The Complete Cinematography & Videography Guide for 2024

1. Welcome to This Cinematography Class!: Hello Bonjour Ola and welcome to this course. My name is Julian Melinson and I'm going to be the instructor for this cinematic cinematography logging filming course. And we're going to be talking about how to make your videos look and sound amazing with these simple, straightforward techniques that we're going to be covering in this course. So let's get right into it. First up, the transformation that you're going to have by taking this course. If I do my job, you'll be able to create incredible looking and sounding videos with any camera in any situation. This level of content, these techniques that I'm talking about in this course are going to be for beginner to intermediate level students. If you're someone who's shot some things in the past and you're looking for really simple, clear techniques on how to upgrade your style. This is for you if you are a new beginner, novice, that has a phone, has a smart device, or has a DSLR or a wireless camera, and you want to start shooting videos and you don't know where to start. This is the perfect course for you as well. So let's get into a micro overview of the main steps that we're going to go through in this course to achieve the transformation and the new skill set that you're looking for. First up, we're going to dive into the camera settings. Okay, I'm really just going to cover the most essential manual settings for you to use on your smartphone or on your camera that will allow you to get the best looking video quality for the situation you're shooting in. Next, I'm going to be going into the most important techniques that you need to know to start shooting better looking videos. Next I'm going to be talking about audio and B role. So this is really important because a lot of videos I see from students don't have these two essential fundamental techniques really of how to capture the best sounding audio. And how to really upgrade your video style with having proper cutaway shots. So this we're going to also dive into. And finally, synthesizing all of these techniques to bring them together into one cohesive, final product that you will be able to share on your Instagram, on your Youtube channel, on Facebook, on whatever social media or online presence that you have, you'll be able to bring these techniques together. And so we just have a few housekeeping items to get to before really diving into the course content. First up, this is a one course of a multi course series. I did it on purpose this way, where each course is giving you a different type of information depending on what you're looking for. There's other courses on the editing process, there's other courses on the pre production and creativity process. So those are linked on my Instagram. Those are linked in the bonus final lecture of this course. You don't got to worry about it now. I'm just giving you a heads up. Get through this course first. But it's designed for all of these to build on top of each other. 2. Learning Exercise: Lighting and Shooting 101: So now that we've gotten kind of the course introduction and the housekeeping out of the way, I really wanted to start right away with doing a hands on learning exercise. So in this lecture, you're going to really be working side by side with me to discover the lighting in the environment that you're in. I'm going to pull out my phone and I'm going to do video of myself and you guys are going to follow along with that. And I really found that this is the best way, regardless of skill level, if you're a smartphone shooter, great. If you've been shooting for a while and you're comfortable with lighting, great as well. This is really the best way with the phone. It's going to give you an instant response instantaneously without having to look back at footage. At how angling yourself, how different light sources and all these things change the look and aesthetic of your image. So go ahead and get your phone ready and you're going to film yourself along with me on selfie mode. And you're going to shoot a before shot with the normal ambient lighting of yourself in your environment. And then you're going to shoot an aftershot with the new understandings and techniques that I'm going to walk you through in this learning lesson. Then you can export and share your before and afters with your fellow students to the Q and A section. If you don't feel like sharing these videos of your face in different lighting, it's totally fine. Instead of that, you can say hi to your fellow students and share what you're excited about learning or creating while going through this course. And so now let's hop into it. So what I'm going to do is flip over on my phone and I'm going to put the camera on myself. And we can see that while I'm talking, this is not a very good looking image. And the reason of that is because the background is blown out. The lighting on me is not very well balanced for this situation. The background is all white, there's no real contrast. It's a little bit better if I just simply, all I did was probably move my arm 12 " to my left. And now we have much better light coming directly from this light source and we have a much better background than the white. So there's just these little tips and tricks that we are doing with the more professional style and more professional equipment. But these things also apply to all the little Instagram, Tiktok, Facebook videos that you're doing. All this stuff you can use to upgrade that content that you're doing daily. So let's kind of walk around our space here. And we can already see that huge change of the quality of lighting. As I'm walking closer to this window, we can see a huge transition from standing in the middle of the room to now walking over to this light source. So as we can see, if I really want to do Iki lighting, where my whole face is lit, I'll face directly at the window. If I want more contrasted lighting, because I'm facing two windows here, actually. So it's a little bit more tricky. But if I want to make more contrasted lighting, I'm going to close this window to this side of my face. And now we can get more contrast lighting, but this is purely natural light just on my cell phone. So we can also see that the background is lower, is exposed a lot lower. So that's making me stand out more. But let's continue to kind of go around the house and choose and find what works and what doesn't work. You can see the dramatic change in what I look like when I just turn. I'm in the same exact place that I just was. But if I just turn 180 degrees, this is what this looks like compared to this. Okay. So now we're going to take a look where else is working. So here the light is. Okay. But I would say that the overall lighting is here, is pretty decent, but it's not giving a good pop, a good kind of glossiness. So let's walk over to this other window. You can see as I approach and get to this window, you can see my eye color, you can see the highlights on my face. And you can see that if I'm facing directly at the window versus as I turn, we're getting more shadows, right? So if this is what you're wanting, more of a serious look, more of a contrasted cinematic look. You want more shadows. If you want more of the tube, the whole face is lit. You want to face directly at the window. So now we've got a handle on that. The other thing I wanted to mention was the distance from the camera to the subject and the angle of view. If I put the camera here and I'm looking down to you as the subject, I'm looking down to you as the viewer. Hey, you're going to get some chin action. Some people, this works for some people, doesn't you have to be the decider of that. But it's a little bit of a weird dominance thing where I'm speaking down to you. As soon as you come to eye level, you see there's more of a world on the same page. And this is what a lot of people do as well, the kind of looking down. As long as you don't do it too much, that can be a little bit weird angle for most people. But you can do it a little bit above eye level. It makes the features on the face look a little bit more favorable depending on your face type. But I do want to mention that, especially in the selfie video mode, this is a very wide angle lens on the front of most smartphones. Now the closer I get here, the more it's going to accentuate. What's closer to the lens is going to look bigger. And what's further from the lens is going to look a lot smaller depending on your face type you want to find. Now, the proportions on my face and my body are very equal as soon as I start doing this. Now you can see my forehead looks really big, in proportion to the rest of my face. If I do this, my chin is looking really big. You want to just keep it in mind that when you're shooting with a wide angle lens, whether it's a smart phone or smart phone, or whether it's a lens on your DSLR or mirrorless camera, you want to know that it's going to be less flattering the closer it is to your face. And it's going to be more flattering when there's a pretty decent amount of distance. I'm holding this about 2.5 feet away from the face. The angle and the distance makes a very large difference in your overall look and appearance. So we're looking at lighting, we're looking at background, we're looking at distance, and we're looking at angle to the face. That should give you guys plenty of stuff to work with when shooting. From here on out, your videos should look a lot better, a lot more clean, and a lot more highly produced. 3. On Set: Set Up and Choosing How to Shoot: All right, and so it's time to hop right into the deep end. You're going to be not seeing my face too much in this section because I wanted to maximize your time with this onset experience. So don't worry, we're going to have plenty of face time later in the course. So what we're going to do is actually open up this door. But this is really a real life onset experience for you. So this is going to be a crash course and you know a preview of what we're going to be learning throughout this course. So if you're hearing things in these next few learning lessons that you don't know yet or you don't understand or it's terminology you've never heard, don't worry. The biggest thing here is me showing you why you would do certain things when making a video. Then we're going to get into the how throughout the course. So this behind the scenes set of learning lessons is just going to help you get the gears turning and kind of open your mind to different video creating possibilities. And so now we're going to time travel to me and Louise right before our shoot. So what is up guys? And I saw that up guys. We're here today and for this portion of the corpse, my friend Luis is going to be taking us through some cinematography principles. So we're all on set today in downtown Los Angeles, and we're going to be taking a look at lens choice, camera movement, and some other cinematography principles that we haven't learned yet in the course. So Luis is a good friend of mine. We've shot together for years and we're going to have a fun shoot today and it's going to be, we're going to try all different types of cameras, you know, So I'm glad you're here so I can show you what we're all about. You know, it's gonna be fun bottom and there it is. So I'll put a montage of Louis's Instagram, his website, and his content so you guys can get an idea of the kind of content that he creates. So with that said, I will see you guys in the next learning lesson. Perfect. Now let's dive into this. So the first thing I want to talk about is knowing your camera capabilities. Whether you're shooting on a phone or a La, or a mirrorless camera. You want to know the dynamic range, You want to know the frames per second that your camera will shoot. You want to know the body stabilization that it has. These are all going to really dictate what you're going to do and how you're going to do it. Because Louis is really familiar with his camera. He knows he can get away with doing a lot of handheld shots during the shoot because of the embodied image stabilization that his camera has. He also has a really good idea of the type of lighting that's going to work the best for his camera. And what's slowing down? His 60 frames per second footage in post production is going to look like for the final product. So I really want you to hold on to that and keep in mind that the more comfortable you become with your equipment, the easier it's going to be to translate your idea through your camera into creating the final product that expresses your original idea. So let's say that you have your location picked out. In this case, our main light source is 5,500 Kelvin, which is going to be a nice natural looking light because sunlight is 4500-6500 And let's say you've planned and blocked out your camera shots and your character movement, and you've chosen your lens, You have everything ready to go, and you're ready to start shooting. Now what do you do? So we're going to really start with the basics here. The most basic of shots that you have to choose from is simply a tripod shot. And you can see in the situation that we are deciding to shoot, this onset is when there's not a whole lot of action going on and we want the viewer to focus on our character. Now in the next shot, when we chose to switch to a gimbal, you can see same character, same outfit, same background, completely different feeling because we're moving our subject and we're moving with our subject. So you can see the comparison here. Tripod shot is very static. Gimboshot has a lot more energy. And then we go to a handheld shot. This is going to have a less polished and less refined feeling. And Louise is deciding to use it for this shot because it really kind of frees you up from the restrictions that a tripod may have and the flexibility that a gimble won't have. When you're shooting something handheld, you really have a lot of options of where you can point the camera, the height that you place your camera up and down, and the amount that you can move from side to side. Now it's a trade off, because a handheld shot is going to offer a lot less stability than a tripod or a gimbal, but you're going to give up that stability for a lot of flexibility and options during your shoot. So right off the bat, that gives you some insight for when you're ready to shoot and you have no idea how you want to utilize your camera. Asking yourself this question is a great way to start. Will my scene or video benefit the most from a tripod shot, a gimble shot, or a handheld shot in your current scenario? 4. On Set: Camera Movement and Essential Cinematography: So now let's move to the next fundamental. Now when we're shooting, let's talk about why we would decide to do camera movement versus zooming with the camera. If we zoom with the lens on our camera or our phone, we are magnifying what is at the center of the image and enlarging it. If we move our camera, we are physically bringing the camera closer to what's in front of it. Now the plus of this is that it creates a shift in the background and creates a much more dynamic looking image. Because there's a conversation happening with the camera, the subject, and the background. And that conversation you can only get from physically moving the camera. You can't get that from digitally or manually zooming in on your shot. So we can see a side by side comparison here of what a wide and static shot looks like versus a close up with movement. So simply put, the camera and the lens is what shows your viewers what to look at. But the techniques that you're going to learn, just like camera movement, are what tells the viewer how to feel about what they're looking at. So let's dive into some more of Louis's decisions on how to use those techniques. If we get back to our main light source that we're using for this very first set up, the coloring of this light is the same temperature as daylight. This gives our image a very natural and realistic feeling. Now, if we were to change our temperature to a much colder light, you can see we haven't changed any of our other techniques. But just by simply changing the color temperature, we've changed the entire feeling of our image. Now something else that changes the feeling of your image is the lens choice. Now here Luis is deciding to use a sigma 18 to 35 millimeter, 1.8 And if you don't understand these terms yet, don't worry. I promise we're going to dive deeply into this information. So Louise is deciding to shoot a wide shot. Here we have a large depth of field, meaning a lot of our image is going to be in focus. The foreground in the background is going to remain relatively at the same level of sharpness. This is great for wide shots. This is great for when you want you or your subject to be in focus and you want the background to be in focus. For the next shot, Louis decided to switch over to the 7,200 millimeter, 2.8 This is a much more telephoto lens compared to a wide angle. So he's going for a much more shallow depth of field and getting zoomed way in so we can pick up on details of our subject rather than information in the background. So we're deciding to show detail of our character, her clothes and the expression that she has versus her in the surroundings that she's in. You can make that same decision by deciding what is an important part of the story that you're telling. Using different lens choices, an excellent way to better tell that story. And here we're moving to our next set up. Louise has a little bit more of a softer, more diffused lighting source for this location, and we're adding a little bit of fog to create more atmosphere. This is perfect to add another layer of texture and depth to what's in front of the camera. And now Louise is deciding to do a pushing shot, which is making you focus in on the character. As we're moving the camera closer. It's really the same exact thing as a microphone. If I move away from the microphone, it's a completely different feeling compared to me moving closer to the microphone. Visuals work in the same exact way, and we're using this situation to really maximize the amount of shots that we can get. Now that we moved up close to the character, now Louis is deciding to continue to record, but to move away from the character to gather even more coverage. You can really feel the difference here of moving into our scene versus leaving or doing a pull out and moving out of a scene. The trick here is really to, as you move forward as a video creator, think of your shots as having a beginning, middle, and an end. If you're doing a push into something that's moving into something, starting something, beginning a shot. If you have maybe a tripod shot or you're doing a tracking shot, that could feel like a middle shot. If you decided to do a pull out shot, that could really be your ending or concluding shot of your scene or video. That is our first two set ups for this shot. 5. On Set: Lens Choice and Framing: Now let's talk lenses. Focal length and lens choice is really something that we dive into into this course to really make your talking video. Interview videos and any other kind of videos really look a lot more professional. So one of the first questions you might have when shooting is whether you should use a zoom lens or prime lens. That's a great question because there are a few key benefits and drawbacks to each type of lens. If we start off here with the prime 50 millimeter, 1.4 we can see is a very shallow depth of field. Our subject is razor sharp and the background is very blurry. The downside to this is that there's no zoom function. You can't move from 50 mill to 70 mill. You have to actually physically move your body and your camera closer and further to what you're shooting. Now the tradeoff is that you're giving away that ability to get multiple shot types with one lens. For the great looking, shallow depth of field, which looks really cinematic and creates kind of a one pointed focus. Whatever is in focus on camera the viewer's eye fixates on. And whatever is out of focus with the prime lens kind of falls off into the background. And this really just allows for you to also get a much larger maximum aperture, which lets more light into the lens and allows for you to shoot in different scenarios with much lower available light. Now when Louis switches over to his zoom lens, now we're shooting on at 2041 oh five, at 4.0 So without having to move, we can get a wide shot. We can get a close up, we can get a medium shot all very quickly and easily. So we're getting multiple focal lengths and multiple different framings with one single lens. With this 24 mill at 4.0 and this 50 mill at 1.4 you can see a huge difference with the 50 mill. And we see the subject very sharp. We see a very cinematic looking image of our subject on the 24 Mill. It feels much more of a behind the scenes, less produced, less professional shot because so much of the frame is in focus. But as I'm shooting the behind the scenes here, I can very quickly shoot a wide shot, zoom in and shoot a close up of just the camera. And easily choose different types of framing. Now at this next set up, Louis is deciding to throw on the 17, 40 millimeter, 4.0 It's a super wide angle lens that he's strategically chose for this very dramatic setting where we have the subject walking through this large doorway. And we really get a feel for the scale and size of what's in our image compared to the 24, 70 that I'm shooting in on. It's not nearly as dramatic and we're seeing a lot more of the majority of the image in focus, so we're clearly seeing the subject and where she is in the location. So the takeaway here is that as a video creator, you're using your tools to change the way that the viewer is feeling. And you don't need a whole lot of lenses. If you have maybe two lenses even on smartphones, and they now have a wide angle function and a telephoto function. You can mix and use all of these different techniques together to create something that feels more professional, or adventurous, or action oriented. So now I want to touch on framing. If you've noticed, for pretty much all of these shots, we're framing the subject's eyes on the upper third of the screen. This technique is known as the rule of thirds. There's these imaginary intersecting lines that intersect at four different points on your screen. Now if you place important parts of your image on those intersecting lines, it's a pretty good chance that you're going to get a good looking, aesthetically pleasing image. This is a great guideline and a framework to follow as a video creator. But as we're going to learn in this course, we want to learn these rules so that we can use them properly, but then also be able to consciously break them for a desired effect. 6. On Set: Make Better Edits with Video Coverage: We've been on set for this high fashion magazine shoot, learning different techniques and really getting a glimpse at what we're going to be diving into in this course. Now I want to talk about one of the most important parts of creating a video, which is getting coverage. These techniques that we've touched on help you to get shots looking a certain way, but really getting multiple angles. Shooting the same action in multiple different ways and getting as many usable shots as possible is key to having enough ingredients to work with when you get to the post production phase. So let's take a look at what the shots Louise has shot so far would look like in a montage. Po, po, po. Cool. So all of these shots, what makes them unique is they're using the fundamentals from this course for what we were shooting specifically. It's a short, entertaining and exciting fashion magazine video. So if everything was on a tripod with no movement, it would be a pretty boring video. But what Louise decided to do was to use the clothing and the character as the main focal point with dynamic lighting and an interesting background, and create excitement and action through the camera movement. Some of the shots here are very traditional, framed on the thirds and some of the other shots are very non traditional. That creates unique imagery that stands out. So the goal here, like I mentioned, is really to enhance what's in front of the camera. If you're shooting a talking shot on an iphone with a tripod, and it's just you standing in front of the camera, what kind of lighting and background can you use to make that more uniquely yours? If you're shooting a high end fashion video, what kind of camera movement and framing can you use to make your average looking shots really stand out? Even like choosing your background properly, it can be just as important as the subject or the main focus of your image because it's also changing the way that we perceive what's on camera. Two different shots, same subject and outfit, same movement, different backgrounds, different experience when we're using these things. We're making sure to shoot multiple takes and multiple angles. This is going to help you carve your story later on in the editing process. The more coverage you have, the more of a story you can tell. Things that are important for this kind of example that Louise is doing is creating a lead in shot with movement. You see, we're not really framing anything on the third. There's no special rules that we're following here, but we're moving the subject into frame and this gives us kind of a cool intro into a shot which really makes it stand out. It's also giving us more to work with in our edit. Little things like this really add more options for us later on and allow those extra little moments that you have recorded to create a more dynamic video. And now we're tracking with our subject. We're moving with our subject and this is something I'm really excited to get into, which is effectively using camera movement. That wraps it up for our mini onset crash course experience. Again, I wanted this to be a really cool way to get the ball rolling, give you a real life look at some key techniques that you're going to walk away with as you progress through this course. 