like a scroll dial. So it starts with shutter speed on this side. This is basically controlling your shutter speed just like you would on a camera. So you can go right to 148th, which we'll talk about why that's important in a bit. Go over to ISO, can change that, lower that individually. You have exposure comp, which the center one is basically an overall, it still adjust automatically. But you can say, "Hey, that looks a little too bright. I'm going to go exposure comp down negative one," so that it still exposes based on the elements, but it exposes negative one star. So it's a little darker. Right over from that is autofocus, which you can turn on manual focus. So if you're doing a lot of close up or macro shots, you want to make sure that focus is perfect. Then you'll go straight over and manually adjust, and it will lock it in. Every time you're on the app and you double tap, it resets. Let's say you're on manual focus here, if you see that little line under it, that means you're locked. If you double tap on that icon, it goes back to autofocus and resets it. That's the same with if you lock your shutter speed, you can double-tap and that also resets it. All the way to the far right you have white balance, and that's super important. So if you're in a room, phones are notorious for just shifting white balance pretty easily. So you might be pointing the camera enrolling on one scene. You move over and it looks way more green or pink or something, warm or cool. Basically, with locking your white balance, you can set it, hit record, and then that won't change throughout the frame, which is very nice to have for getting consistent footage. The most important thing with our app is to make sure you lock your settings. When you shoot in the native app, and what makes this so special is that it's constantly changing. Your ISO is changing, your shutter speed is changing, like Caleb, your white balance is changing. So by locking it, you're keeping it consistent. This might sound a little bit advanced and really just get in there, experiment with it, but there are some fundamentals which I'll walk through. On the top of the app right here, you'll see your resolution. So you're able to shoot all the way from low 720 p-rays, 1080, or up to 4K and indifferent frame rates. So 24 frames per second is that cinematic magic frame rate, which we're shooting all the time. You want your shutter speed double your frame rate. So the app has the ability to lock it in at 148th, which is nice. Then you can actually adjust your ISO, lower that down so you're getting a cleaner image. The reason you want your shutter speed to be double your frame rate is because of motion blur. So when you shoot the right shutter speed, it basically looks nice and smooth. When you shoot the wrong shutter speed, it looks choppy. So right now I want you to take your hand, I want you to wave it in front of your face. You'll notice that right there, there is some motion blur. That's because your eyes see similar to the 180 degree rule. If you were to do that in front of your camera at one over 8,000, you're going to see no motion blur, which just makes your footage look choppy and not as professional. So say you have the app downloaded and you're outside on a nice bright day and you want to shoot with 148th of a shutter speed. You're looking at it and you set it there and you're like, that's completely blown out because it's a bright image. You don't have access on a phone to control the aperture. In the app, you'll put it at 148th and you have to control that exposure somehow, which leads us into filters. So filters are like sunglasses for your phone, similar to how you would you wear sunglasses to block out light on a bright day. You're going to mount an ND filter over your phone lens in order to block out light and achieve that right shutter speed. We make a few different variations of this. This is a filter mount which goes over all of our lenses, anamorphic, telly, and so on. We also make a line of filters that mountain directly over your native lens. So if you want a really minimal setup, I'll let Caleb demonstrate, you can just mount that straight to your case and get that right shutter speed. If there's one thing that I want you to take away from this course it is to use a filter and shoot the correct shutter speed. That is the most sophisticated look, and that is what is going to make your footage look a ton better. One thing to note is if you use a filter and you shoot in the native camera app, all that's going to do is make the native camera app think to adjust the ISO, which is going to make your shot noisier. So in the Moment Pro Camera app, what you'll do is you'll put the filter on, adjust your shutter speed, and then you take the ISO and you can keep that low. If you don't lock in your settings and you put the filter over, your phone will automatically adjust and be like, why is it darker? It's just going to think, I need to crank up the exposure. So you'll want to adjust your manual settings, and then apply the filter, and then adjust, from there to get your perfect exposure. So the next bits of gear that we want to talk about are our lenses. At the most basic level, what they're doing is they're changing up your focal length. The first one is the anamorphic lens. This is probably our favorite as filmmakers. An anamorphic lens gives you the look that you see in the movie theaters. That wide aspect ratio, some flares, looks really fun. So lenses are just an accessory to change the