7. Get the Most Out of Your Video Settings Overview: The first thing up is maximizing your video settings. Before we get into moving the camera, setting up lighting, how to get audio, we're going to get into how to properly use your settings. This is for people who aren't very familiar with the basic functions of the controls that you can use for the manual settings on your camera. If you are someone who's very comfortable with shooting and you want to get directly into the techniques, you can skip this part of the chapter and get directly into those techniques if you want to refresher or you want to get a little bit more clarity on how to use the manual settings on your camera, this is a perfect place for you to start. So let's get into it. If you want to do these settings along with me, I'm going to run through these settings on my phone and my camera. So you'll be able to pull out your camera if you'd like. But before I run through those settings individually, I'm going to go over an overview of what we're going to talk about more in detail. First, your phone or your camera uses these main attributes and variables basically to create an overall image. The first term that we're going to talk about is exposure, which is the overall brightness of your image. And the exposure is controlled by a few fundamental characteristics and controls on your camera. The first is the ISO. This boosts the overall sensitivity on the sensor to the light coming into the camera. So I'm sure you're relatively familiar with that. The higher the ISO, the brighter the image. But you're boosting the signal on the sensor, which can create distortion. You'll see it as the grainy noise. It's not necessarily grain, it's called camera noise. Grain is something slightly different. That's with film cameras. Noise There are all those little dots and things that don't give it that really clean, kind of polished look. It's more of an older style, a bunch of dots look that's from the ISO and we're going to dive more into that. Next up is your shutter speed. This is the amount of time that each frame is exposed to light. Okay? The lower the shutter speed, the longer each frame is exposed to light. We're going to get more into that. Next up is the latitude, okay? This is something not a lot of people talk about. Latitude is the amount of darkness and brightness that a censor can expose for. So there's darkness in this image right here. This black bookcase is probably the darkest part of the image. And probably the brightest part of the image is one of these lights in the background or this light, right? That light, the latitude is the camera's ability to expose for the darkest part of the frame without it being completely black, and the brightest part of the frame without it being completely bright or white. Okay, It's its ability to hold the low and the high, but expose and have information there. What happens with a lot of cameras? The cheaper the camera, the less the latitude, the more the dark part of the frame is just dark and the bright is just bright. But I'm getting too into detail right now, we're going to get into it later. The next up is the picture profile. This is basically the camera color grading that your camera is allowed or able to put on top of your footage. Okay, that's kind of the brief overview. It's kind of like an in color correcting color grading process. It can be more blue and sharp, it can be less contrasty and warm. This is something we'll get into. Next up is the white balance. This is the overall value that your camera assigns to the color white or yeah, the value of white. The warmer the white balance, the warmer the image, the cooler the white balance, the colder the image. And we'll get into the terminology. Next up is the aperture. This is the amount of light let in through the opening of the lens right right now, this camera is shooting at a 2.8, which is a relatively open aperture. That means the opening of the lens is larger. If I was shooting at something like in F 16, this room would be very dark. You wouldn't be able to see me. And we'll explain why. Next up is the focal length. This is the millimeter number that is on the name of the lens. So the lens that I'm shooting on right now is a 16, 35 millimeter and it's set at about 22 millimeters, so that's a relatively wide angle of view. The lower the millimeter, the wider the angle, The higher the millimeter, let's say a 200 millimeter, the more telephoto and the more, that's more of a telescope. You can see further and we'll explain why and when to use those. Finally, we have frame rate. This is the amount of frames that your camera is recording per second. Right now, we're shooting at 24 frames a second because that has a specific aesthetic. There's also 30 frames, 60 frames, 120 frames, 240 frames. We'll get in all those things, but I just wanted to briefly overview what these things were, and then we're going to dive into it. 8. Tips for Smartphone Shooters: And so for smartphone shooters, it's good to know that the phone, you know, default setting is going to be on auto, which means it's going to be choosing all these parameters for you. In some scenarios that's okay, you'll be totally fine. In a lot of scenarios, you'll want to be using an app of some kind that will let you adjust these parameters as if it was a DSLR or mirrorless camera. My favorite app to use, I have an iphone. It's called Pro Movie. It's completely free. This app is amazing. It allows for you to shoot at higher resolutions, higher bit rates, which is just basically the amount of information that the camera is recording. The higher the bit rate, the better the quality overall. So I highly recommend shooting something with Pro Movie. I don't know about Androids and the other kind of apps, but I'm sure that you guys are familiar with some of them. You can just go onto the app store and choose or search a pro recording app for your phone. Okay. If you have any favorites and you want to share it in the Q and A section with some of your students, that would be much appreciated. Go ahead and hop into the Q and A section, and if you already have a video recording app that you use for your phone, please share it. And finally, I'm going to be demonstrating the settings, doing a screen capture on my phone, which is linked to my camera. So it's going to be the same type of settings that you're going to have on your camera or phone. It's just probably going to look a little bit different. But regardless, if it's a DSLR, mirrorless, or phone, you'll have to look for the settings and wherever matches for the device that you're using. But that is it for our overview. In the next lecture, we're going to drop into ISO shutter speed and exposure. So, I'll see you guys in the next lecture. 9. Nail Your Exposure and ISO Levels: All right. You guys excited? You ready? Ready to go? Ready to do this? Okay. I was a fly. Sorry about that. Okay. So first off, let's start with the question, okay? Which of these images do you prefer? Image number one or image number two? Now, I can't hear you, but I would assume that you would choose image number one. Do you know why that is? Uh huh. Uh huh. Yes, exactly. Because the exposure right the viewer's eye. And with that, I will try not to get too theoretical here because this is not that type of course, I have other courses on that, but I do really get excited about this part. The viewer's eye is always going to be drawn to the most well exposed part of the frame, right? You're looking at me right now, because the exposure on my face is at a level that is pleasing or proper to what the eye wants to look at. If you try looking directly at the sun, it's like it hurts. And your eyes want to look away. If you're somewhere and it's really dark and it's nighttime and you're looking, you can't see, it's really uncomfortable because your eyes can't perceive what is there. So one of the very first techniques or understandings for creating our amazing looking and feeling videos is really understanding the importance of exposure. And how that's changing the way that our audience is really feeling about our imagery. And so the main way that we really dive into exposure, which is exposure exposure, AKA the overall brightness value of our image, is through ISO, shutter speed and aperture. Now, we always want to start with having a well exposed frame, because this creates a pleasing image before we get into framing and before we get into composition, and before we get into choosing our location and what we want to look like at all these things, we have to really nail our exposure first, right? Like I mentioned, the viewer's eye is going to gravitate towards that well exposed part of the frame. If the opposite occurs and you're image is not properly exposed, let's say that I'm too bright in this image and that the background is well exposed, right? You know, actually let's see. So now we have a completely different looking image, right? All I did was change the level of exposure in the background and now it's throwing off the entire balance of the image. So really keeping this in mind that we want to nail the exposure in our camera using these values that we're going to talk about. But also keeping in mind and what not most people talk about is really getting and choosing our environment that's going to have a proper exposure, right? Because it's going to make a really big difference for image. So let's turn off the slide so we can get back. Oh, so the first thing that we're talking about with boosting or changing our exposure is our ISO, and that's changing the sensitivity of our light to our camera. And this is really good for low light situations. But like I mentioned, it creates that digital noise in the image. And it's kind of like boosting your sound. You know, you've seen your sound levels in your car and your editing software. Once it starts getting to that red, it starts to get a distorted sound. That's the same kind of boosting that our camera or our phone does to get more light, not from the surroundings, but to boost the light that's hitting the sensor. This kind of can create a distortion. So it's not something we want to lead with, but it can be used to make up for not enough light in our scene. So what I'm going to do, so what I'm going to do, wow, is I'm going to take my phone, which is attached to you guys, and I'm going to start a screen recording. Okay. So what I'm going to do is create a scenario where I don't really have enough light for my camera, so I'm going to kind of work backwards here. And since I already have my camera set up, I'm going to change my settings and then build from scratch with you guys. Even though my image is well exposed for right now, what I'm going to do is change the settings so it's not well exposed. So I'm going to make my aperture higher, which is going to darken my image. And now we're going to focus on this ISO function. So as you can see, we have a really dark image, right? If I boost the ISO, I'm bringing in more light into the camera. This is a very extreme scenario. But you can see that downside of that is that it's like boosting sound in your editing software, in your car where it starts red lining and distorting that distortion is called digital noise, which gets those little dots that we talked about because the original sound is being amplified, it creates these distortions. But like I said, it's perfect to make up for lack of light in your scene. 10. Shutter Speed Fundamentals: Next after ISO for how we adjust the exposure is our shutter speed, okay? And I have a cow because I have a funny way of explaining it, because I think shutter speed is a little bit harder of a principle to understand. But I want to really give you guys an example that will help you always remember it. The basis is the slower our shutter speed generally you'll see it one 50th of a second, 100th of a second, 200th of a second. The slower it is, the more blurry our image is going to be in terms of motion, not in terms of sharpness or blurriness when it comes to the quality of your lens. That's a different kind of sharpness that's picking up on how crisp certain parts of the images are without movement. Shutter speed is adjusting the blurriness of movement and of brightness of the image. Okay, so if we take this cow example, let's imagine that you have barn doors on a barn and you have cows. And these cows in this scenario will be photons of light. All the light in this scenario that's hitting the sensor of the lens. The aperture is going to be adjusting how wide the opening is on the lens. Okay? The wider the aperture, the more light the more cows are going to be able to get into that barn and fill that barn. And the shutter speed is how quickly those barn doors are opening and closing. The shutter is literally opening and closing inside your camera. Unless it's a mirrorless camera, it's slightly different, but there's still ways to adjust for the shutter speed by they do it electronically. But that opening and closing is literally happening in your camera to adjust how much light, for how long, is hitting that sensor. So a faster shutter speed is going like this. There's not too many cows, not too much light being able to expose that frame. If it's going like this, you're going to have a lot of light photon cows getting into your sensor and brightening your image, right? The higher the number, the less cows getting into the camera, the less bright the image. The lower the number, the slower it's opening and closing. The more those cows Can you stricken? The more those cows can come in. But the more blurry movement is going to be in your image. And I'll demonstrate this with my camera so you guys can see. But a good rule of thumb is if you're doing something that's action oriented, 100th of a second and above is going to give you crisp movement with motion 100th, and below is going to give you a much more softer look with motion blur. Now you want your shutter speed to really double your frame rate. All feature films use this kind of golden rule to mimic the natural motion blur that our eyes have. Every time we're doing that, we're naturally creating a more, what we call a cinematic image. Because the closer we mimic the eye with depth of field and with motion blur, just the better if image looks and the way that feature films have learned how to do that, and it's kind of industry standard, that if you start doing it with your camera, you'll create that kind of cool, soft looking cinematic look is doubling your shutter speed. It doubles the frame rate that you're shooting at. So if you're shooting at 24 frames a second, ideally your shutter speed is anywhere from 50 to a 60th of a second, okay? And if your frame rate is shooting at 60 frames per second, and we'll get into frame rates, so don't worry, you want your shutter speed to be around 120th for a similar natural looking motion blur. Okay, all feature films use this guideline and this creates a motion blur that's aesthetically pleasing with the information that we just covered. Here's an example of different shutter speeds. Now we have three different images here of the same exact object that shot at different shutter speeds. Now, can you guess what this image here on the farthest left, what shutter speed that is? Would that be a high or low shutter speed? Okay. Yes, it would be a high shutter speed. So this was shot at 150th of a second. You see how it's not capturing any blur because the opening and closing of the lens is so fast that when it exposed the image, it captured the moment so quickly that there was no motion blur. Now, something in the middle. This is one 30th of a second and you can see a slight blur because in that one 30th of a second, and the camera really is counting one 30th of a second, that pinwheel moved that amount of time in that short amount of one 30th in a second. If I go poop, and that's one 500th of a second, the pinwheel thing is not going to be able to move very far before it gets exposed to. I think now that's probably starting to make sense. And for this last one, obviously this is a very slow shutter speed. This is one fourth of a second. So now I'm going to demonstrate on my camera what that looks like. 11. Learning Exercise: Hands On with Shutter Sped: Perfect. So now you can see me here, or you can see me there. You can see me here, or you can see me there. So if we have, I'm going to kind of change all the settings around here so that we're working from scratch. Okay, so now we have our image and you can see it's not very well exposed for you can see the brighter parts of the image, which are these lights in the background, but I am quite dark. If we start with our ISO here, we're going to start boosting up the brightness, right? So we can kind see there that at about 800 this is a decently exposed image, right? If we went really high, now we're over exposed and you can probably see grain in the dark areas of the frame. Okay, So let's bring it back down to, let's say 800. Okay? And now let's look at the motion blur from our shutter speed. You can see the blur in my hand, right? If we move that shutter speed to, say, a 200 of a second, you see that the image is a lot darker. But you can see more of a strobe where each frame that's getting exposed is very crisp. It creates this hyper realistic look versus here, right, there's a lagginess. Okay. If we use our golden rule that I just mentioned to create our most cinematic looking softness, the right amount of motion blur is going to be one 50th because I'm recording it 24 frames a second. But now that I moved my shutter speed from originally it was here, actually, I think originally it was here to what would look to have the right amount of motion and now we're too dark. Okay. What I'm going to do is boost the ISO so that the image is looking well exposed, and that looks pretty good. One thing I haven't mentioned yet, and it's in a different lecture, but I'll just briefly touch on now, is the aperture. This is the opening and closing of the lens. So if we have our aperture set to 2.8, which is the widest aperture on this lens, you're going to see a blurring in what is behind me and what's in front of me. So this is going to be slightly out of focus. And what's behind me is going to be slightly out of focus. If I turn up that aperture, it's going to close the opening on the lens, not letting in as many cows, right, as you can see. But if I brighten up the image, okay, you're going to see that everything is a lot more in focus, right? The before and after, you'll see a very clear difference. Personally, I like to shoot at a wider aperture because it creates more of that depth of field. Which means what's in focus is very sharp. What's just before or what's just behind, what's in focus falls out of focus. Let me get the exposure right. Okay, but we're going to get more into aperture. 12. Synthesizing Your Frame Rate, ISO, and Shutter Speed: That should give you an overall good understanding of those main functions for your camera to really set up the scene that you want. Ideally you're, you're setting your shutter speed to a 50th of a second. If you're shooting at 24 frames per second, the apps on your phone will let you change those manual settings of the frame rate that you're shooting for, Talking videos, for logs, for anything that you're not shooting, cutaway shots, of, which we'll get into when it's someone talking, you pretty much always want to be shooting 24 frames a second. That gives it a very natural aesthetic and really pleasing looking shot. If you're shooting above that, like 60 frames a second, that's a lot better for slowing that stuff down and doing slow motion. That doesn't look good for talking shots. So the main takeaway here is that for your talking scenes, in your logs, when you're shooting, when you're talking to the camera, or when you're interviewing someone else who's talking to the camera. You want to have your frame rate set at 24 frames a second. You want to have your shutter speed doubling that, which is going to be one 50th. It can be one 60th, okay? You want to have your ISO as low as possible, because the higher the ISO, the more it's going to add the noise into the image. But you use the ISO to boost what you're not getting enough of light in your scenario when you have your other parameters set to that more cinematic looking standard. And then you're going to use your aperture to adjust how much you want the background or foreground to be out of focus. So hopefully that makes sense. If you have any more questions about this portion of exposure, feel free to hop into the QNA and ask if you have no questions. I will see you in the next lecture. 13. Video Quiz: Understand Your Camera Latitude and Dynamic Range: Alrighty, and so next up is latitude. Picture profile and white balance. And again, like these are just really, how do I say brief understandings or fundamental understandings so that we're all speaking the same language. And that when we get into the actual filming process, you know exactly what we're talking about. So latitude, right, the amount of darkness and brightness your sensor can expose for. Okay? It's the amount of information that can be picked up in the bright and dark areas of the image. The cheaper cameras have a lower latitude, while more expensive cameras have a higher amount of latitude. This is important to know and the reason I bring it up is because you want to know how much you can push your camera in different scenarios, Whether you're standing by a window to get lighting in on your face or your outdoors and it's bright in the background. You want to have a general idea of how to use your tool, which is your phone or your camera. So that when you're creating and wielding that tool, you know its exact capabilities. You know that if you push it too much in this really bright scenario, that image that you're going to be stuck with is it's not going to look very good. So getting an idea of what latitude is and how it works is really important. So let me ask which one of these images has a better latitude, camera number one, or camera number two? Now, don't pay attention to the coloring or the tone, or the white balance or anything like that. What we're looking for is let's look at the dark area where, like the wooden poles are going from the dock into the water. You see on the left image where you can't really see a whole lot. And then on the right image, you can see the difference in the shadows. The wooden pole, the boats that are underneath those images of the frame. In the bright images of the frame, if we look at the boat that's very bright on the image on the left, it's blown out. But on the image on the right, we can really see the definition and the information that's still being picked up. You can see it along the water as well. So the answer to the question is that yes, the camera on the right has a better latitude. Okay. Coloring aside, that's not what we're paying attention to here, but it's just the amount of information that you can be exposed for, the background behind you can be exposed for. It's really a big part of what you're paying for when you do buy a camera, is the amount of latitude, The amount of strength that the sensor has to expose for these two contrasted parts of the image. So I mentioned it because it's just, it's an important understanding to have and really get a feel for how much you can push your camera in dark and bright scenarios. 14. Hands On: Picture Profile and My Personal Settings: Next up is the picture profile. This is the in camera stylizing that's put on top of your footage. Okay. It's your camera adjusting the overall sharpness, contrast saturation, and white balance. The sharpness is how much post processing, I don't know any other word besides sharpness used. But kind of the clarity that your camera can add to how sharp parts of the image feel. The contrast is the amount of difference between the darkest and the brightest part of the frame. The more contrasty, the more punchy and the more dark the darks are, the more the brights are. The saturation is how much the tones and the colors, how vibrant they are in your image and then the white balance will get into this is good to keep in mind that this is baked into your footage permanently. So if we are using a picture profile on our camera and it's very contrasty and it's very saturated, we're going to have to combat that or fight that in post production. If we want to change the look of the image, I highly recommend using a flat picture profile for the footage that you're shooting. I haven't seen an app that you can do this with for the phone. If you do have an idea of an app that does that for smartphones, please share it. But I do use it all the time when I shoot. I pretty much shoot with the same picture profile. Anytime I'm shooting with my DSLR, actually. Yeah. Let me grab this camera real quick and show you guys. So if we see our image here and we go to our picture profile style, we'll be able to see different picture profiles that have different aesthetics. It's a different adjusting on the white balance, the contrast, the saturation, et cetera. Depending on what kind of camera you're using, you can go to the owner of your camera's website. In this case it's Cannon. And you can Google their flat picture profile. For Cannon, it's called Log for Sony, I believe it's called S log. It has a different name. Every company has their own picture profile that you can download. They will give you a flat less affected image going directly into your camera. If you don't have that for your camera that you're using, don't worry. I generally shoot with my own profile that I've created. That's really easy. It's just a neutral profile. If you go into the custom setting that you can be able to do for the camera that you're using them, you can always add a custom picture profile for mine, it's neutral. I just go in and I turn down the sharpness. Okay, I turned down the contrast. Okay, turn down the saturation. Finally, I leave the color tone as it is. You don't want to really adjust the color tone that's changing the value of certain colors. It'll make your image too blue or purple or green. You don't really want to mess with the color tone, but the basis is you go into your picture profile setting and you turn everything majority down so you have more information that's unedited to work with in post production when you do want to edit those things. Okay, and so hopefully that gives you a general understanding of picture profile. We'll go into that stuff more when we're actually shooting alongside each other and when I bring on some guests in the course and I'm actually changing these things in real time. 15. White Balance: So next up is our white balance. This is giving a specific coloring to our image and it's giving a different value to the quality of white. So the different kind of presets that all cameras have, tungsten fluorescent, natural lighting. All of these have a different color temperature or Kelvin rating. Okay? The goal is to set your picture profile, or excuse me, your white balance, to a proper setting for your environment. This makes the colors more true to the surrounding rather than blue or too yellow or warm. You want to have the most neutral image as possible while you're shooting, so that you can change it and warm it up or make it more blue in post production. But a good example of what this looks like is this is the same image with different white balance settings. Okay, so we have a much more tungsten on the left, which creates a blue image in the wrong setting. It's going to give a wrong looking image in this kind of daylight or kind of cloudy scenario. That preset makes the truest colors possible because that's the actual environment that we're shooting in. So for this kind of situation, right now, we're shooting manual White balance, which is a good extra step that you guys can do to ensure that your camera is not automatically choosing the color value to be used in the scenario. Sometimes the audio can get a little bit tricked by the coloring because we have, you know, these kind of tan lights. This tan light right here, a little bit of blue light coming in from the window back there, and then this relatively tan light. So I'm shooting a custom white balance setting with 3,000 with the Kelvin or the color temperature set to 3,000 And I'll show you what that looks like. Pull this ear. All right, so here's what it looks like on Otto. You could see it's a little bit more tan. Here's what it looks like on the daylight setting, you can see it's getting really warm 'cause it's thinking that I'm shooting in an outdoor scenario. Here's what it looks like with the shade preset, and here's what it looks like with the cloudy preset. So you can see that the coloring is way off, but I set it to 3,000 on manual because that is the best looking color temperature for this scenario. So hopefully that gives you an idea of how to use white balance effectively. And how it's really changing the overall aesthetic of your image in your camera. So that in post production you're not trying to battle the terrible looking coloring that happened while you were shooting. I'm sure this has happened to some of you can say as honestly happened to me a lot. And that sums it up for this lecture. In the next lecture, we're going to be talking about aperture, focal length, and frame rate. So, if you have any questions, throw them in the Q and A section. If not, I'll see you guys in the next lecture. 16. Case Study: Aperture: Now you guys are almost camera setting experts. Next up, what we're going to be talking about is aperture. It's a very important fundamental understanding of how to get the most out of your camera video settings. Aperture, simply put, is the F stop number. The lower the F stop number. Right now I'm shooting at 2.8 The wider the lens opening and the more amount of light is getting into the camera. The higher the number, the exact opposite. The less light, the less depth of field. So let's explain what that means. The higher the F stop, the smaller opening and the less depth of field. This is great when you want to make everything in focus. Like for landscape shot action shots where there's a lot of movement or a lot of things in the image you want to have in focus. And really wide angle shots. The lower the F stop, the lower the aperture. This has more depth of field. This is great for when you want what is in focused to be sharp and what is closer and further to be out of focus. This has a more cinematic look and feel. This is great for controlled situations shots when you're, you know, talking to the camera or you're shooting someone that's talking to the camera because it blurs out the background and makes the image look more professional. So let me ask you here, which out of these two images has a low F stop or aperture and a high F stop or aperture? Image number one with this leaf and image number two with this open landscape. Would you guess that image number one with a leaf is a wide aperture with a shallow depth of field or a narrow depth of field with a high aperture. Okay. Perfect. Yes. This is shot at F two. The aperture is wide open, so the leaf is in focus. What's behind it is blurred. This gives a really great look and style. So we want to keep this in mind when we're going into our own projects. Do we want to have, you know that everything is in focus look that's more action oriented or are we shooting like some park or video where someone's doing back flips off a bridge? Maybe, maybe not. So this image on the right, if you had to guess the F stop, what would you guess? Would it be? F 4f5f, ten, F 15. It's got to be up there pretty high. So let's see, F 22. That's why the rocks that are only a few feet away from the camera are just as in focus as that mountain that's hundreds of feet away from the camera. So hopefully that gives you an idea of when to use a wide aperture and when to use a high or low aperture. Right now, I'm shooting at F 2.0 which is a relatively low aperture. Because I know I want to be in focus and I want the background to be blurry, right? I'm not shooting this really cool mountain landscape, so I'm not at F 22 plus I'm not out in a really bright scenario with broad daylight. You're going to need a really high aperture and that's going to give you a properly exposed image. 17. Case Study: Focal Length: Next up is the focal length or the angle of view that lets in light into the camera. Okay? The millimeter, the M M on your lens equals the millimeter. And the shorter that MM number is, the shorter the focal length or the wider the angle of view. A 22 millimeter is a really relatively wide angle of view, while a 200 millimeter, which is a much higher number, is a much more narrow field of view or a much more telephoto type lens. Wider is for more action oriented, a fun and playful feel. Generally, Youtube videos are shot on a much wider. Right now we're shooting at about 22:24 This gives a wider feel if it's something that's more documentary style or something where you're shooting something off in a distance, you're going to want to use a telephoto lens so you can get a much more zoomed in look and a shallower depth of field. So the overall wider is more desirable for a Youtube and Instagram style, while a telephoto is like, you know, shooting things like wedding style or more of a documentary style or more of something where you want to have a more professional look. Okay. The wider the angle, the less depth of field, the more everything's in focus. The shallower or the higher the focal length, The shallower than the field of view. Also the shallower, the depth of field. What's in focus is clear. What's out of focus is very blurry. So let me ask, let's get back to this leaf and mountain image here. Which angle here is a wide angle and which one is a telephoto? Is the leaf wider Telephoto. Okay. Now, if you're guessing that, what would you guess would be the millimeter of this shot of the leaf? Would it be a 20 millimeter, 50 millimeter? 10150200. Let's see. Okay. So this is a 200 millimeter lens. You can tell that the camera is probably, yeah, six to eight, or nine feet away from that leaf. But it's zoomed in and creating a very crisp image with a soft background. Now, if we look at this mountain image, would you put this as a ten millimeter, 30 millimeter, 405080 millimeter? It's probably going to be on the much lower end because it's a pretty wide angle. So let's see. Yep, that's a 20 millimeter, That's why we can see such a wide field of view in this landscape. So hopefully that's making sense. You're able to kind of compile this together. Of course, I'm going to be demonstrating this later in the course. This is getting us to the point where we're all speaking the same language. 18. Case Study: Frame Rate: Let's hop in a frame rate, this is the amount of frames that shot per second. Okay? The way each frame rate looks has to do with the way our eyes see and perceive the world. Our eyes, yes, the eyes in our head most closely see to 24 frames per second. This is normal life speed with the natural motion blur of your eye. If you look at your hand and you do this, you're going to see that there's a slight motion blur that your eye is actually seeing. Now, if I'm shooting at 24 frames per second on my camera or my phone, there's going to be a similar motion blur if we have the shutter speed at the proper level. And so the frame rate really has to do with the way it looks is in comparison to what your eye normally sees. Hopefully, that's making sense. This causes a similar motion blur that is similar in detail to moving objects that are ICs films. Choose to shoot 24 as their standard style of frame rate because it creates that pleasing look that your eye is naturally used to. This is a soft, a little surreal, and 24 has this really cool film esque appearance. Now, on the other hand, 30 frames per second. We'll try not to get too technical here, but this has more of a realistic broadcast TV home movie, kind of almost fake feeling, yeah. You know news stations, old VHS camcorders for home movies, they have this kind of like weird, fake, non real feeling. And you see a news anchor and it looks very plasticky. That's because they're shooting all at 30 frames per second. And even though that's only six frames per second, faster than 24, it really does change the look. So I personally don't recommend ever shooting at 30 frames per second. There's not really a need, unless you're really going for that stylistic choice for a specific purpose, stick to 24. Next up is 60 frames a second, okay? This is almost doubling the normal speed of life at 24 frames a second. 60, you're doubling the frame rate, which is perfect for action. It has this very high definition look because it's picking up twice as many pictures per second or frames per second, but it can feel a little plasticy if it's for a talking interview. Okay. So the way and the reason you would use that if you wanted to slow down that footage in post production, for a slow motion like montage or cutaway shots, which we'll talk about, but it just gives it a much different feeling when you have that frame rate. Okay, because you're doubling what you would normally see. And lastly, 120 to 240 frames a second, you're rarely going to shoot like this. But this is really cool. For really epic, slow motion, dramatic style footage, that's when you would want to use a really high frame rate of 120 to 240. So hopefully that gives you a kind of idea for when and where to use, what kind of frame rate. Now what I'm going to do is switch over my camera 24-30 and to 60 so you guys can see the aesthetic difference. All right, so now we're at 30 frames a second. It'll be a slight difference. A slight little change. And there's a lawn mower outside, so I apologize, I'm hoping it doesn't pick up too much on the mice. But yeah, right now we're at 29.97 frames per second, which is 30 frames per second. And yeah, you can kind of see the difference. Now let's go to 60 frames per second, or in some cases, 59.94 frames per second. And so now that's a pretty big difference because we're doubling our frame rate. And if I wanted to now, I can slow this down in post production like this. So you can see it creates a much, very dramatic style of effect. So you won't want to use 60 frames when you're filming someone because it kind of has a little bit of a plastic look. So if we pop back over to 24 frames a second, so as you can see, it's a much more natural look and feel at 24 frames a second. But I'm hoping that this gives you guys a really, really solid understanding of how to use your camera settings without any of the extra fluff or stuff that you really don't need to know. But this will really get you off the ground and able to shoot in any scenario with whatever kind of camera you're shooting with. So now in the next lecture, we're going to do a learning exercise where you guys are going to be able to apply these actual understandings and techniques to your own shoot and project. So I will see you guys in the next learning exercise. 19. Camera Settings Activity Introduction: Now that you really understand the fundamentals of your video settings, for your camera and for your phone, it's time to apply all this information that we just learned. So it's your turn. So what we're going to do is we're going to do a learning exercise on shooting one shot in two different ways, okay? What we're going to do is choose one subject, or object, or scene, or whatever you want to shoot, and we're going to shoot it two different ways, Okay? The first way is going to be on auto settings or improper settings. Okay? The information before what you learned in this course so far, okay? So, over exposed, the ISO is all wrong, the shutter speed is all wrong, or the aperture is not really ideal for what you're shooting. And then you're going to shoot it a second way, which is going to be the upgraded way with what the information that you learned so far. So what I want you to really do is apply yourself on this learning exercise and use the proper ISO shutter speed, picture profile, white balance, aperture, and focal length. You guys are more than welcome to do either a video of you talking or a photo of an object that's at your house or outdoors. Really, whatever you want something to get creative with. And you're going to export that video link or screen shot with the standard shot first and then the upgraded shot to the course Q and A. And share your before and after not using what you've learned, or maybe the way you would have shot it before, and then using these techniques to shoot something in a much more aesthetically pleasing way. So I'm going to cut to me doing this too right now along with you guys at my own house. I'm going to choose something to shoot. I'm going to shoot at the improper way, and then I'm going to shoot a second, much better image. 20. Learning Exercise: ISO and White Balance: The first thing I'm going to do is with my Smartphone. I'm going to, so I'm going to find something at my house and I'm going to shoot it with like improper settings. And I'm going to do screen capture so you guys can see exactly what I'm doing. And then I'm going to shoot it with the proper settings and show you the before and after. So let's see what we can find. All right, so we have our first image here on my smartphone and we could see our shutter speed is at 24 frames per second. Our white balance is at tungsten, so there's kind of this weird purplish hue to it. And so our, you know, auto white balance is set to the improper setting for this type of environment. And our ISO is pretty high for this kind of scenario. So what I'm going to do first is start with the shutter speed, and I'm going to go to 50th, And then I'm going to move to our white balance here. And I'm going to go to manual now I'm going to go and I'm going to set this, see that's a little too blue, the Kelvin rating is too low. I'm going to go at about 3,500 here. I'm going to tap on where we want to focus. I'm going to check the ISO here. Bring the ISO down just a little bit. Perfect. Here's my before, here's my after shot. 21. Learning Exercise: Using Focal Length to Enhance Your Shot: All right, for this next example, we have this painting here, and now I'm shooting on my DSLR. Let's see if we first start with focusing on the focal length aspect of our settings. If I zoom in here and change the focal length, we see a little bit of change in the overall depth of field and the overall stylizing of really picking up on the depth and the texture of this image. If we zoom back out, we're at 24 frames. Let's get our settings right. Let's first start by opening up our aperture from a 9.0 to 2.8 This is going to give us a much more shallow and stylized depth of field. Now we're going to drop our ISO to something. Let's say 12 50. Let's say 12 50. And we can now see that we're getting a little bit more of a shallow depth of field. We can see that this painting in the fore ground is in focus, while this one in the back is out of focus. And now we can come back to this one being in focus. And to accentuate this look even more, we can change our focal length from a 24 millimeter to something like a 70 millimeter. So that now we really have this cooler style depth of field, right where we can really focus in on the depth of this image. This really kind of more textured image compared to this much more flat image of the same exact object is an example of using our different settings to really try and create a better looking and stylized image of what we're shooting. 22. Learning Exercise: Using Depth of Field: All right, so for this example, welcome to my kitchen. That's where the magic happens. Let's see what we got in here. I'm going to grab this, some tumeric. I'm going to set it right down here. So if we focus, we have the camera was just automatically set to the aperture at 11, the shutter speed at a 50th and the SO at 1,250 So let's see here, since we're shooting at a DSLR, let's focus on aperture for this example. Let's get the exposure right then. I'm going to take a photo of this example, Okay? Now I'm going to get the same proper exposure with different settings. What I'm going to do is bring down the aperture so we have a much wider depth of field. And then I'm going to bring down the ISO so that we're not getting over exposed, and then our image is actually going to be a lot less grainy. Then I'm going to set the focus, can even go down further on the aperture. Now I'm going to take the same exact photo. You can see how that simple difference of changing the aperture, even if you're getting the same exposure value, that simple change in settings makes a much more dramatic and stylized image. Let's see the before and afters of these examples. Now I'm excited to see what kind of examples that you upload that are your before and after examples in the student Q and A section. I'll see you in the next lecture. 