focal length and help you tell that story better. Gimbals are a great piece of gear to use if you're shooting action and want that smooth buttery footage. Basically, you put your phone in it, powered on right now. All it's doing is balancing the shake from your hands and making your shots smooth. So what your hands if you were to walk with it, the phones have decent stabilization, but it's not perfect, and this just corrects that shake. What you'll want to do with a gimbal is actually try to get it mostly balanced before you turn it on. Because what that's doing is then the gimbal motor is working against your motions. Not also doing that, plus trying to balance itself. So you find this happy medium. This is the DJI Osmo Mobile 3, which is pretty good gimbal. It'll always go into this vertical orientation and then you double-click, boom. Another gimbal we also use a lot if we're going to use our phone with our lenses and a whole filter setup, this one's able to handle a little bit more weight. This is the Free Fly Movi. It has a counterweight on the back, which looks bulky. It's a little more intense, but gets you great results as well. So the next thing we want to talk about are tripods. These are super useful because one, you can set them up to get a nice static shot. You can also use these to vlog. Sits down like that, has a little button where you can adjust the head, put your phone on the top, works great. So the last piece of gear that we want to touch on are microphones. Microphones are great for enhancing the audio that's on your phone. Not necessarily important to have because phones actually have pretty good microphones built in, but if you're going to really plan on your videos being vlog heavy, dialog heavy, a microphone is a good investment to look into. Specifically because these are little shotgun mics. Meaning the direction, so if I'm behind it, it's not going to pick me up as well as turning that around and being in front of it. So there's background noise or you have a noisy street behind you, the direction of the mic helps a ton to cut out some of that noise, and the quality is just a little bit better. The mics that are built into the iPhone are pretty good. This is just taking it again to the next level. I will say sound design in post is also super important. We'll get into that later. But basically, if you start with good sound and you edit with good sound, sound is a huge part of a good edit. There's a lot of good gear out there that you can use to soup up your phone and make that footage look that much better. These are some of our favorites and all the links to those will be in the resources. 4. Shooting Your Footage: What is up everybody? Welcome to the lesson where we actually get started shooting. Right now we are battling some rain, but I think we're going to get some good shots. Yeah, we're here in the rain. We were going to skate at the skate park, but that isn't happening. So we're going to just try to find some cool puddles, some reflections, do some composition, show some gimbal movements. See what we can get given the elements, and that's the best part of film-making. So what we have here gear wise to shoot this little rainy, nice, beautiful scene here. We're going to throw on the gimbal. This is the free fly movi, we have an iPhone 11. This is our anamorphic lens because with the rain and everything, it just looks super cinematic. So this is our most cinematic looking lens. In our app it's not hard to use, and we have a little ND filter as well just because it's daylight out and being able to control that shutter speed, like we talked about earlier, is very helpful. So before we get started with Calo skating this beautiful road here, let's run through some settings. The first thing we have is our shutter speed locked. So right here, I'm basically just going to scroll that to 148th, which is as double our frame rate following the 180 degree rule. Next, I'm making sure my ISO is as low as possible to just keep the noise down. I'm going to have my focus at auto, and then I'm going to have my white balance, I've locked at 4800. That is because we typically like a cooler image. If you like warmer images, you can go higher, 4800 is the sweet spot for us. Right now we're going to try to shoot a little five shot sequence. It's always really important when you show up and you're shooting just to not get one shot. So think of this as a little mini story you're telling. Even if you're not going to use all the clips, it's just good to have those. Because you never want to get an edit and be like, "Shoot, I should have shot more." Right now we're going to get the first shot. It's going to be Caleb skating through frame. I'll have him start behind me, skate through frame and that'll be our initial action. Then after that, I'll probably shoot feet. Try to get a nice shot tracking on the side. You'll see me running funny, that's just because I'm trying to keep this as stable as possible so the gimbal doesn't have to do a ton of work. But yeah, basically we have it on a gimbal just so it's buttery smooth. All right, let's do it. All right, ready? Ready. Ready? All right. On you. So we have our first two shots, right now we are trying to plan our next three to four. I always think it's good to have a couple of experimental shots. So get the ones that you know you'll use, but then get a couple that are maybe a little weirder. You haven't seen as often, helps separate your edit a little more. So the reason I think experimental shots are