23. Hands On with Studio Lighting: Initial Set Up and Camera Settings: All right, what's up guys? So at this portion of the course, we should be very comfortable with our camera settings. And today I'm with the wonderful Kimber Lea. Hi. She's an amazing Youtuber. She has her own business. She's an entrepreneur, and today we're going to be working at her studio, her space. And I'm going to walk you guys through really start to finish on the proper camera settings, the right lens to use, and really how to set up your environment in a natural light scenario. And in this scenario which is going to be an artificial light scenario. So I'll have a montage that shows Kimberlaa's content and her channel. You guys can check her out. Thanks. Great, we're going to keep that in. So with that said, let's get started. So what we're going to start with, this is our before shot, so I'm going to go ahead and hit record here. So we have an actual reference of what we start with and then the final product that we end with. So here we can see that Kimberlaa, a wonderful subject, she's kind of pushed up against the background Here we're using our natural ambient light in our scenario. Not a good thing. And we also have our settings not with the proper exposure. So what we're going to start with first is by increasing our ISO. So we're going to boost our ISO to get a little bit of a better exposure. We don't want to get the exposure too high because we still haven't turned on the lighting that we're going to be using here. Let's first start getting a proper settings for our shutter speed. Now we're at a 50th of a second, which is going to be perfect because of we're shooting at 24 frames a second. Let's start with first adding one key light. I'm going to flip on this perfect, and the next thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to cut away the excess ambient light that we have in here. Because these tube lights, I think they're called fluorescent lighting, is not a good thing. You never want to be using fluorescent lighting. So, and so we're looking a little bit better here, but what we're going to first do is because these lights are relatively cool, the Kelvin temperature is quite cold for this lighting set up. So what we're going to do here is scroll to our white balance setting. And then we're going to go to manual. Okay? And we're going to set it at about 4,800 And so now we still have pretty harsh shadows. So what we're going to do is turn on our fill light, which we have right here. Okay, so what this is going to do is this fill light is going to fill in the shadows on the face. All right, and we're going to change the exposure. How are you doing? Kimber, Fine, perfect. You're doing really good. Way better than A. Now we have our ISO at 500, which is giving us a nice even lighting. We have our shutter speed at a 50th of a second. We also have our aperture at 2.8 Now what this is going to do is it's going to help us blur out the background when we change our focal length. Because right now we're at 24. If we were to zoom in and now we're at 50, you can see that she's perfectly in focus and the background is falling off because it's slightly blurry. This is already looking a lot better than our before and after. Here's the before and here's the after. Like that magical editing edition in there. Yeah, Yeah, right. The snaps in the claves, baby. The snaps in the claves. So this is already looking really good. But what I want to do now is another trick is luckily her outfit is already very contrasted from the background. If she was wearing a white shirt in this scenario and we wanted to shoot a really good looking video, I would definitely have her change her outfit today. It's perfect. So we're not going to do that for this scenario, but what we want to do is move her away from the background. This is going to create more of a separation and allow for the background to be more blurry and a little bit, it's going to be a little bit darker depending on the lighting, but it's going to fall off more. So let's do that now. So I'm going to zoom out a little bit. Kimber layer a wonderful model and you can stand up and we're going to push it a little bit forward. Now that we're changing where our subject is, we also have to kind of change our lighting a little bit because it's going to change the angle. Okay, Perfect. Now I'm going to move the camera back a little bit so we can get a similar framing to what we want. And I'm going to zoom in, so that's looking pretty good. 24. Hands On with Studio Lighting: Rule of Thirds and Focal Length: So now I'm actually really happy with this lighting and the distance that she that Kimberley has from the background. It's creating a nice separation. We're at a low aperture, which means we have a very shallow depth of field. We're framing her on the top third, which is actually another thing I want to mention real quick. What makes the most pleasing image possible is when you frame important areas of your image on the third. So there's an imaginary line going across the top third, the bottom third, the right, and then the left. You see how we have her framed on the top third. Now if I were to change this framing and put her in the middle, you see we still have great lighting, we still have great coloring. The background looks really nice, but the framing throws out the aesthetic of the image. So that's something I really want you guys to keep in mind, is that it's always most comfortable, especially with the talking scene, to frame your subject on the top third. Now personally, right now we're at a 50 millimeter. This looks great for an average talking video. If we want something that's maybe a little bit more serious, we can go here to 70 where we're even closer to our subject. If we want something that's a little bit more fun, of course, we're dealing with the outside stuff that we have here. Yeah, we have some workout equipment and stuff, so we can't really get a super wide angle. But I want to show you guys what that looks like. So if we have this wide angle, we frame here on the third, we always want to have the camera pretty much at eye level for our subject in an interview because we're giving the viewer the feeling that they're at the same level of their person that's talking. If I'm talking to the camera right now and I'm talking from down here, it feels a little bit weird if you're the audience looking at that. And if I'm talking from up here, looking down on you, feels a little bit weird as well. So we always want to try to frame our camera at the same eye level as our subject, so we can go a little bit lower because we're shooting wide. And I'm going to push in a little bit minus the background stuff that's here. This is a lot more of a fun, less professional look, which is great for you tube. Right now that's at 28 millimeters, we can go even a little bit wider and that's at 24 millimeters. The wider, the more playful, the more zoomed in, the more serious. 25. Hands On with Studio Lighting: High Key, Low Key, and Rim Lighting: Now that we have this set up, this looks great. At 50 millimeters, our F stops at 2.8 Now this lighting scenario that we started with for this example is called high key lighting. That's because our key light is basically all the way on and our fill light is all the way on. And that's giving a very bright like beauty blogger style that is really, actually works really well for women. Because if you think of like a mob boss, like a sopranos or something, they're always going to have very dramatic low key lighting. So let's kind of experiment here and see the different kind of lighting scenarios that we can get depending on the look you're going for. And what I want to mention is if your video vibe is bright and happy and you're doing like an unboxing video for some type of thing, you know, hold on. Yeah, I'm like, wait, what am I trying to say? If you're doing an unboxing video for some type of product, you want bright, good lighting from both sides. If you're doing something that's a lot more moody, maybe it's a documentary, something that's more stylized, more cinematic. You want to have actually the majority of your lighting only coming from one side of the subject. So let's kind of experiment here. I'm going to turn down this light all the way now. We can instantly see that we have high lights on the subjects left side of the face, her right, our left. And we can see the difference between this style of low key lighting versus this style of high key lighting. So what we're going to do now is, like I mentioned, we have a really cool, more contrasting looking light set up. And what I want to do is a, excuse me, add a rim light, or it's also called a hair light, which is, especially because she has dark hair and a dark shirt, it's going to add a really nice high light to our subject that's going to separate them even more from the background. So let's go ahead and see what that looks like. I'm going to grab this light, Hopefully this one works. Yeah. I'm going to grab this light here. And the reason I actually moved it from this side to this side is because our main light source is here, this side of the face. If I do the rim light here, then there's going to be the main light source from this angle. And then the rim light, it actually looks better to have light and dark contrasting. So we'll see what that looks like. And the key to this is not to be lighting the front of the subject. We already have that squared away and looking good, so let's see what that looks like. And here's the before, and here is the after. A. 26. Hands On with Studio Lighting: Upgrade Your Shot with Practicals: So what we have here is our main light source and then we have a little bit of a softer light to fill in her shadows, so it's not too dramatic. And I actually want to take a look and see what it looks like with this completely off. So for this scenario, it's too dark. That's not the kind of like vibe that we're looking for, especially with like Kimberley's style of video, that would be too dramatic, but if we have a really cool moody scene in our film, having one light source with a hair light would be perfect. But let's flip this back on. That's giving a little bit of fill for our shadows, which is perfect. And now I want to kind of add a little bit of extra touch to the background. So we've done a lot of work with moving her, getting her to the right position, getting the proper focal length. Now I want to show you guys something that's called practicals. Now, practicals are simply a light source in the background of the scene that you're shooting that doesn't have the purpose of lighting the subject. The only purpose that it has is adding a warm kind of glow and making the scene look a little bit more realistic because we have all these different lights, and if there's no light behind her, it kind of can look a little bit artificial manufactured. So in feature films they use what's called practicals. Having lamps on in the background, having lights on in the background. This subconsciously gives the viewer a little bit more of a belief as to why the lighting kind of looks so good in the situation, and it gives it a little bit more energy, in my opinion. So let's go ahead and see what that looks like. Stay on. Yeah. If it stays on. Okay. We're in business. Yeah, that's fine. That's one practical and the second practical. Like I mentioned, this is not helping any lighting directly on our subject. This is just livening up and making the background look a little bit more realistic. So let's take a look at this angle and see what that looks like. So this is with the practicals, and this is without the practicals. So I'm a huge fan of that. It really just kind of adds a little bit more special sauce to the scene that you are shooting. 27. Hands On with Studio Lighting: Colored Gels: So I actually wanted to add one more thing. We got our practicals, we got our set looking great, the lighting looks good. I will mention that the nature of these lights is quite blue. So one thing that I really wanted to share with you, that you can get around this kind of more bluish lighting, because it can have its drawbacks if we are lighting our subject and her frontal lighting is this bluish light. But let's say we're in a different scenario and there's daylight in the background. That daylight is going to be extra warm because our white balance is set to make her lighting look neutral. The background is going to change color wise a lot. So in this scenario, we're going to actually get a little bit more of tan lighting, which is actually really great for talking footage. And it's going to be really good for you to see this demonstration as well if you have different color temperatures on set, sorry, just spit everywhere different color temperatures on set that you're working with. So what we're going to use is colored gels. Okay. And I'll just kind of briefly run over how to set it up on your light. Now you want to make sure you're not putting these on a light that gets hot. These lights don't heat up, so we're not going to have any issues. But this will melt as if you put it in a microwave on your light. Before trying this, you want to make sure your lights don't get too hot. This is a little bit warm, but it's not going to be an issue. We want to cover our entire light with our gil. And you can see the difference on my face here. You can already see the kind of effect this is going to have. Okay. And we're going to put one more down here, La. Now we're also going to add a gel to this side. And this is going to really soften up our scenario for two reasons. It's going to diffuse the light and take down the intensity of our main lights a few stops. So we're going to definitely have to change the exposure on our camera and we're definitely going to have to change our white balance on this light. We're going to do the same thing again. This light does not heat up. We are good to attach our gel directly to the light source. Now, if we look at our scene, it's a lot softer, but you can see now it's a very warm scenario. We're going to start by increasing our ISO to get the proper exposure. We are going to then change our white balance to match our new color situation right there. Now you can see the difference between without the colored gels and with the colored gels. A lot softer, a lot more of a warm feel. And just taking away that studio lighting set up, it's really effective to use if you want to match the color temperatures of your situation. Now, I do want to mention that we didn't add a gel to our hair light. It's going to make the hair light stand out even more because the color temperature is completely different, which can work for you. Sometimes a golden hair light looks really nice, sometimes it doesn't. You really have to use your own discernment for your shooting situation. Cool. So that wraps it up for our artificial lighting set up scenario. So I think you guys should have some really good tips and tricks to take your set up that you're shooting from this beginning looking stage to now this final set up. Perfect. Now, in the next lecture, we're going to do the similar kind of lighting set up, but we're going to be using only natural light. So I will see you in the next lecture. 28. Hands On with Natural Lighting: Choose Your Set: So before we hop into actually filming Kimberlaa for this section, I wanted to just do a brief run through of the environment that we're shooting in. So that way you can better relate to this type of scenario where you're at your house and you're looking at your scenario and you want to shoot a good looking image that's a lot more, well a good looking scene or scenario that's a lot more casual. So if we take a wide shot and get to see this entire place, we can see that there's three primary natural sources of light. And this is the most important part of choosing where you want to shoot in your environment. Here is the first option. We would have the subject facing the window so that the majority of the light would be hitting their face. Of course the problem with that is if we flip around this backdrop and here doesn't look so good, we have, you know, this kind of stuff in the background, it doesn't look very clean, right? So if we go to our next option, this is our second primary source of light. What we might be able to do here is open up this window so that we can have the subject facing the light. But as you can see from this image, there's really not a whole lot of natural light coming in through this window, at least at this time of day. So that's something that you want to keep in mind is are you shooting at noon? Are you shooting at sunset? What side of your house is getting light? At which time of day? If you're going to choose a more permanent set up at your house using natural light, that is something you really want to keep in mind is, you know, what time of day do you want to shoot and how is the lighting at that time of day here, if we were to set up the subject here, have the lighting, it doesn't work without really having to move around the different things at this house. Option two is really out of the question. Now, if we go to option three over here, we have this source of light that is coming in with a lot of diffused light. We have Kimberlay in the background doing her thing. So we have this large natural light right here. And the reason I went for this in this situation was because we have a light source that's getting great quality light for a lot of the different times of day. The way that the light is bouncing off the other buildings, the white fence outside is perfect for what we're looking for. The other reason I chose to do this, and the other thing you want to keep in mind is how much can you control the lighting in the background of you when you're shooting in the natural light scenario? Here we're able to really cut the light, meaning we keep the exposure of what is behind me very low, okay? And then we can add practicals that in that you'll see in the following learning lesson of what the practicals are doing. And this is really the most ideal set up for this person's house, for Kimberly's place. So you're going to have a few different options at your house or wherever you want to shoot, you want to look at all your options. In this case, we had three. We weighed out the pros and cons of each option, and then we go ahead and choose where we want to shoot. Get our set up in, get our settings right, and get everything dialed in. Which is what you're going to see in the next learning lesson. 29. Hands On with Natural Lighting: Initial Set Up and Camera Settings: For this set up. What we're going to be doing is where kimba's place and this set up is going to be a little bit more difficult and a little bit more on the go. I wanted to give you an example of if you don't have an artificial lighting source, you don't have any external lighting. Or you wanted to do something that maybe looked a little bit more casual and a little bit less produced using natural light is perfect for that kind of scenario. So what we're going to be doing is taking a look in this situation to find where we can find a really good source of natural light coming through a window, coming through a doorway. And then we're also going to, of course, use proper focal length, proper framing. But more importantly, we're going to use exposure, contrast, and separation from our subject to the background to really create an image that looks good. Because we don't have a rim light or a hair light, and we don't have bright artificial light to really make it look good. So with that said, we're going to take Kimber Lea and we're going to choose a backdrop. And then we're going to set everything up with the proper settings. So what we're going to do is actually take this area of the house and turn this into the set up. So right now it doesn't really look like much, but what we're going to do is open up this door. This is a huge, natural diffused lighting scenario. Because we're not getting direct light from the sun that would create harsh shadows. We have the sun bouncing off white walls. We have the sun bouncing off the fence, which is going to be perfect for getting really soft looking natural light. So the next thing that we're going to do is look at the direction that we're going to be filming, because this is our main lighting source. We want to have our subject obviously facing that main source. But we want to keep in mind what is going to be in the background. So what I'm going to do is want to set up this camera about a boom. So I'm going to go ahead and hit record on this camera to see what we're working with here with the backdrop. Of course for this scenario I would generally have a little bit more of a minimal background, but for something that's really easy. And if you guys want to pull out the camera to film a video at your house, we're focusing more on getting a good lighting set up and how to really use natural light. Don't focus too much on the background for this kind of scenario. So now that I know where I want to shoot because we have this really nice natural lighting set up, we're going to do a before shot before we go into making the footage actually look good. So here's kimbala in, we're not paying attention to setting a good focal length where our exposure is off and really the lighting is just not good. So we're going to start from scratch and really build this up to a really good before and a really good after. And now first step, oh, we are opening the door and not hitting the wall. Perfect. So now we have a really good natural light source and we're shooting at 24 frames a second. And we're going to move our shutter speed up to one 50th, so we're doubling the speed of our frame rate. That's going to give us a really nice natural motion blare. Now the other thing that I'm going to do is open up our aperture all the way because we don't have any external lighting. It's going to be really important to have a shallow depth of field to make this image look as good as possible. So I'm going to open up all the way and I'm going to zoom in a little bit. Kimberly, you can step forward. Yep. Okay. And I'm going to raise the camera up. This is going to be her new style of shooting. She's going to always be standing in her future videos, so check out her Youtube channel for that. Okay, So this is looking pretty good already. Our white balance is already set pretty good. But let's just, if we move it up just a little bit, our Kelvin rating temperature is going to be at 5,000 That's looking good. 30. Hands On with Natural Lighting: Optimizing Background and Aperture: If we want to have a more intimate feeling, of really feeling connected to our audience while we're talking, we would want a closer angle like this. Of course, you want to frame the eyes on the third, if we want something, let me move that up a little bit. If we want something a little bit more informal or a little bit more fun and less planned, we would shoot wider like that. This is looking pretty good so far. I think the next thing that what we would be doing in this situation is taking a look at what in the background we can turn down to create even more separation between her and the background. So what I'm going to do is flip these lights off. So we're turning on a practical in the background, of course is not going to help with lighting our subject, but it's going to make the background feel a lot more alive. So now we have more light in the background and because we're using natural lighting in this situation, we're not getting that really good rim light that we got in the other shot. So one of the tricks that I really want to show you guys is if you can't create enough exposure contrast in camera by turning on lights in the background, by getting a light on your subject better, What you can do is change the shirt color or the color of the clothes that your subject is wearing. So Kimberle is going to go switch her shirt really quick to create more contrast. Very good. So as you can see we have Kimberlaa. She changed her outfit to create more contrast with the background, which makes her as the subject stand out more. And we have this practical light on the back left, and we have this practical light on the back right. So you can see the before and after, before and after. So now that we really got our framing and our lighting really nailed, I want to show you guys the difference between having a very shallow depth of field, a wide aperture, and having a very narrow aperture with less depth of field. And how big of a difference that makes with a shooting scenario like this. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to increase our aperture, which is going to bring down our depth of field and it's going to make everything in the frame a lot more in focus. And I'm going to bring up the ISO to make up for that increase in aperture, so I can get the exposure right. And so here you can see the difference between an F ten with the subject and the background, and the difference between an F 2.8 with the subject and the background. 31. Hands On with Natural Lighting: Proper Framing, Focal Length, and Distance: So right now we're at 28 millimeters, and I want to touch on focal length before we wrap up this learning lesson. So this is a really comfortable framing. She's framed on the third, so we're at a good distance where if she was talking to the camera, explaining something, we would be able to connect with her and it would look aesthetically pleasing. If we were to go from 28 millimeters to something much more zoomed in like 60 millimeters, this is a completely different focal length that creates a completely different feeling. She didn't move, the camera didn't move what she would be doing when it changed. But this would completely change the way you would feel about what she was saying. So it's something to really keep in mind when you're setting up your framing. You want to always be thinking about how you want your viewer to feel. So if I move it back out to a little bit wider, this is now we're at 24, which is a little bit too wide for the situation. But what I want to do before we wrap up here is of course, when we just went to 60, it was too close. But if we move the camera further back and keep our subject where they are, and now what we did was we moved about ten feet away from our subject. And we zoomed in to 70 millimeters. So at five feet away from our subject, 70 millimeters was way too close. But with ten feet distance, if you have that kind of room to move around in your scenario, you can actually get a really great compressed image with a very shallow depth of field by moving far back and increasing your focal length, making the number go higher, which creates a much more telephoto field of view. So you guys can see the difference between five feet away at 28 millimeters and now ten feet away at 70 millimeters. Same scenario, different focal length, different distance from the subject to the camera. Completely different aesthetic. 32. Full Summary of Hands On Exercises: Perfect. And so that wraps it up for the session with Kimberley and I. I will link her Youtube channel, all her social media on the page right here, you guys can click and check out all of the offerings that she has. And I wanted to just recap really quickly all of our before and after shots that we did in this session. So here is the before and after with our artificial lighting setup. You can see with and without the colored gels and with and without using a hair light. The two different options of having high key lighting and low key lighting, here are the examples that we shot in natural light are before, where we're not using the lighting properly in our surroundings with and without practicals in the background. And shooting at 28 millimeters versus 70 millimeters, with more distance between our camera and our subject. That about wraps it up for this portion of lighting, camera types, lens choice, focal length, and focus in this part of the chorus. I will see you in the next lecture. 33. Learning Exercise: Filming Your Talking Scene: All right, so now that you guys have been able to really see behind the scenes, look at how I choose my backgrounds, choose my lighting scenarios, set all the functions and settings on my camera. Now it's your turn. It's your turn to film a talking scene with your phone or your camera. And something that I want you guys to keep in mind while going through this learning exercise is that ideally you're actually talking to the camera and we'll be using your words or the topic that you're talking about to create a shot list of cutaway shots. Basically, it'll look something like this, but I am addicted to coffee. I just love the entire experience of it, those lovely texture deans, and then brewing it when you pour that off. So it's pretty straightforward. Now it's your turn to shoot. You're going to film one talking shot in two different ways, okay? The first way is going to be the standard shot. Without any of the techniques that we've discussed so far in this course. This might be the way that you would film your video normally without having any idea of these new techniques and principles. And then the second way is going to be your upgraded shot with these new techniques that you've learned. And that's going to be framing shot type focus, exposure, distance between the subject and the background, right, using a contrast in coloring, using lighting, and using good sound techniques. Then you're going to export your video link or screen shots with the standard and upgraded shot one after the other to the course Q and A. That way you can engage with your classmates, they can engage with you. You guys can critique each other's work, and you can all see how you can improve on your talking video shot for all your future videos. So hopefully that makes sense and I will see you guys in the next lecture. 34. Introduction to Learning Session with a Professional Filmmaker: This section is really about taking things a step deeper. Now that we have a good understanding of the settings and other specific camera techniques, I wanted you to be able to get some real life learning from someone who's taken their career a long ways. And is also creating content that is really relevant for today's type of video creator where he's using film techniques mixed with shooting with modern equipment. So it's going to be a really cool one on one sit down discussion and advice from an expert that's really going to give you some essential tools to take into the rest of this course. Sit back, get out your pen and pencil or your note pad. There's a lot of good truth bombs in these next two learning lessons. So let's get into it. 35. Case Study: Breakdown of Cinema iPhone Project: Cool. So Hunter, thank you so much for coming on as a guest speaker for this part of the course. So far, the students have really doven into how to use lighting and how to really set up their camera to get the best looking video possible. And you've been on my radar for a while and, you know, we've kind of connected on a few projects here and there. But I saw your iphone commercial, let's just call it. And it's really the perfect part of the course and really the perfect topic that I wanted to have. You want to kind of speak and go through that amazing project that I saw and give some tips. Give things that are applicable for smartphone shooters and all types of new filmmakers. That sounds exciting, dude. Thanks for having me. Yeah, of course. And then what's just maybe a little mini background. I'll have some cutaway shots, some montage of your Instagram, your website, what's like, you know, your elevator picture of, you know, where you are today. Yeah. So to your listener, my name Hunter. I run a business called Unemployed Movement currently. And I've been in the digital marketing and content creation industry, if you want to call it that, for about seven years now. And I've gone through kind of different models that I worked in an agency right out of school in Colorado and that was like in the action sports world. And then moved to California and was a freelancer doing a lot of freelancing content, whether that's making social media content, doing photography jobs. A lot of my, I think unique skill lies in digital marketing. I think that's a little bit of a differentiation factor between like a filmmaker because I do come from more of the marketing background in the sense of like shooting courses and managing podcasts. More so than I guess you can say, like the creative industry to bring up the concept of the iphone videos and why. I actually put a little bit more energy into understanding that type of stuff. Because this is a little less equipment heavy, right? We're not using like DSLRs or cinema cameras, we're using a little phone in my pocket. Was more from the perspective of understanding like that is how most people are using tools. Whether not necessarily filmmakers, but just influencers, creators, people who want to use social media to build their personal brand. So using that and understanding that from a perspective, that's how a lot of people are going to use it. So not so much only filmmakers. So that's kind of my approach to understanding that stuff. And especially in the sense that nowadays with Instagram reels and Tiktok and all of these ways that we use social media, a lot of people are using the more basic tools to do those things. And I think understanding that even if you are a high level filmmaker, is important. And I think it can be easy to shun it because it's less fancy, you know what I mean? But at the same time, it's really important because that's how most people are using their equipment and using social media 100% I agree with you. It took me some time for my filmmaker ego to kind of let go of like even using iphone stuff and now I'm actually kind of incorporating it into more higher produced projects. In a foi that's fun, where all of a sudden there's a vertical video inside a 16 by nine normal format project that's high quality and then it cuts away to something that's just kind of more raw and feels fun. But the thing that I loved about what we're going to dive into your project is that from the trained eye and the untrained eye, I mean, it looked quality, you know what I mean? So I really want to kind of go, you know, frame by frame and kind of how and why you did the things that you do that you did for that project. Kind of going through, you're going to do screen cap for that to kind of show people, you know, it's the biggest thing is that, yeah, the equipment should never be holding you back. So I love, you know, your approach to it and kind of accepting this new wave of mobile filmmaking genre. I don't even know what to really call it. Yeah, yeah, it's actually interesting. One more point on that. Like in the realm of Instagram and Tiktok land, I noticed that often the clips and little reels that go viral are often like the most simple ones. Like somebody like, you know, walking around with an phone and doing the crazy like du jitsu waves. And it's like that's kind of dumb. But it looks cool. And it's like, maybe because it's a novel, right? It's unexpected. It's something that you wouldn't see even amongst filmmakers. So kind of. I think that's interesting. It is interesting. And yeah, the last thing I'll say about that is coming from a more Filmmaking back background. It's like pointing the camera at yourself and holding the camera was just like. Or holding the camera and talking. As a filmmaker, you were always pointing the camera in front of you, quietly, standing behind the camera as a creative. And now it's just so funny, it's all kind of mixed together. But yeah, man, I love the intro. Let's kind of hop into your video. Maybe we can play it all the way through so that students can see it and then we'll go and you'll kind of dissect it. Great. I actually have it in two layers too, so you actually, I stuck a go pro on my head so you can actually see the behind. And that will give you some context. I'm going to pull it up right now and I will just play it. All right, so first off, the first thing that came to mind when I thought about creating this video I'm a teacher, I have a course like yourself. So I really wanted to show the process of creation instead of the end product. So that's why I put together this piece. Also, my students, creators, not so much filmmakers, you know, they're in the realm of Youtuber. I hate the word influencers, but people who have, you know, a personal brand. And so that was the process that specifically for this video, I live in Southern California. I wanted to create something that was a destination based video. This is a coffee shop right in Venice. And everybody knows the Venice skate Park. Everybody knows the boardwalk. It's very nostalgic. That's why I chose this location. And then I just wanted to tell a story after all, like any video, whether it's an iphone or DSLR or story is the base of everything. My mindset was like, I'm going to just put together a little sequence that tells a story. Something very simple. Going out and getting coffee and going in, like watching the skaters at the Venice Gate Park. That was my mindset. This is a pretty simple sequence where it's just very linear, right? There's nothing dynamic. It's just like establishing shot. Which is why I chose this shot because it's like showing the coffee location, then cutting into more establishing shots and then it really opens up to the subject, really is my girlfriend, Amy, right here just going through different shots. That's like not showing the full environment. And then I chose to open up halfway through to see, okay, that's the Venice Boardwalk. You can't really tell in the beginning, then you could clearly see where it is. And then just ending with the scene at the skate park. So how much of this was blocked shot listed, storyboarded and how much was just kind of okay, concept. I want to do like you mentioned, destination, cool vibe, very modern kind of hip, you know? The coffee thing is very like big. Was it okay, I know where I want to shoot, I'm just gonna do it. Or was it like shot list? Here's shot one, shot two, shot three. Good question. I would say like 90% of the time in any project I do, whether it is just a fun Sunday morning or actually like a paid gig, I'm very analytical and structured, Ironic. Like my girlfriend, I work with her and she like makes fun of me. It to the degree that I need to know every single angle and, and movement. In this case, I actually just was more free flowing. I knew like I wanted to put together certain shots. Like I knew I wanted to get establishing shots. The coffee shop, I knew I wanted to get a shot of the sign, but I did not shot list it out in order. But I did just go and shoot like two or three shots of the sign. And then I shot a few shots of the window. Then I got different angles and movements of the brista. Creating the latte was very like. Even though there was not an awareness around exactly the shot, I knew I was going to get certain shots and I was going to basically give myself as much room and an edit. So I would get so I wouldn't like, you know, imagine you go through this process. If you go out and you shoot and there's something that's just one thing that's missing your God, I wish I had, you know, some type of panning movement to put here. If I don't have a shot list put together, I generally go out and do like four or five different versions of the same thing. Like same shots of the sign with different movements. Whether it's like pushing in, same shots of the coffee barista or different shots of barista doing that same action. That's generally how I go into any shoot because it just gives you more freedom if you were to need to. You see it here? I mean, this is pretty typical content creator practice. But using movement to match shots like I would come in and even though I didn't use that drop movement, I had that there in case I needed to. So I just cut that out. But I did use it in the second shot where I pull down and then match it with the shot at the cups. So that's kind of something I would go into and just like, make sure that I have the movement that I need if I need them. And then if not, then I have other shots to pull from. And this is where I don't want to have the same transition for every single shot. But I do want to have some movement, something that is capturing somebody's eye. And also it's unique because this is an iphone, right? Most people who are shooting on the iphone aren't using more sophisticated camera movement transitions there. Probably just just holding it like this, right? I wanted to think, how could I use something that is a little bit more in the filmmaking tool kit, so to speak, in an experience that's less sophisticated. That's why I chose the movements in the beginning. Obviously, going through this whole thing is cutting to a beat. It just keeps the sequence flowing like organically. Using a mask, once again, not something that you would see with somebody shooting on an iphone. A little more sophisticated and obviously just like leading people through the experience of like starting from the boardwalk and getting to the skate park. That's pretty much it. All of it's just simple cuts and then just ending with the shot and just kind of like the kind of the culmination of chicks getting coffee, going for a walk, watching all the Skater Bros. Mm hm. And so what you're saying is basically when you see the shot in mind or you already have it planned and written down, you're shooting it. Yeah. 345 times to get what is it that you're getting like, I know it's like that feeling, you get the shot. You're like, okay, cool. I got it. But for you, what is that? When do you know that that's going to go in the edit? In a process like this where it's not as structured and exact, I just look for, is the composition good? Is it in focus? Is my hand shaky? You know, like you're using hand movement. I was using obviously just my iphone. I didn't have to stabilize or anything. I just want to make sure I have at least two. Like clean takes something. I know I could use that. It's not shaky. Things are in focus. There's not somebody in the background that I don't want to be there. I'll kind of just analyze all those kind of check marks and if it passes then I'll give it a green light. Yeah, You're shooting all this stuff and then you're using like 10% 20% of the shots. And the rest is kind of throwaway stuff. On the technical side, were you using like Pro camera or Film Pro or were you actually using the native video recorder on the phone? Yeah, I believe actually for this you can see it on there on the phone screen, the moment app, particularly because it allows you to very quickly change the frame rate. Obviously, I shot this all in 60 frames, so I can slow it down. It allows you to control the aperture, shutter speed, and all of the functions that you couldn't necessarily do. I don't believe you can in the native camera roll camera in IOS. That's a really great app and obviously it shows you like the exposure and balance and all the extra stuff that you wouldn't have also. 36. Case Study: Creating Videos That Are Shareable and Unique: So what did you learn shooting this on a smartphone versus using one of your more professional level cameras? You have to be aware of the composition. I think more than if you have a DSLR, obviously, because an iphone has a really high quality camera. But the depth of field you just don't have. Right. Being aware of the shots that you're able to use. It's almost like here's a good example. Like if you use a prime lens on a camera, it forces you to move your body right? It's kind of like, that's kind of one of the oldest thing people say is like if you want to get better photography or videography, like use a prime one so you don't zoom in, right, I feel like it's kind of that to a higher level. It's like it forces you to focus on things that you could get away with a higher level piece of equipment like composition hand movement, right? Like I'm using a very light iphone, so any little motion in my hand is going to catch. Being really hyper aware of how to do hand held camera movements is a really good thing to learn when you're using an iphone. And I would say those two things, just being able to understand composition a little bit better forces you to kind of only use what you have. And then secondarily is like if you're going to use hand movement or handheld movements, then it's a great way to kind of test your skills. Right. And so with this, did you know you wanted to do it sound driven with a montage or did you entertain the idea of doing maybe fully montage driven by the live sound in the video? Good question. Now I had the song in mind for this specific clip. So that was kind of, that was actually the foundation of this video and what kind of sparked thought, because it kind of had this like kind of chill morning vibes energy to it. So it kind of was the foundation of why I chose the sequence, this story. And that's what kind of built off of that. Mm hmm. Perfect. And so have you been able to kind of use this project in any way outside? Has it brought in any kind of other gigs or anything like that? Any kind of, you know, other things. Yeah. As a filmmaker u, it's definitely, it's not necessarily directly brought in a gig sound like somebody like saw it and was like, hey, I need an phone video made from my company, right? I would say indirectly, 100% in the sense that for one, like I said, from an engagement perspective, not that likes and views matter, but they do. When it comes to social media development, this specific video got the most shares and it also was shared on platforms that host videography and filmmaking content. Like learned Filmmaking. Filmmaker, like all of those theme accounts on social media like Instagram, to my mind, I was like, oh, this is a sharable piece of content. Creating these types of content isn't necessarily a full depth, personally driven creative expression type of project. But it's a project to get my account found as a project to teach. Like I said, I had a course this shows people like, oh, I'm a teacher, I'm not just creating photos for myself, which nothing wrong with that at all. That's great. It's established me as a teacher. Like I said, a lot of my students, we specifically focused on creating Youtube channels. And a lot of them are intimidated by the filmmaking process. This shows them like, oh, you don't need to have a $3,000 USR. You can start with what's in your pocket if you're willing to take the time to learn how to use the tool. And that's really what's come from this. What do you think it is? You're saying that this was one of your better more engagement, more shares, more audience interaction with your probably lowest expensive piece of equipment. Which is kind of a weird contrast. Or it seems like it opposes, you know what I'm saying? So what is that sauce? What is that thing that other people can really hear and apply into equipment? Yes, it's important. But what is it about this video that created that engagement that other people are wanting in their videos? I can get met with that. A few thoughts. One, it's different. It immediately is different. Most people don't see people making cinematic B roll sequences with an iphone immediately right there. Two, it's a format that I recognized as something that's getting attention. I follow a lot of filmmaking accounts and I was like, oh, this format of showing what you create, whether it's like the timeline on the bottom and the B roll sequence on the top or the actual film POV style, I recognized, oh, these pieces of content are getting shared. These pieces of content are getting a lot of engagement. And I said, oh, I'm going to go start creating this. And I think the key to that is just being observance. And that always develops and change, right? People use social media differently and it always is evolving and changing based on like Instagram reels just came out like it's basically obviously like mimicking Tiktok. I thought that was very interesting. That's a side tangent. But like people use Instagram in a very specific way, people use Tiktok in a very specific way. People use Youtube in a very specific way. But now that people got used to how to use Tiktok and all of a sudden Instagram reels came out. Now I'll see the Tiktok dances on Instagram reels. It has become like a meme of its own, right. And I think that's because it's how people are used to using a platform and for the filmmaking photography community, show people the process, then show them. The result was very viral on Tiktok and I was like, oh, that's going to start carrying over to Instagram. So that was my mindset around why I did this. And it's a vibe, there's a feeling, it's storytelling in the sense of you're showing someone's experience and you're giving it in a way that is aesthetically pleasing. And what can you kind of speak to? That is that it's obviously all these techniques apply to any piece of equipment. But when it comes to storytelling and, you know, using video to tell that story, what have you kind of learned over the years with that process? Good question. It's just like a, there's a finesse to a good video versus a great video versus a holy crap video. Right? And it's all these little subtle things that come together. I don't claim to be the best technical filmmaker. I know there's so many people who are amazing at both the shooting and editing process, right? But it's like you can just like bring or be willing to teach yourself all those little elements and work on them and they all come together. I think that's what makes something stand out in my mind in this specific project. In this video, it's handheld. Can you shoot handheld video? Well, do you know how to use your body and not just your hands? Do you know what types of shots can you shoot versus what you can? Right, there's certain shots with the gimble. If I was like chasing her and she was running, obviously, unless you're trying to get like a shaky like action scene, but understanding how to do that is one thing, color correction, right? So understanding how to color, correct, and grade a shot, once again, something that's not typical for an iphone video. But if you can bring all of those little elements together, understanding how to edit a sequence together that feels natural and not forced or awkward cuts, I think all of those elements coming together like a little bit of editing technique, shooting technique, understanding how to color grade, understanding how to cut a sequence to a beat, and not just like randomly putting shots together to some song that doesn't really fit. I think those are all the elements that really come together. I imagine like something that's once again, I'm a structured person, so you can break that down and kind of like put that onto a spreadsheet. And it's something that is just unspoken and kind of like you have to have a finesse, an awareness that's unspoken. And I think being able to have both of those elements is really what brings that together. All right, so what's the thing if you were to do this project, now that you've done this one, and let's say you want to do, I want to do another 32nd. What's the one thing that you would upgrade or change to really make it even one step better? It's a good question. I would bring in some element of humor or pop culture relevancy is because that's really the things that people connect with on the Internet, whether it's on Youtube, especially in this short format, right? Is something that people relate to. It can be expressed in so many different ways. Whether it is like getting in a fight with your girlfriend and creating a little sequence of that obviously audio that brings something in actual dialogue. That's immediately something I would probably bring in is like, how could I create like a little dialogue sequence that shows something that's relatable, humorous, and connect with people in that way? I think that's what I would do because that's really, I think what people relate to, especially in short format content like Instagram and Tiktok, which is obviously this is meant for that platform. You see a lot of people who are in the social media creator world who do that type of stuff. And on the most low quality way, they're like color grading their footage and doing B roll sequences. But they're doing something that connects with people that's relatable. Whether it's like some goofy sequence of a girlfriend and a boyfriend ghosting each other while they're texting, or something stupid like that. And it's kind of like, I think to a filmmaker or creative like, oh, that's stupid, but that's what people care about. So how can you blend those two things together, the pop culture elements and the relatability element with storytelling, filmmaking, and those two things together. I think that's the stuff that stands out. Exactly, yeah. How do you express the community thought or the stuff that so many people relate to express that in a video. That's something that I'm really working on changing, you know? Yeah. The type of content that I create for social media platforms because what I think is good is like high produced, the majority of people is like entertainment humor, something that. Oh, yeah, I know that. I get that. So that's something that, Yeah, I'm working on that balance as well. So to kind of sum it up and wrap it up here, what's kind of something you want to leave the students with, these cinematographers, upcoming video creators. You know what's a little piece of advice, you know that you've learned over the years, you want to leave them with. I would say this, I think it's easy to, especially as a filmmaker and a creative, to focus on what other people do and be overwhelmed by that. I think it's hard to sometimes when you get in your own head of like creating your own style and the way that you create content. I think though it's a balance of observing and learning from others while still at the same time creating your own style. Don't be so focused and headstrong about like I want to do it the way that I want to do it. On the flip side, don't be focused on like I'm going to do exactly what Sam colder, do it and it's going to work. And I'm going to be a travel influencer and I was that person too. I literally turned down jobs, so I could go fly to Bali, and I'm going to go film waterfalls. And that was the most amazing experience I've ever had. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to create the same result from that. My point in saying that is that focus on your style, focus what is authentic to you and observe what people do. Because really the blend of the two is really, I think, how you're going to create success in that. I'm very much like, coming from a background of digital marketing, I think more from a strategist, more so than the creative. But if you can bring both those elements together, both the creative mindset and the strategic observant mindset, I think that's really what will stand out and allow you to one, not only be creatively fulfilled, but also understand like what type of content are people hiring for where if I'm looking to become a full time filmmaker and be paid for this career and skill, what types of jobs and things are people going to hire me for versus just the creative side of things? And I think both of those things need to be understood and brought together. Mm hmm. Yeah, I love that, man. It's all about remixing. And talk a lot about that. Taking yourself, you other people's ideas and yeah, remixing and building something new, but building on top of what's worked before you know so Well, perfect man, thank you for coming on today and expounding on all the stuff that you learned on making this project. And of course going to link to all your sites so that all the students can check out your work. And looking forward to seeing the next iphone project, the next smartphone video. Glad chat and thanks and. 37. Main Types of Microphones: Here we are key fundamentals and principles of getting good sound recording. I know I've talked about sound already while you've been shadowing me on some of these shoots that I've been doing for you guys. But this is just an extra in depth dive into Yeah, the mechanics that make good sound quality when you're shooting. So let's get into it. Some of the basics that I just want to cover with you is you always want to capture the best sound quality. Why is that? Because people generally won't click away from an overexposed or grainy image like I mentioned. But they'll click away from audio that is echoy, buzzy, or distorted. So here are some main key recording types and ways for you to get clean audio. First, I want to talk about the three main types of cameras, cameras that the first three main types of audio recorders or ways to record audio. We have our lavalier, Mike, we have shock and Mike, and we have a zoom or a handheld recorder. And I'm just going to briefly explain, man, I cannot talk today. Briefly explain the benefits, the downsides, and the positives of each type of these recorders. The lavalier captures sound in a small sphere, which is called an omnidirectional mic. It gets in all omni directions around the microphone. This is perfect for interviews, Youtube, or when the microphone needs to be hidden or out of sight. I'm doing this course with a lavaler mic because I want it to match the audio that I get. When I'm doing the learning exercises and walking around the house and shooting, and moving. I don't have a boom operator that can follow me around with a boom mic. So it's really best for my scenario. It's portable. It's wireless. I highly recommend it for pretty much all shooting scenarios. You're not going to get that wider deeper podcast, the sounding voice recorder from a lavalier mic because the microphone itself is on the tinier side. Those big, wider microphones that you see for podcasts or even shotgun mics, they have more ability to pick up more information vibration because the recording device itself is bigger. So that is one downside of the lavalier mic. You're giving up a certain level of audio width and quality for the portability, convenience and just overall ease of using it. Now the shock un mice captures what's directly in front of the mic. Okay, it's used for capturing subjects at a distance which is perfect. Or it can be used on board a camera or connected to a boom pole or a tripod type of setup. That you can have just out of frame right about there capturing my audio. You always want your shock un mic to be pointing at the base of the source of the audio that you're trying to get. You don't want it pointing here, you know? You want it to be pointing right where the source of the voice or sound is resonating from. So that's a small little tip. And that really goes for all mics too, I must say, is that you want to get the distance of the microphone to the audio source as minimal as possible. I'll show in the shadowing demonstration, in the next lecture, that you'll see what kind of effects the distance of the microphone to the subject has on the overall recording quality and, um, sound dynamics. But that's a good tip for any microphone that you're using. And just to reiterate, I don't know if I touched on it, but for the shotgun mic, it's perfect for when you are at a distance of. So let's say you're shooting a soccer game and you want to get audio of kicking the ball of the ball going to the goal of the audience cheering. You can't go around and put a lavalier mic on each one of these people, but what you can do is use a shock gun mice to shoot directionally the audio that you want to get picked up or received into your recording. The shockgun mic is perfect for those kind of scenarios where you can't always get up close and personal, but you want to pick up what's happening in front of the camera. Audio wise, it's perfect. Now if you're getting interview stuff, you don't want to be shooting with a shock gun mic across the room. The shock gun mice is great for ambient noises like cars, Like I mentioned, soccer game noises at a distance. Any other kind of noise that you want to pick up that creates an atmosphere for your video, But you don't want to be sitting across the room shooting interview audio with the microphone on the Ashokan mic. You know, multiple feet or yards away from the subject. That's going to have an echoe, nondesirable thing feeling for interview type scenarios. So I just want you guys to make that distinction between picking up audio and a surrounding with a directional mic shockunmiic and then also interview. It's two separate scenarios where the distance of the microphone to the subject doesn't matter so much for ambient atmospheric noises. But when it's talking like this, you don't want it to be across the room. So let's move on. The handheld recorder, most commonly, Zoom is the largest of these companies. This is a recorder that allows mics to be plugged into it, so you can do in field mixing. That means you have multiple microphones that are getting plugged in and you can level those audios on your chute at your production. And it can also pick up stereo from the microphone that's built in. Generally all zooms have that and it and they're also generally have CelR inputs so you can do more live event or music productions with multiple microphones and multiple channels. I don't think that you guys will be using these very often. Maybe if you have some type of podcast or video podcast, or you do a lot of interviews with multiple subjects, using the zoom will be handy. But I just kind of wanted to cover the main three so that we're all speaking the same language and we all have a general understanding of when to use what and what scenario and what the pros and cons are. Okay, so in the next lecture I'm actually going to be shadowing you guys are. Well, you guys are going to be shadowing me. And I'm going to be showing you dynamics of sound in a scenario and how that's affecting your overall sound quality. I'll see you guys there. 38. Sound Dynamics In Your Environment: I always want to say, okay. So. But I notice I always say, okay, what else can I say besides and then I'm like all all right. So I'm like damn, I don't know how to not do it. Okay. So okay. So I'm just going to do it. So here we are. We are at the same filming location of the majority of almost all of the talking portion of this course. I'm using the same exact microphone in almost the same exact position I generally film from about right here. This is the backdrop. But I'm sure as you've been listening and going through the learning lessons in this course, even though I'm in the same scenario, it sounds quite a bit different. So what we're going to talk about in this learning lesson is sound dynamics. Choosing a location to film that in your space that you want to film that has the best sound possible. And how to actually change the scenario to upgrade your sound if the situation isn't that ideal. Now the reason why, even though I'm standing in this normal place that I've been filming for this course, but it sounds so different is because I normally have two big sound dampen eras that I put up a big wall of curtains or blankets or anything soft, it takes out the reflectivity of the room. And so that's where we're going to kind of go over in this lesson. So I kind of want to start by walking around the house so that you can actually hear the difference of what different scenarios actually sound like. So we're standing in the middle of the room, so we're getting kind of equal echo from all directions. Now if we see we have a carpet. This is really picking up a lot of the sound reflection. What we want to get rid of is the reverb stuff. The reverb is what makes things not sound good. So if I have my microphone and it's really close to me, and there's not going to be that much reverb if I'm talking directly into the microphone. Now, if I hold the microphone out here and I'm still talking, you see that it's not getting nearly as good of sound quality because there's a lot of extra reverb that it's picking up as well. So the very first thing that you want to do is have your microphone as close as possible to your subject. Forgive me for any of the noises that this is creating in your ears as a student, but it's for the learning, okay? So we want to always have the microphone as close as possible, whether that's a shock and mic, a zoom mic, a lavalier mic, or even your iphone, like I mentioned in the other courses, that audio hack that I showed with the phone, That's the first thing that I want to talk about. Now let's talk about reflectivity. So if I come over here, if I'm talking directly towards this, it's gonna pick up some echo. If I have the same distance, but I'm talking at a wall, you can hear a huge difference in the sound dynamics. So when you're looking at a room, you're looking for good lighting, you're looking for a good background, you're looking for good dynamics for your sound. Now if I walk into this room and the room is about half of the size, you're going to be able to hear the difference in echo as I'm walking in here, so it's a lot fuller. I can hear myself a lot more. Which on the microphone is going to pick up a lot more of that echo. So the way we would solve this is by putting up a sound dampener, by adding rugs, by covering any reflective surface that we can. This is helping. These are certainly helping. But stuff like this, no, this is not helping. So we're going to take a look at adding a sound dampener, But I just want to walk through the house so you guys will be able to kind of think ahead as you're setting up your scenes. So let's now take a look and go into a room that has absolutely no sound dampening. And I want you to hear the difference as I'm walking through here. So as I'm walking in here, this room is about the same size as the dining room that we were just in. But I feel like I'm in an echo chamber in here. So same size like I mentioned, Smaller creates more reverb, but more importantly, reflectivity. If I put a carpet in here, if I put some soft things on the walls, couches are great, pillows are really great. You want stuff that's not going to bounce the audio waves around in your environment. So you can see this is like E, this is not usable. I can't film in here until I set it up with proper sound dynamics. Now the next thing that we're going to do is we're going to set a kind of a homemade thing that you will be able to do at home using just a blanket or a rug that you hang that's going to cut out all of this noise. So remember what this sounds like, and then I'm going to go grab the blanket and we're going to set it up and hear the difference. 39. How to DIY For Better Sound Instantly: As you can see, I just took about a minute to set up this backdrop stand. We have two of these tripods with a vertical or horizontal crossbar. And with just a simple blanket, you can use really any blanket for this. But the thicker and the more dense, the better. What this is doing is it's capturing the sound that's bouncing around. And it's blocking it from obviously reflecting and making that crazy echo chamber like before. When we heard it, it sounded like this. Remember what this sounds like? And then I'm going to go grab the blanket and we're going to set it up and hear the difference. So it's a lot better if I had my set up, let's say I really wanted to film in here. This has pretty decent natural light. We haven't cut off or blocked any of the light because this is more about the audio dynamics. But if I were to choose to film in here, but the audio wasn't good. Firstly, I would set up something like this to really pick up and dampen a lot of that sound. And I would speak at it. So the closer I'm going to get to this, the closer, so the closer I'm going to get to this, why you kick in my backdrop. So the closer that I get to this, the more that it's going to pick up any excess sound. So your voice is like a cone that's shooting out. The more I move away, the more it's starting to hit the rest of these surfaces. Right. So you want to keep that in mind is whatever you do have in your scenario, that's dampening sound, They're sorry, there's cars honking outside. It's ridiculous. What we're going to talk about next is how to get those noises away. So, like I mentioned, huge difference right before and after is night and day. And I haven't even put a rug in here, I haven't put any couches in here, I haven't put in anything. It's simply using what I'll call a backdrop stand to really fix the audio problems that you may encounter when you're filming at home or for a client. And you need something that's easy whether you're shooting at home, But I really want to show you this is a great alternative to not having to have anything super expensive. All you need is two tripods and a horizontal crossbar like this, a blanket and two clamps, and you'll be able to change the dynamics of your room very easily. 40. 3 Ways to Remove Noise Makers From Your Shoot: We understand really more about the dynamics of our sound. What I want to talk about now is what really can make our break. The quality of the sound that we're getting right now, we're in our recording space. If we are quiet and we listen, we can pick up a few things that's happening in the environment. After you've figured out where you want to film, before you hit the record button, you want to take a survey of things that are causing excess noise, that are getting excess noise. I don't know that was excess noise that are getting picked up in your scene, just like what we just heard. So we're going to walk through and find out what those potential problems are in most scenarios and we're going to fix those problems. So by first or one of the first things mainly is window noise, okay? Wind that's coming out of a window, coming through a window. Cars honking in the background like we just had filming the other lecture. Plenty of cars because we live here in Los Angeles and there's just a lot of issues. Dogs barking the distance, whatever. So whether it's obvious or not to you, I definitely want to just mention that closing all your windows before you start recording. Very important. The next thing that we hear is air conditioning. This is creating a steady hum in the background. Feels good, feels really good, but it creates a steady hum in the background. So before we record, AC, boom, the next thing, and this is a much more low key, the window and the air conditioning unit. Very much. You got to fix those. Otherwise when you're editing there's going to be a constant hum in the background. One of the reasons people click away from videos is if it's echoi distorted, buzzing, humming in the background, you always want to have clean audio. The last thing is the hum on the fridge now might sound funny, might not, I don't know. But I, if we listen, you don't want this in your recording. Okay. So I always shut off the fridge and a little hack to that because sometimes you forget to turn the fridge back on. I set a timer on my phone when I shut off the fridge, that in 2 hours the timer will go off. You can't do anything about the honking, but the 2 hours when the timer goes off, it reminds me to turn the fridge back on because you don't want to leave that off. I've done it many times, but man, these people are honking. Like on the lecture that I'm doing about sound, what is the jokes? So that should give you guys a really good one oh one on how to take a normal area and make it sound a lot better. How to use sound dynamics in a room that might be very echoy. Always keeping the microphone as close to the subject as possible and really killing the things that can distort or make distracting noises in your recordings. 41. Auto vs. Manual Audio Settings: All right, cool. So now that you guys have seen, it's pretty interesting how different environments reflect sound in different ways. How the settings on the camera or whatever you're using to record how that changes the sonics as well. And kind of, you know, an overall view of shadowing me on how to choose your locations. Now I want to actually record a voice over that we're going to use later in this course for you guys so you can see how I would actually go about doing that. So let's do it. I'm going to actually grab this camera in the back and we're going to get started. All right, perfect. So we have this other camera here, and right now I'm going to scroll over to the audio settings and Yeah, right now as you can see, it's set to manual. Now if we go into that setting, we can see our record level. And when I'm speaking right now, it's hitting just below negative 12. And negative 12 is really the sweet spot where you want to be getting the majority of your audio peaking at or just above that region you never wanted to get to zero because that's when it starts distorting. So for this shotgun, specifically, in this scenario, the manual setting is actually set pretty a little bit low. So we're going to turn that up. What I do is just select it, scroll the wheel up, and now you can see where it's pretty much peaking just about or right below the negative 12, which is perfect. Now what I want to show you guys is the difference in sound quality. If we take a, listen to me talking and then when I stop talking, okay, you hear a little bit of the room tone, a little bit of the atmosphere. But if I were to change it to automatic, let's see what that sounds like. Now we're on auto and so we can see what, you know, we can see what the recording situation and what the recording quality sounds like. While I'm talking, it sounds fine, but when I stop talking, the camera is doing its best to boost the levels to what it thinks that I want to record, right? So the auto is great for different scenarios where you don't really have the capability of changing settings. Let's say you're at a concert and it's quiet and there's people that you're interviewing and talking to and then you're recording the live audio of the concert coming through the speakers. That's going to be a big fluctuation. That situation you may want to do auto unless you're going to be, you know, changing your settings. But it's just good to know that when you have a sit down interview, or you're sitting down and recording your own video, you want to set that audio recording, setting two manuals so that you can get the crisp audio that's hitting at the right amount of input for your voice. And then when you stop speaking, it's not trying to fluctuate the amount of input to maintain that amount of sound that's coming in. 42. My DIY Set Up: And you know what, actually, I want to show you guys maybe a little bit of close ups for the kind of sound light situation set up that I have right here, just in case you have any questions. So this light is simply a 36 inch diffuser. Okay. I think I got that at Sammy's camera for like 30 bucks. So this is a really great purchase to add soft lighting and also work. Secondly, as a great sound dampener Now now this is simply just a C stand that has a 90 degree articulating arm. Okay. And I just took a sheet and put that over the arm with two clamps at the top. Super easy, super simple way to get a very large change in the quality of your sound and you can go more intense into the amount of sound dampening that you do or less. It's really a personal preference, up to you of how solid you want your audio to be coming through, but this is an easy way that takes maybe ten to 15 minutes to set up. And if you're one of those people that shooting with a permanent set up at your house or wherever you shoot, doing an option like this is an excellent, excellent way to make all of your future videos sound much better. In the next lecture, I'm going to be diving into me, actually recording my own voice over. And you guys will my own voice over. And you guys will be able to see what that looks and what that sounds like. So let's check it out. 43. Case Study: Create a Great Voiceover with a Lavalier Mic vs. Shotgun Mic: Now we're going to be recording my voice over. It's going to be a roll coverage, a role audio for something that we're going to be adding two together later in chorus. Man, I'm just doing some crazy things today. I'm going to kind of move my set up a little bit. I don't want the laptop in the shot for this. And move this out of the way. Okay, cool. Now we're clean, got nothing on here. So I created this script with the pre production checklist that's actually from the course before this. It's a small example. I want you guys to not get too intertwined with this creative idea, but it's just something that's funny to me. I really love coffee. Kind of addicted to it. Sometimes it feels like am I drinking the coffee or is the coffee drinking me? Because I feel like sometimes, like the craving is so damn real. But anyways, this voice over and this script and concept came from the previous course to this one. And the whole checklist, the pre production checklist that helped me come up with the idea and everything is an actual handout for that chorus. So if you're interested in that, it is in the bonus lecture, which is the final lecture of this