important is just to help separate your edit and your video from another one. A lot of people have seen pushing skating. So just thinking of things that are cool that the environment has presented, like a puddle. Doing that shot where Caleb wants to get one of the trees as he passes by. That just adds production value and I think those experimental shots help do that. I think the fact that you're shooting on a phone, it's such a lightweight camera, a whole system that you can shoot. I want to shoot a top-down of me skating. It might not work in the edit. It might, probably will. Probably will. But the fact that it's a phone will make it light and easy. So this should be fun. Yeah. It would be fun to get Caleb falling. So maybe you try to do something and then you fall and then it's like, ha ha and the edit ends. Yeah, he wants me falling. We got the shot. That felt good. Because you did the pan and I wanted you looking. Yeah. So it's basically pan is him looking at the building. Showing another wide scene similar to that first shot. Yeah. Will give you one try to do it. No. You're going to give me four trials. All right cool. So two more shots. All right, I'm rolling. All right. Let's do one more. Okay. It's like the great filmmaker photographer lies one more. It's always 10 more. Okay, yeah. Perfect. So right now we are going to film the last shot of our sequence. I think it's really important to think through what that last shot is because you want there to be a reward for watching the video. It's also important to shoot a few different angles of this because by showing those various angles, you're going to show that it's important, and that this was the thing that you wanted to show in your video. Okay, so right now we're going to have Caleb walley, right? Well, I'll try. Yeah, he's going to try to walley and the payoff will either be him landing it, which most likely won't happen, or him falling, which will be funny. It's not even that cool of a trick, but it will end the sequence in a decent way. It's some sort of that's the end. We'll show a couple of angles. He skates off into the sunset. Yeah. The rain sunset. The rain set. All right let's do it. Rejection. So sometimes when you're out shooting, you need an alternate ending. So that's what we're going to do real quick. We're just going to pick a different shot, a little different trick to end the sequence and call it good. We're going to shoot two shots. The first we'll throw it in the 60, so it's a little slow mo, a little dramatic. The water splash. The water splash. There's a lot of action, so it's fun to slow it down and warrant slow mo. The last shot will be in real-time just because we did everything else in real time. So we'll have that 60 frames. It will be like this drama, and then we'll end in real-time. He'll skate off to go to work or whatever you're skating to do. Ice latte. Get an ice latte. Send it in. All right. Send it. Here we go. Just for the socks. I have no idea what that looked like. I closed my eyes, afraid to get splashed. So right now we're going to get another shot. I'm changing my angle. We might use both of these slow mo shots, I didn't love my first shot. It's worth trying again. Let's do it. I'm rolling. Yeah. So we just wrapped up shooting with the gimbal. We got a lot of movement, a lot of tracking shots, a lot of following Caleb skating, some push ins, some pull outs. Yeah, it went super well. When you're shooting with a gimbal, you just want to utilize the fact that it's stable and you can move around a lot with it. Yeah. If you are shooting a lot of action, kids running, dogs playing whatever, gimbal is your go-to tool for that. Now we're going to move on to shooting some static shots though, which means putting your phone into a tripod and basically just having a locked off shot. We're going to tell you why sometimes that is the best shot style and technique for a given circumstance. All right, so we are setting up a couple of static shots on the tripod here. Got the little tripod on top of the trash can with the street corner here. The reason I like to use the tripod shot is really for establishing location shots. So no movement, just letting the action in a shot speak for itself and you're able to dial in your composition, get all your settings perfect. Hit record and just let it roll for a bit. One thing that's cool about shooting on the tripod like this, really small is that you're able to pick off just shots really fast and really easy. Just set it down on a subject, frame it up how you like, and you can get these cool, quick cut little scenes of the city. I'll also say that it's super important to have some action in the frame. If you just have a shot with nothing moving, you can't really tell it's video. Just good to have some action in the frame. Then hit record. Yeah. That's cool in the cheetah. Yeah. Yeah, having motion in the shot when it's locked off is nice. So something in your frame is happening when your camera's completely still. So I think it's important when you are shooting a lot of static shots that you want to have a subject in mind. You don't just want to aimlessly compose. You want to have a focal point that you're focusing on. So here I have the stoplight in the left-hand side. I'm going to frame out the wire. We're finding something that looks cool here. So I think the coolest thing about a static shot, is when you have some shots with motion and then you throw in a static shot. The static shot is a place where you can breathe in the edit. If all you see is motion, it can become disorienting. A static shot parks you. A static shot just puts you in a place. The last technique with a tripod that I'll talk about is shooting time lapse and shooting a time lapse on your phone is super easy, but a tripod is a must have accessory for shooting a good time lapse because got to keep it still. Let the motion happen, and we're just shooting the time lapse in the native app or locking our settings. Which we showed you how to do that earlier and now just letting it roll. So that wraps up shooting with tripods. The one thing I just want to reiterate is that if you get a good composition in real time with some good action and a good subject. Some good lighting. Some good lighting on a tripod. In my opinion that is more cinematic than what you see with a run and gun on a gimbal. What you see in Hollywood is a lot of good tripod dolly shots. Yeah. That is how you achieve it. Tripod shots also work perfect if you're going to film yourself obviously doing something or for YouTube or anything like that. You're going to set this up and film yourself. So these are a must have little accessory. I like the small one, but you can get any size you want if you want to lug it around. So now that we have our footage, we're going to bring it back to the studio, open up the computers and show you how to get the footage from your phone onto the computer in the best possible way. 5. Transferring Your Footage: We are back from skating out in the rain and we are going to show you now how to get the footage that you shot on your phone onto your computer so you can start editing. There are three different ways that we do this. The first being AirDrop, the most seamless and the quickest, but sometimes can degrade your files when you are doing a ton of footage. The second being Image Capture, which is built in with Mac OS. It also works, but sometimes some cliffs don't transfer, time lapse is 4k-60, can get a little buggy. The third is an app called iMazing. It costs sum money, but that one works every time. These are just the three ways that we've used to get our footage off our phone and they were great. There's probably other software out there that you can get, but these are our go-to methods. I think when it comes down to what we use the most, I tend to lean toward AirDrop, just doing 10 clips at a time. Usually, I am not shooting 50 plus clips, so it's pretty seamless and pretty quick go from my phone to my computer. But Caleb. I'd say if I was shooting an entire edit, a whole YouTube video, and I had 40, 50 clips on my phone from that day. Obviously, like we're saying, there's no SD card. I'm not plugging that in. So I'll plug the phone and with the wire into the computer, and I'll use Image Capture or iMazing, the software Niles mentioned. So the first way we are going to get footage from our phone to our computer is AirDrop. If you are an iPhone user for a long time, you've done this before. So this is pretty simple. I'm going to hit Select and I'm going to drag my finger and select all the skating clips that we just shot in the rains with Caleb, nice work dude. He's gone pro next year. Then you're going to hit a little icon in the left, which is the universal share icon. Tap that, hit AirDrop, and then right here you're basically going to see some options for who to share with. Right now, we have AirDrop open to everyone on both the laptop and the phone. So I immediately popped up, which is Niles' MacBook Pro. Just tap on it, it'll say waiting, and you'll see something pop up on the other end. You just hit accept. Thirty two clips. Thirty two clips. So right now you see this bar of progress. A lot of times, I will start importing and then I'll go get some snack, or I don't know, go get my slots, pet my dog, do something because these clips are 4K, so they're a little bigger. Sometimes we shoot 1080 on our phones just to save this process a little bit. They'll go right to your downloads folder on a Mac. So that's where you'll found the clips after you AirDrop them. It's a little bit faster when your phone's hardwired to the computer. We're showing you this method first, but I personally would probably do this method with 10 clips or less. I do think that quality might go down. So we're just showing you this method. You can do it, and if you don't have a cord with you, it does work. Next method, you're going get out your handy dandy lightning cable to your iPhone and then whatever connector, USB or USB-C to your Mac, plug that in. So first, you want to actually unlock your phone to the lock screen so that your computer can recognize it, and then you'll go up to search for Image Capture. This is the built-in Mac OS software that you can use to actually just grab just files. So this will give you a list of all the files that are on your phone's camera roll. So from photos to video, you'll scroll down to the clips you want. These are all the skate clips here, ends here. If you hold shift and click, then you've maid your selection. You can then go over to the desktop, make a new folder. You can also do that on a hard drive as well. So if you're working with a hard drive, you just make the folder there Skater rain boy. Sorry. So we've made our folder and now you just drag and drop right into the folder, and the clips will import. The last method that we use to transfer footage from the phone to the computer is a software called iMazing. Cheesy, but it actually works really well. I think we just searched this out one time