course. You guys can check out that one to help you come up with your concepts and really hone in on Yeah. Videos that you want to create using that course and that handout. So let's get to the voiceover. So yeah, you know, this realization hit me earlier today. It's kind of, it's hard to say. Mm, yeah. It's hard, it's hard to say. But I am addicted to coffee. I just love the entire experience of it. Those lovely textured beans with the aroma that fills the entire room. And then brewing it when you pour that piping hot water over those freshly ground beans, and then the gift of actually being able to drink it right with all that productive energy that goes through the body. You know what? And then sometimes I feel like maybe I don't need this. Maybe this is something that I should stop indulging in. I mean, really? Do I need to be drinking this stuff like every day? Yeah. You know what, I think I'm gonna stop today. Yeah, on second thought, I think I'm going to get a second cup. So hopefully that was slightly entertaining for you and moderately funny. But I want to also show you guys what that would sound like because for this kind of video, I'm planning on using the visuals of me for the beginning and for the end. So I shot an angle like this with me looking at the camera for the voice over. But if it's something like audio for an intro video where you know you are not going to be using, you actually talking to the camera. In that situation where the video doesn't matter. You can actually use a shock and mic that you have or an actual recording microphone for podcasts that you use, or whatever a bigger microphone would be that's bigger and can get more width and depth than a lavalier mic. So I'm going to show you what that would look like and really what that would sound like, the difference between the two recordings. Now we have this on and to really get that kind of like deeper podcast voice that's really open and sounds like radio show. You want to get a nice shock at mic or boom mic or zoom really close to your mouth for this kind of situation. And so if we weren't going to be using my visuals, what it would look like, and of course I wouldn't be doing it handheld. I would set it up on a tripod. Tripods are being used for this video shoot, so I'm just going to do it by hand. But of course you'd have it on a tripod and you would get as close to the microphone. So let's switch over from the lavalier to the shock at mic. And here you can really hear the difference of probably a lot more width that's getting picked up while I speak. And if I was to move this away, you would start to hear a difference compared to when I move this closer to the mouth. You can really feel more of a resonance and it sounds a lot more like a professional voice over. So now I'm going to read just a few lines from the script that I just did for the coffee video. I just love the entire experience of it from start to finish, the texture of those sweet beans and earthy aroma that fills the room. I just love the entire experience of it. Those lovely textured beans with the aroma that fills the entire room. Maybe this is something I should stop indulging in. I mean, really? Do I need to drink this stuff like every day? I mean, really? Do I need to be drinking this stuff like every day? Yeah. You know what, I think I'm gonna stop today on second thought. I'm going to get a second cup. So as you can see, you don't want to be holding this by hand. That's not advisable because anytime you're touching it or moving it, you're going to be picking up on those sounds that will be getting picked up into your audio recording. But I wanted to show you guys what the different qualities of sound happen when you are recording with different types of microphones. This is like a like $150 mic compared to this $600 Sen, iser lavalier. But the quality in depth really comes from the size of the recorder that's receiving those different bands of frequency, the different range of frequency. So I hope that gives you guys some insights on the audio recording process and how you can really use it to upgrade the quality and sound of your videos. 44. Smartphone Audio Hack: Okay, so now that you have a pretty good understanding of using slightly more professional audio, I also wanted to talk about using your smartphone. So I'm going to do screen recording here. I've actually found that the audio directly from the microphone on iphones and smartphones in general can be pretty damn good if you know how to use it. One option for you is to attach a lavalier mic directly into your smartphone. You're going to have to get various adapters. I will link the products that I recommend in the next lecture so that you guys can see what I use. If I do have to record audio using a lavalier mic through my smartphone. Road is an excellent company that makes it very easy to do this. Of course, you'll need the little lightning bolt, thunderbolt, lightning bolt adapter, whatever it is. But this is a great option. So I'm going to hit record and you guys will be able to see what that sounds like directly into my phone versus what it sounds like using just the audio from the phone speaker itself. This is what it sounds like just using the audio from the mice in the phone. But I want to show you a little bit of a hack that I found here doing voice recordings on the road and not really having time or not really having the right equipment while I've been traveling. What you can do is actually bring the microphone from your phone close to your mouth. But you don't want to have the mic directly pointed here, because this is going to really pick up in the mic. The little hack that I've found is turning the phone sideways and talking into it directly this way, really close to the mouth. You can actually get good sounding audio if you guys are recording a voice over for a video that you're doing or a trailer for your Youtube channel. Whatever it is, smartphone can really get you really decent, really good sounding audio. So I just wanted to add this little tip here that you can either use lavalier going directly into the camera if that's not something that's available to you. There are very decent lavalier mics that go directly into the smartphone and there's even the shotgun ones that I don't personally have, but I will link because I've had friends use it and it works really well for more of the logging style. I'll link that in the next lecture. But trust me, if you use the built in, but hold it sideways to the mouth so that the air is not hitting the speaker directly, but the sound is still getting picked up very cleanly. You will be surprised. I've used it for a few projects in a pinch to record my own voice over. So I hope that little smartphone hack helps you guys out. And I will see you in the next lecture. 45. Learning Exercise: Record Your Crystal Clear Audio: So that's pretty crazy. Sound dynamics is huge. I would much rather record my audio on a decent microphone in a set up with good sound dynamics. Then a super expensive microphone in an echoy room with loud, distracting, buzzing noises or anything, that's going to really degrade the overall clarity of your sound. So now what we're going to do is work on recording your new and improved audio with the techniques that we've learned. So we're going to be synthesizing these techniques and you're going to be able to apply these enhancements to your own recording. So I want you to record your voice using this new knowledge. And this can be used as the voiceover for the B roll montage we're gonna shoot later in the course. I mentioned that a few times. If you haven't gotten your voice over yet, don't worry. But it is important because we're going to keep building these techniques on top of each other so that by the end of the course, you're going to have everything that we brought together all in one video. That's really the goal, one video that you walk away with with all these techniques that are highly produced with a better final product. So while you're doing your voice over, getting your more enhanced audio, you can record video of that if you like as well, or you can just record audio of it totally up to you. So your assignment is to apply these techniques. We've learned to get crystal clear sounding vocals. The first example that you're going to record is your vocals in a normal environment without any changes or without any use of the techniques we've gone over. In the second example, you're going to hit the Record button and record your vocals with the new techniques used. These techniques are proper mic settings, proper placement, choosing the right type of environment, canceling out any kind of background noise makers, and setting up your surroundings with good sound dynamics, using a DIY set up, or using any type of belongings or equipment that you have, that's going to set up a great sounding environment. Then you want to export and share your audio link with the combined before and after to the Q and A section so that you and your other students can learn from each other's mistakes. Learn from what each other are doing, right, And so on. So with that said, go ahead and upload your before and afters, and I will see you in the next learning lesson. 46. Review and Improve Your Footage: Yes, yes, yes. So we got a chance to see me in different kind of audio scenarios and how to get the best audio for your video. Now what we're going to do is take a look at the footage that we've shot so far. So ideally up until this point, you've basically shot some sort of talking scene. Whether or not that is you walking and talking, talking to the laptop, talking with selfie video, talking to a DSLR or mirrorless camera. There's some type of dialogue or voiceover or something of some kind that we can basically create a shot list for and block out or yeah, basically create a list of cutaway shots to add on top of that footage. So what we're going to be talking about is reviewing and improving your footage. As you can see here, I have all my before and after shots. You can see the improvements in the stylizing, in the coloring, in the lighting, in the depth in the settings, all of these different attributes that we've talked about so far. Now, this is where a lot of people can call their videos done, right? But we're going to take it a step further and introduce what's called B roll or cutaway shots. Simply put, it's just an extra layer of footage on top of what you've already shot that further explains what's going on in your video, so let's dive into that further. 47. Understanding B-Roll and B-Roll Coverage: So let's talk about understanding B role and its purpose now. Basically, there's two keys to filming or creating a better looking video. What we're doing is we're shooting what the viewer will experience in their minds. That's, we're going to get a little bit on the theory side here, but I want to keep it very straightforward for you guys. But basically is this, is that the type of footage or the type of video that you watch is always made up of two different types of coverage. And that's a roll coverage which is the main footage of your video. This is a role coverage. Right now, it's me talking. It's your main layer of footage. I said that twice or three times. It's your main layer of video in your video, right? That's called A role. Now, B role is basically the cutaway shots or what is added on to that layer of video to further explain. So I've mentioned that before. And basically it's primary and secondary footage. And the reason I say that, it's what the viewer will experience in their mind. If I'm talking to you right now and you're watching this video, this is all you're experiencing. Now, if I took it a step further and added cutaway shots or you started to see different layers of footage in this video, it would take you on a different journey and a different experience in your mind which would then create a better looking and feeling more produced video. So that's really the primary thing that we're talking about here. So let's dive a little bit more into a role coverage now. This is the main footage of your video or scene for an interview. It's the subject speaking, just like I mentioned for a story. It's the main characters interaction between. It's the main interactions between characters. Okay, so if it's for your Tiktok video, your role footage is of you dancing, doing some kind of sync to music video vibe, right? But if you added cutaway shots to that, then there would be a little bit more depth. So that's the role, the cutaway shots to the role overall, it's the main driving force of the entire video. And lastly, a role is generally shot first. So for this course, for example, I'm shooting all my main role footage. And then I have a shot list of basically what needs to be layered on top of that. And then I go, boom, knock out the shot list. And then I have everything that I need to work with in post production. Now B roll coverage is the cutaway shots, the inserts, the close ups of when someone is speaking or picking up the phone or something important happens, that's what you're adding on on top of your footage. It can be an object of importance like a phone, like I mentioned, that you shoot a close up after filming the main scene. It's the shots overlaid on top of your interview or your footage. Just like this cutaway shot of the screen, right? The text that you're seeing on screen is technically B roll footage that's overlaid on top of the role footage to further explain and get across to you, the viewer, the video that's happening in your mind to further get across the point of what I'm trying to teach or make a funny situation or tell a story or whatever your type of video is. This is the overall concept, so you're showing the audience the important things to take note of. So it's kind of like an establishing shot of a character that's in a specific location, right? It's a big part of making a higher produced video is really by using these cool cutaway shots. So here's an example of what this coverage looks like. You have to create style. Style, something that you see, Style, something that you bring, that's more than anything physical. I've been through so much in my lifetime. The biggest thing was me tearing my ECO, you know, and I just try to do like in and out. It kind of just popped the first time, then I try to go in the second time and that's when I knew I toured. I feel like if you get down and you worry and you know, like that means you don't have the belief that you say you do. So this leads us to different shot types. So in the next lecture, I'm gonna dive into what these different type of shot types are. And then we're going to go over a learning exercise where we're going to create our own shot list. And then you guys are going to shadow me and see the actual process of having our roll coverage. Ideally, you've already shot that during this course. And then I'm going to walk you through the process, step by step, of how I would go about shooting this different kind of B roll coverage, using different shot types. And using camera movement. And other cool little tricks that you guys will be able to incorporate into all your future videos. So let's get into it. I'll see you in the next lecture. 48. Importance of Using Multiple Shot Types: Okay, so I get really excited about this part because we are going to be talking about shot types and camera movement, which is one of my favorite favorite parts. So let's start with knowing your different shot types. Now what I'm going to show you is an example of a scene with one shot type, and we're going to see what that looks like. Now we're going to look at that same exact scene with multiple shot types. It's going to allow for us to have more depth in that same scene, but also stretch time, have more footage to work with in post production and to really create an actual experience that extends beyond just a five second clip. Let's check it out. It's pretty cool, right? So we're looking at close ups, wide shots, medium shots, a lot of slow motion. So like you mentioned before, this is a perfect scenario to use slow motion capability on the camera that you're shooting on to tell a story. What we're doing here is really using our different ability to tell a story through choosing what ingredients to show to the audience. Just like a chef, a little bit of salt, a little bit of pepper, a little bit of cayenne, add some spice. This is really how we use different shot types and really how we decide, you know, how to effectively tell our story. And so what we're going to do now is go over what the title of these different shot types are and then I'll briefly explain when to use which type of shot. 49. Shot Types: In Depth: So up first we have an extreme wide shot or a landscape shot. What this is doing is it's showing our subject in an environment. So when we're planning out our video or when we're not sure what to shoot, I'm going to kind of run through the reasons and the purpose of these different types of framing. For the extreme wide of the landscape shop. We want to show our subject in their surrounding, in this situation. If we're shooting a video, and we want the audience to know that our subject is in a particular area that's of some type of importance. The wide shot of the landscape shot is a perfect shot to map out and put into your shot list that we're going to work on together. But it's a good thing to keep in mind that that shows the environment that you're shooting in. So what you're showing to the audience, you always have to keep in mind that is of importance. So we're not just randomly swinging the camera around or pouring our phone in random places, but we're always having the thought in the back of our mind that we're showing what's important. We're creating what tastes good, like a chef for our audience, with what we're producing, Right, So the next kind of shot is a wide shot. Now this is showing the subject closer up, but still some of the environment. So we're going to use this when we want to have a full body shot of our character talking, speaking, doing something of importance. But we can still see the scene that he's in or she is in. The next shot is a cowboy or a medium wide shot. This is generally the knees or the shins up. We don't use this shot too much, but I wanted to put it in here so you guys knew the terminology and you'd be able to recognize when someone mentioned it. But it was kind of like honestly created in those old western films where they wanted to show a full body of the character but also the gun holster that rest along the leg. That genre of like Cowboys and Indian style of western movies created this kind of framing, to be honest. So you probably won't use it too much, but it is still a comfortable framing. And the other thing that I'll mention is with all of these framings, these are like industry filmmaking, standard type of framings that are comfortable, wow, still conveying a certain story. The reason I say that is because if I were to cut off my head here and continue to talk, this would be an uncomfortable framing, right? If I were to come down over here and continue to talk, it would be an odd framing because the eye level would be low, Whatever it is, it can be used artistically and you can break these rules in specific scenarios where it makes sense. But all of these framings that I'm going to show you are ones that you can use that comfortably place the subject in the framework. In, you know, on specific areas of the frame with their eye line at certain levels that you can use to create something that looks good and feels right to the audience. That's the main purpose here. Next up, we have a medium shot. This is waist high. This is, if you're talking, this is great for interviews. This is great for two characters communicating with each other. This is great for action videos where there's a lot of movement and you want to see the character and really see their expression, but still show enough of their body and the surrounding. The next up is a medium close up. This is really chest high. When I'm saying or when the character is saying something important, you know, this is kind of the distance that kind of a selfie video kind of gives you a little bit. Is the chest high? It's kind of intimate, you know what I mean? You feel like you're with the person. So the other thing that I'll mention with that is that the camera is acting as your viewer's eye. You know, the camera is really where your audience sees your video from. And so if the camera is far away from your subject or you, there's kind of a distance, There's kind of a non intimacy. And by intimacy, I just simply mean a closeness or a connection. Or I understand you, I feel that we're on the same page, kind of feeling, right. So the closer I get, the more of an intimate feeling is created, right. And so that's something to keep in mind that when we start bringing the camera closer to you or your subject that's in your video, you're creating more of a connection with the audience, right? When it's far away and you want to see the surrounding, there's not really a connection with the person it's, they're seeing, the audience is seeing everything. But when we get closer, we're getting more connected. So the next shot is a close up. This is a lot more intimate and this is great for saying very poignant, very dramatic statements. If you really want to make your point, you can cut to a close up shot and really make your point like that versus a wide shot that's, you know, not really pushing in so much on the viewer, just seeing what the character or person is projecting or displaying with their facial expressions. A close up is just really showing the face and really like neck high, so all the viewer has to look at is what's going on in the person's face. Which if we know this, then we can use that for specific scenarios in our scene when we want to say something that's very important or dramatic. And then we have an extreme close up, which really is just a little bit more of a pushing on the normal close up. And you don't really need to use this a whole lot unless it's a very, very important part of your scene. Or you really want to show someone's emotional response to a certain scenario where you're filming yourself. And you really want to, you know, say something that you feel very strongly about. The close up is very perfect for this moment, right? And then we have the macro shot. This can be used for the person who's in your video that's talking, or you can actually use it for objects in your video. Because the small object that's becoming very large in the frame is filling the entire frame. The viewer and your audience is going to subconsciously feel that this is a very important, very, very important part of the video. Like if we show this person's eye opening in the morning, they're going to feel that it's oh, wow, this person just woke up for the day. Or if we show a close up on a certain object, the viewer's going to feel, oh wow, okay, this object is of importance. They're not thinking that consciously, but trust me, they're feeling that subconsciously and picking up on these little things that you can use to further tell your story. 50. 