when image capture wasn't working. We had a hole project that the footage was all on the phone and we needed the best way to get this over. So I think it's like $50. But if you're looking for just a really nice Mac software to use consistently, and it's easy. You plug it in, you open up the software, you searched the camera, way better layout than Image Capture too, and it just displays all the files there for you. You can view them in the grid option or you can view them in a list option, and it's as simple as dragging and dropping into a folder. The reason that you would use this and pay the $50 and not use Image Capture is because Image Capture isn't working right. Sometimes with new OS updates, it has issues with how you are ingesting your footage. So iMazing is just a way to make sure that it happens in works every time. The thing I like about iMazing as well is that once you drag and drop your files, it's giving you a live progress preview, but also saying how many gigs of footage you shot, which is pretty cool. Between all these methods, what I've noticed is doing a comparison in the file size. Sometimes one method will give you a slightly larger file size on the same file, or a slightly smaller one. So AirDrop is sometimes a little bit more compressed. To the average person and viewing it on your phone screen, you can probably barely tell. But if you're looking to optimize the highest quality, I would go with the direct transfer method. So now that we have transferred all our footage and showed you those ways of how we do that, let's dive into how we edit. 6. Editing Your Footage: In this lesson, we're going to dive into how we edit. This is going to be our process on how we organize footage, how we import it, how we edit, and everything in-between. We're going to be cutting a little sizzle montage story, whatever it is of Caleb skating. So let's just dive right in. Kind of approaching it like we took those clips from yesterday, and making 15-second little social edit. Just how we actually would make something from that footage. All right, so first things first. Organizing your footage is very important and something I take very seriously. Your workflow is your happiness when it comes to editing video. So this one's pretty simple. We just have 30 clips or so. So I have it all in a folder called raw. When you import your footage into a folder, and you then import it into Premiere, you don't want to move that footage because basically Premiere is reading where it is in your hard drive. So right now we're on a desktop, we could be on a hard drive or whatever, and then I have a folder called liveworks. You can call it whatever you want. You can call it a project. I call it liveworks because's how I was taught way back when, and then I'm going to create a folder. I'll just call it project. I'll create a folder called MX, which stands for music, and then I'll create a folder called SFX, which would be for any sound design that we might do. Now I'm going to go into Premiere, make sure it's the most recent one Premiere 2020 CC. So right now I'm going to go into New Project, it's going to come up to this folder. I'm going to hit Browse, and I'm going to make sure I'm saving it where I want to save it, so I'll never have to move it again. So right now it's under skater rain boy iMazing. Usually wouldn't call it that. Usually I'd go day underscore title, and then so I'm going to put it in my project folder, title is skater boy Caleb. Then I'm going to get my scratch disk, and makes sure everything is just listed at same as project. Don't be overwhelmed by all these, just make sure everything is as same as project, and it does. All right, I'm going to hit Okay. It's going to open this beautiful Premiere window. Again open finder, find that raw folder, and just going to drag the whole folder in. All right, so now that the footage has been imported, you see right here it says raw, which is great. I'm going to create the exact same folder that I just made in my project on my desktop right here. So I almost did to call it liveworks, I'm going to create bin called SEQ, which stands for sequences. But basically this is called a timeline, and that is where you actually edit your footage. So I'll show you how to create a timeline, and then you will drag and drop your clips onto that timeline. So let's just start there. You're going to go to this little tab, new item, select, hit Sequence. Yeah, then you have a bunch of options here. There's a lot of different ways to make a sequence, but this is the way I do it. So now we have sequence name, we'll title this. You can title it main, you can title it story, you can title it the push, perfect, and then you go into settings. I'm going to change this to DSLR. It's just a basic timeline works for all kinds of footage, 1920 by 1080, keeping it in 1080, hit Okay. So now you are in your timeline ready to rock. That is one way to do it. But let's show to you another way. So the other way to actually make a sequence that's also super easy. Say you don't actually know what your settings are from your camera when you're creating your timeline, you can actually go right to your first clip, say that's the first one you want to use. Right-click on it and select New Sequence From Clip. That will take that clip, whatever the dimensions were or whatever the frameworks were, and actually make a timeline specific to that. So now Niles is actually going to go through this whole editing process, probably speed this up so you don't watch every cut and will create a little mini masterpiece. So typically, even though we don't have any music here, I sit there and I'm counting beats, because that's like how long your clip is going to be on screen. It's not final, it's just more of you're piercing that edit together mentally, and then we know what we have. We have about seven clips we're going to use, and this is our opening one, our establishing. So I have him right here. Make sure Tom is out of it. I'm going to leave a little bit of room. I just hit Command L, to unlink the footage in the audio. So then I can J cut it which just means, you have a little bit of audio leading in the clip, a little bit audio leading out. It helps the cut actually look better by sounding more fluent. Right now I'm basically working on this first cut. I just tried to match Caleb's foot as he's coming down. So you'll see here, you'll see his foot, it's coming down and then it's basically trying to match. I'm leaving a little bit. It's not perfect perfect, because you want it to be obvious that it matches. So you'll see here, boom, he pushes down, pushes down, and then you see there's good motion blur right there because we used the filter which I'm loving. The shoes look cool, good orange,. Good rain. Good rain, good leaves. We're just really scrubbing through on the left-hand side. Those are all the clips that we shot. So they're just setting there and we'll go through one at a time. They'll be imported into the project chronologically. So now we can just have fun playing around with the edit, looking through our experimental clips that we talked about. Right now, we're trying to match basically everything his feet are doing. You don't have to do that. That is like in an ideal world it all matches, and usually it doesn't. Right now I'm starting with the ideal, trying to match his feet, which are right here, and then try to match that curve which would be right there. But as you can see from this footage, that motion blur is all because we shot at that correct shutter speed, with the filter gives that nice. It actually would look slower. I was only pushing a pretty medium to slow speed, but it looks faster than I was really doing it because of the motion blur. So right now we have three clips. You've our intro establishing. It always good to start with something. Sometimes you can start tight, reveal a wide. Right now we're starting wide, give you a sense of place, and then we're cutting in, boom, he's cruising. [inaudible]. Editing in it of itself is an art, and I think that's what people do develop a visual style, because once you start to see the footage come together in its final form, and really what you can do, going in into your next shoot, you might actually shoot thinking like that, and I really think it helps you develop as a filmmaker. Skating like that. Yeah. Then we cut. So those are our clips right there, then boom,and then we get into our pay-off. Here we have this slow mo. Another fun tip that I like to use and Niles as well. If you're editing and you're like, my footage really doesn't look that good, maybe the lighting was bad or your phone settings were wrong and your ISO was grainy, just make it look even worse and then it's art. Crank up the grain when you're editing the colors, and just really embrace the super bad old-school look. Especially with skateboarding, you're going to want to pay close attention to the sound on how it flows in between the clips, because the sound is so prominent, if on a cut it sounds completely different, you can be thrown out of the edit. So use some cross fades, cross dissolves with the sounds if you need to. Usually you've finished sound designing at the end, I sound design while I do it. So I'll put in some cross fades, do a little experimentation in the beginning, and then all I go master the audio on the end. Right now, I'm going to go to a site called Musicbed and we are going to find some tracks. So typically when I'm looking for music, I'm thinking of something quirky, something eccentric, something unique, and weird. For this edit, the song is pretty important because you don't really know the whole story behind the edit. You don't know who this person is, where they're going, why they're skateboarding, where they are. You might guess it's New York, you might not. Might guess it's me. You might guess it's Caleb, you might know it's camera Caleb from Instagram, but yeah. So right now we're going to find a song. The song is pretty important. This is such a hard part of the process. It can be so fun, but it can be also grilling. We'll try to find the song pretty quickly here. Music is the ultimate mood setter for your video or for your film. So really spend some time looking at it. You can definitely use serious stuff to portray serious. You could also put serious music to a funny scene and it have that weird sense of humor to it. So it's just a whole another element and sense that you're figuring out so. Important workflow point. I have a song. I downloaded the song. It is in my downloads folder. I am not going to drag from my downloads folder. I'm not going to drag that song from downloads into my project because, if I were to take this project on another computer, then it would be offline because it wouldn't be referencing that song. So good workflow, please do this. Just copy the song, go into your music folder that you already made, paste it. Now you are free to drag into your project. Some of them can a music tab in liveworks, drag that bad boy in. There it is. Now I'm going to find, let's find that saucy 15 seconds, right? Quick pro-tip. Keep your computer at plugged in because editing programs will just kill your battery. All right, let's go back in. When you're first starting out film making, it's pretty tempting to find a song that has a beat and do your cuts on beat. Sometimes if that's intentional, it can look really good. But throughout entire edit, it can be almost like a little headache if you see every cut happening on every beat. So play around with where your cut is happening, after you've selected your song. So we have this beat. I like that, that one's a little faster. It's perfect. Let that role, let me hear the song go a little longer because I like hearing your laugh there. All right, so we found the song we like. We have edited to the beats. Some cuts are on beat, some aren't, and then we've frankenstein to the end a little bit and faded it out. So we basically have chopped in a downbeat. So as it come right here. So it starts to end the song, and then we fade it. You hear me laugh, kind of personable, and then it ends. So now that you have your edit on the timeline and you want to go ahead and make some final color tweaks. Like I mentioned before, shooting in default, the phones footage looks pretty good right out of the gate with the colors. But if you want to make it a slightly or stylized look, have a little bit of a vibe you look to it, we use a program in Premiere called FilmConvert Pro, and it's super easy. You just drag it on an Adjustment Layer, which Niles just made, and then you can make some small tweaks, and usually with phone footage, I think it's a little bit oversaturated. So I do turn that down to about 90 percent on saturation, and then I adjust one of the filters to my liking. Sometimes I add even a little bit of a green. Again, it's our personal preference at that point in how you like your colors. So pretty much the whole coloring process is just poking around the controls and seeing what you like. Premiere has a pretty good color window. If you go up here and hit Color, you can basically see on the right you have Lumetric Color, Basic Correction and Creative. Basically, if you go to Creative, you can start cycling through some of the lots that are just baked into Premiere, you can also upload your own. That is pretty advanced stuff. Right now lets focus on getting a look that you like, and film convert is great. It makes it look a little more nostalgic, so we go back there. I think it was pretty green before. Maybe it was the filter, maybe it was just a light, I'm not sure but we made it a little bluer, and took away some of the warmness too because its a winter day, so wanted it to feel a little cooler. All right, so we just rendered, let's watch this back. If you hit Control, and the low tilde you go full screen. Looks good. Water. There is our 17 second masterpiece. So just a short little edit. Again, editing takes time. You could spend a lot more time than we did just finessing everything, at some point, you got to call it export it, render it out, and yeah, then there's your edit. 7. Rendering and Exporting: Right now, I'm going to export this. I'm going to hit the plus sign, go in. I'm going to hit "I" for my inpoint, and then "O" for my outpoint. Then I'm going to drag that outpoint to the end of the song, which is right there. You can go up to "File" and hit "Export" or you can be cool and hit command M with your shortcuts and go to "Export". There's a bunch of different ways to export a bunch of different codecs. The one that works for everything is H.264, which is right here and then Match Source-High bitrate is going to match whatever that was in your timeline. That's great, it'll be the anamorphic look, which looks awesome, and then I'm going to scroll down. You can seen it's in 4K too, which is great. I'm going to scroll down and right here you're going to see Target Bitrate. This one is the only things I play with. Usually I'll bump it up to like 20. Basically, what it's doing, you'll see here the estimated file size. That when you go down, that file size drops, when you go up, the file size increases. So right now we'll just rock like 20, 25. It's all good. Another thing you can do in H.264 is go to the presets they have here and you can go YouTube 2160 4K, or Twitter, or whatever. So we can also click just the YouTube one, boom, it's set to 91 megabytes, which is a bigger file. I love that. We're going to hit "Export". There is a lot when it comes to editing, there's so many different ways you can do it. Different filters, different editing styles, different music. I think as you dive deeper into editing, you're going to discover your own voice and just get a lot better at it. 8. Final Thoughts: All right everybody. Thank you so much for watching our class. I hope it was educational insightful and also a little entertaining. We had a ton of fun in teaching this thing and yeah, I hope your filmmaking just gets better and better. Yeah, mobile filmmaking simplified, we walked through the techniques, the gear we use, the apps and file transferring and editing, lots of fun, lots to learn. So keep practicing, keeps shooting and thank you guys so much for watching our class. Make sure you post in the project gallery. That is how we are going to see your work. We'd love to check out what does make. Filmmaking is a collaborative process of getting feedback, sending it to people, sharing your work is a huge part of that. Make sure you check it out. Peace.