180 Framing Analysis and Shooting with Multiple Cameras: Now you have a really good understanding of different shot types, right? The purpose of those shot types. But I wanted to add a little extra, something sweet and special for you. So these next two learning lessons are actually directly from the more theoretical deep dive into filmmaking course that I have. But I wanted to add them in here because it's really a perfect part of the course to just kind of give you a little bit more of an extra deep understanding of why certain things work, why they don't, and how that's affecting your audience. Because that gets me really excited and I want that, I want you to walk away with a really solid understanding of that. So if you've seen these next two learning lessons in the other course. Perfect. This will be a great refresher to reintroduce these ideas to you if you haven't been in that course. Perfect. This will be a great way to really open your mind up to the more filmmaking theoretical principles. So in the rest of this lecture, I'm going to be diving into creating emotion with framing. Which is once you understand these rules that we just learned, I'm going to show you how to break those rules to creatively create a new and desired effect. And then I'm going to talk about shooting with multiple cameras. So let's get into it. We basically have understood how to make the viewer feel comfortable, right, So that they are drawn into your film. Because if the framing is comfortable, the viewer is comfortable. If the framing is sideways and disoriented, maybe a little shaky, the viewer is going to feel that because like I explained, we're experiencing what's going on in the screen. The screen is doing the thinking and feeling for us, and then as the viewer, we experience all these things. So if you're watching something that's funny, scary, adventurous, whatever it is, the viewer is going to automatically be feeling all those things. Because the film is telling them what to do, right? These are the experiences that we're curating. So let's say at some point in your film, your subject is feeling boxed in instead of having the comfortable framing of the subject on the bottom third. If you frame them on the top third, you're cutting away all the space that that subject has above their physical atmosphere, right? So the viewer inherently automatically feels that they get sucked into that emotional framing by bending that rule. Now let's say at whatever point in our film or video we want the subject and the viewer, because these two go hand in hand to feel open and free. We're going to bend these rules for that viewer to feel open and free, and we're going to give them space to experience that. Now if we want a little bit of a different effect and we want to invoke a more of a thinking or mental process, that's the kind of imagery that we're going to convey to the audience. And so if we frame the subject above the eye level of the camera. You are looking up to the subject and the viewer feels that, that subject is in power because of the relationship between the camera and the subject. Anytime you have to look up to someone like as a child, you are looking up to, you know, elders, your parents, your teachers, physically, you have to physically look up to them. But energetically, there's that exchange where they're in a place of power on the other end of the spectrum. But the subject is being looked down upon through the lens. The viewer will feel in a place of power because they're looking down upon the subject. It's just like in real life where if you want to have a comfortable conversation, you talk eye to eye. You don't talk with one person way down and one person way above. So now let's say we want to create a more mysterious vibe. We're going to not show the entire story, right? We're going to hide some things with the framing. And as you know by now, we could add lighting into the situation and create deep shadows mixed with framing. So you see you're creating all of these ingredients to consciously create specific moments and feelings for your viewers and for your audience. So if you're shooting with one camera, whether it's a music video, a short film, a commercial, whatever it is, it's a good good idea that you always want to shoot your wide shots first. Knock out all your wide shots with whatever film you're shooting, and then work your way in and get the close up. So if you follow this procedure with all of your projects, you'll usually get all the coverage that you need. And when you're shooting with one camera, you're going to need to get plenty of coverage with the environment that you're shooting in. So that you'll have the cutaways and you'll have the B roll shots that you need to connect your story together. Now if you're shooting an interview and you only have one angle, you're going to definitely want to capture the most usable angle for the entire video. Because you're not going to be able to cut to separate angles similar with this video. But what you're going to need to do is make sure that you capture plenty of B roll that you can place on top of what the person is saying. And now if you're shooting with multiple cameras, something to always, always keep in mind is to always have 45 degrees minimum between your two camera angles. Now, why is this? This creates what we call a jump cut, the inpost production. You'll see if you have a camera angle here and then just about 20 degrees away from that first camera angle, you have the same angle from a different camera. When you cut these two together, it, there's not enough contrast between these two shots. It's actually jarring in a very odd way. It creates a very weird jump cut, so it looks uncomfortable for the viewer. What you need to do is always have the distance between two camera angles, at least 45 degrees, that when you cut from this shot to your next A cam from B cam, there's going to be enough contrast between those two shots to be a proper secondary angle. The other thing to do is to have one camera always dedicated to getting the wide coverage right, and then the other camera always dedicated to getting mediums, close up macro shots, whatever it is. This way both of you, shooters or cameramen or whatever it is, are on the same page. And you're getting all that coverage that you need to weave together that story in post production. So you always want your cameras to be complementing each other. This is why we dedicate one camera to getting a certain angle. This creates a certain record of that story in a certain way, and then the other angle of the camera is at a specific perspective. And maybe it's close ups or medium shots that's capturing that same story with a different essence as well. So these different elements create contrast in the storytelling process in post production, always keeping that in mind ahead of time. You have to know that each camera has a specific reason and a specific way that it's capturing the story. So that in post production, you have a very, very easy way to edit and weave that story together. 51. 180 Degree Rule and Framing Balance: We need to talk about the 180 degree rule. Now you have to imagine that anytime you frame up a shot, in this case, the orientation of the subject is on the right of the frame, and she's looking to the left of the frame. This creates an imaginary line of the orientation of the camera and the subject. If we move the camera and break that line going onto the other side of the subject, now that flips the orientation of the entire framing. It went from the subject on the right of the frame looking to the left, to now the subject on the left of the frame looking to the right. So this is the premise of the 180 degree rule, that anytime you frame a shot, you're creating a line that has to do with the orientation of the camera and the subject. When you move the camera physically, let's say that you're shooting a wide shot and you have a certain orientation set up. And then you move in for a close up, but you break that line and go on the other side of that imaginary line. You're flipping the orientation of the framing. You're going from looking left to right, and then suddenly the subject is looking right to left. This isn't just for people, this is for objects. Let's say a house, a doorway, any kind of a tree, any kind of outdoor environment, any situation. There's always going to be this 180 degree rule that once you have those shots that you filmed, and you bring that into post production, when you're trying to cut wide shots with mediums and close ups. Suddenly there's a flip of orientation where everyone's looking left and then suddenly everyone's looking right. Keep this in mind. When framing up your shots, it is incredibly important not to break this rule. Why is this? Because it distracts the audience, right? If suddenly I'm talking, I'm facing this way, and then suddenly I'm talking and facing this way. And then suddenly I'm talking and facing this way. It throws out the audience and it confuses them and creates a not desired effect for the audience. We always want to keep the audience comfortable and engaged in our films. So the next form of cinematic language that we use to create these pleasing images, because that's really what good films do, is they create this cinematic vive, this feeling of imagery that's pleasing to look at. So right now where we're dissecting and breaking down all these things and the theories behind them so that we can use these with any equipment, any camera in any situation. So this next thing is called frame balancing or creating counterpoints. The gist of it is basically that every single object of interest in your frame has a specific weight to it. So right now I'm centered in this image. I have a certain weight where I'm holding down the middle and center and lower part of this frame. It's much more light and open and there's space out here. So if we take a look at this image where our beautiful model is framed to the left of the screen, and there's a counterpoint in the background, that creates an evenly weighted frame. So like I said, each point in the frame is physically carrying its own weight to it. Now if we have the same exact framing, but without this counter pointed weight in the background, you can see it's an incredibly less of a cinematic image because we're losing the balance. It's almost like that image subconsciously, for the viewer, just wants to turn over on its side, right? And what we want is to create balanced framing. It's just like cooking, where you're creating the perfect ingredients for this awesome, amazing dish, right? So if there's too much of one thing, not enough of the other thing, it doesn't have that overall cohesive feeling And look. So now, if we take a look at how this flower is framed, you have a left dominant framing center, dominant and right dominant framing, all with their own weights. So with this in mind, if we can balance out the primary focus of an image with a secondary point of focus or reference in the background, we can easily create much more cinematic framing and imagery. And that does it for these extra learning lessons that I added in after being in the editing process finishing this course, I wanted to really kind of add in a little extra, something from the more theoretical course. So I really hope that gives you some cool insights. In the next learning lesson, we're going to recap our ideas that we've gone over so far and keep moving into more filming principles. 52. Cutaways and Shot Types Recap: Now let's talk about why this is important, okay? The shots used determine how the viewer feels about your video. So I'm going to recap here a little bit so you guys can really make this understanding of different shot types very concrete because it's incredibly important for all your future video projects. Showing different framing of the same scene gives depth and personality. Just like the fire footage that we saw with the drummer, if we didn't have the different kind of personality, framing and shot choices, it's like it just happens in a moment, right? But when we stretch things out and show things of importance, zoom in close ups, far away shots, we get a certain feeling that we're trying to convey to the viewer. And it transports the viewer to really the scene that we're shooting. The goal of this is to make the ordinary action look extraordinary. We all want our videos to look special, and unique, and different, and impactful, and this is one of the best ways to do that. So I'm going to walk you guys through an exercise as well of how I do that for a very ordinary looking scene. And of course, this is really carving out an experience for the viewer. So we always keep our viewers attention and what they're supposed to be seeing in mind. And to kind of use a metaphor, you know, using these different framing types are like words, right? Different kind of words that when put together create sentences that become your scene or become kind of like the paragraph, whole explanation of your video. And if you want to dive more into this kind of theoretical side of cinematography, and really the filmmaking process, because filmmaking has moved from more of an art and a passion about the filmmaking process itself, to more video creating and more online video use. So it's been an interesting transition, but if you do want to learn more about this, I'll link my other chorus that really dives, dives more into these fundamental, deep, deep, deep, timeless filmmaking principles. And I also have free filmmaking tutorials on my Youtube channel that kind of go more into this side of the video creating process. And that about sums it up for shot choice and knowing when to use what type of shot, very important concept. So if you do have any questions, hop over to the student. Q and A, put your questions in there, and if you see any questions from other students that you know the answer to that you want to engage with, feel free to engage with your fellow students. In the next lecture, we're going to be talking about a part that I like very much which is camera movement. I'm going to show you guys and really give you the understanding of how and when to use different types of camera movement because it's called motion picture, right? It's one of the benefits that film and video has that photography doesn't have is the ability to move the camera through space. And the ability to help tell your story and make more impactful videos through this movement. I really, really like this part, so we're going to hop into that in the next lecture. And then we're going to walk through creating a shot list and then you guys are going to shadow me on how to shoot B roll using everything that we've talked about. 53. Main Types of Camera Movement: Yes, yes, he is. One of my favorite parts of this course is camera movement. This is one of my favorite topics because this is like one of the coolest things as a filmmaker is knowing how to consciously move the camera. Okay, so we're going to get into how to use camera movement. I'm going to overview the different types of camera movement. And I want you guys to keep in mind what resonates with you the most out of these main different types of movement. What resonates with you the most, as in like what you like, what gets you excited, and then also what you can use for your video that you're creating during this course. The main types of camera movement overall, the main types are a pushing, pull out, tracking shot, arc shot, crane tilt and pan to get more specific, the first one is a pushion, which is moving the camera closer, going into and showing importance in your scene. When we physically move the camera closer, we're bringing the audience closer to what they're seeing. Creating the sense of, you know, it's a sense of like, ah, a sense of wonder, a sense of wanting to know more. A sense of coming closer to the information, a sense of expanding what is being seen, right? This is kind of like more on the metaphor theoretical side, but this is the feeling that the viewer is going to feel. So if we do the opposite and we do a pull out movement, what we're doing is moving the camera away, we're leaving the scene. We're ending a thought, we're really concluding something by moving back. Like if I'm leaving you right now, it is a different feeling that if I'm coming in and saying something, that's a very importance, right? So I think that's making sense for you. The next kind of shot is a tracking shot. This is when we're moving with our subject, right? This is when we're moving through a scene. The camera movement is matching our characters movement. So the subject feels on the same page with the viewer and the viewer feels on the same page of the subject. Because the subject, the viewer's eye, which is the camera, is moving along with what is being seen, right? So it feels like we're moving through a scene when we do a tracking shot. The other thing to think about with that is, without getting too theoretical, I don't know, this part is very juicy for me. So I like to dive into like the more of the invisible understandings of these things. But what's happening is with the tracking shot, you're moving with the subject and so the subject is staying in the same part of the frame, but the background is shifting. So that's a very unique perspective for the camera to have. Generally, the subject is here and the camera is moving like this, or this, or this, but a tracking shot, they're moving together collectively. That creates a certain type of resonance. Yeah, like the character is staying the same, but the background is changing and you can use that feeling very uniquely in different scenarios. Next is the Arc Shot. This is when we orbit around our subject. Kind of like the way that our sun, or our Earth orbits around the sun, where the subject stays fixed and we move around. This creates a cool parallax feeling where the subject is staying the same. Similar to, relatively the same, similar to a tracking shot, but the backgrounds have a very dramatic shift. So this is a very cool style for very dramatic scenes when you want to keep your subject in the same focal point of interest. Next up is a crane shot. This is where we're moving vertically, up or down. And this is perfect for a power change or a shift in the scene. If I were to move this camera up or down, it would create a shift in perspective of where I am feeling, where I am looking, where I am in relation to the camera. And that shift creates a certain, a change in dominance, I want to say. But also a change in power between the perspective of the camera and the perspective of the subject. And when you change the perspective of the camera, if you go above and you're looking down on the subject, the viewer is seen through the camera and is going to feel a different sensation than looking up to the camera. It's very different. Right. Next up is a tilt, and this is angling the camera itself up or down. This is great for reveal shots or showing the size or proportion of something. You're simply tilting the angle of view up or down. So it's similar to a crane shot, but without physically moving the camera up and down, you're changing the view of the camera where it's looking in perspective to what it's looking at. Right? So if I tilt the camera down, whatever's in front of that camera, I'm going to be, I'm going to be looking down upon. If I tilt the camera up, whatever the camera is looking, I'm going to be looking up upon. It's a very different feeling and emotional response for whoever is looking at that imagery. The final type of camera movement is a pan, and this is angling the camera left and right. It's a way to softly go through a scene or follow change that's happening in front of the camera. I know that these are a little bit more on the principal theoretical side of filmmaking. But I do believe it's very important for you as a video creator to be able to bring this higher understanding of really the knowledge of filmmaking into your more internet based, modern day type of video creations. 54. In Depth Analysis: Camera Movement: Now let's look at what actual video examples are of these different types of camera movement. Here we have a pushing shot, we're getting closer to the subject. So we saw the subject's motion, and now we're seeing the way that they feel by bringing the camera closer. And now we're doing the exact opposite. We're pulling away from the subject, and now it feels like we're leaving the scene and concluding what we've seen. And now we're doing a tracking shot where we're moving with our subject. We feel like we're there observing, watching, and feeling what the subject is feeling, right? So here we're moving with the subject as they're walking. We kind of feel like we're a part of their scene going through the movements that they are going through. And now we have an arc shot where we're orbiting around the subject with a really cool way of keeping them generally centered in the center of the frame. But what's going on behind them is shifting dramatically. This is an excellent way to create a shifting feeling. And a feeling of that parallax where a lot of change is happening in your scene. So you can really creatively think of a lot of ways to use this. Here we have a crane shot where we're pulling the camera vertically up. Here we have another one. We're pulling the camera down, so we feel the shift in what's going on in the scene by doing that. And here we have a tilt shot where we're showing different aspects of our scene and creating more depth by tilting down to our subject or object. Or tilting up to our subject, right, we're putting them in power or in a certain place of significance. This really creates depth and really shows the viewer how to feel about what they're looking at. Here we have a panning shot where we're kind of turning the page right, where we're kind of slowly working our way through a scene. Things are slowly unfolding more and more as we pan. This is a great way to show landscapes, to really slowly tell the story, and to really move through our scene. 55. How Speed Effects Camera Movement: And the last thing I'll mention on this is we have our speed of our movement. If we slowly are moving, panning, tilting, doing a crane shot, doing an arc shot through a scene, it's slowly unfolding that feeling for our viewer. If we speed those movements up while we're shooting, it creates a lot more action and a lot more energy that quickly changes and makes the viewer feel a certain way. And so with that said, this can go really, really deep. But this is really the overview that I really wanted you to understand in this course of the basis, right? The foundation of how to use and understand these different key camera movement types so that you can further tell your story. In the next lecture, I'm going to actually show you guys how I use these methods of camera movement and framing and these other things that we've talked about in relation to shooting a shot with just one angle. To shooting the same exact shot and scene with multiple angles, with different types of camera movement, and really telling the story that way. And then in the following lecture will be a learning exercise where you guys will be able to film your own scene in two different ways. The normal standard way and the upgraded way with everything that we discussed. So I will see you in the next lecture. 56. Synthesizing Your Camera Techniques: Introduction: I also wanted to do a completely different scenario with no shot list in mind, just an idea shot completely on a smartphone. So what I'm going to do is we have our scenario here and we're going to have our subject lats. And he's going to be basically doing the same movement twice. And it's all going to make sense at the end of the edit, I promise you. But I wanted to shoot it on an iphone to kind of show you, you can string shots together that look really good, just like shooting with the DSL or a mirrorless camera, and you can use a smartphone. I'm going to be doing 240 frames a second for a dramatic effect for the video. So I'm going to be using frame rate, I'm going to be using movement, I'm going to be using camera placement. And I'm going to be using a series of shots back to back that create a punch line. A really cool kind of final product. So lat is gonna be standing here, He's going to do the same movement twice And we're going to have this quartz light that is going to be going through this 36 inch circular diffuser lighting our scene. We have the windows closed in the background. This is less about getting really good lighting and this is more about, if you have an idea on your phone, an idea that you want to just shoot more easily for. Maybe an Instagram story or something that's a little bit less produced. I just want to show you another way that you can do a cool vertical video. It doesn't always have to be a big fancy thing with a large shot list, although that is an excellent tool. But with that said, let's get into the edit in no way. No, it's not an edit, we're not editing. But with all that said, let's get into shooting this idea. 57. Hands On: Shoot a Montage with Upgraded Camera Techniques: Vats what we're going to do is I want to have you here and I want to do like a before and after of what. It's kind of like Tiktok style, kind of Instagram style. Kind of like what videographers think they look like versus what they really look like. So it's like Instagram versus reality. So it's kind of like that. A little bit different. But for the movement, I want you to kind of be standing kind of like double seven. And then we'll have to kind of see what works well with left hand or right hand, but it's kind of like a quick reload thing. So it's like, oh, and then you're going to have the other one in your hand and then you go okay, and then something like maybe then that we'll kind of see what looks good. So I'm going to shoot the before first with no special stuff. This is your cinematic debut, man. So go ahead and do the thing all the way through. Perfect. Okay, perfect. So we have the before, and now I want to do the after. So we'll start with you like Yeah. And try to release it in a cool way. And then I'm going to do close ups. Yeah. And then I'm going to do close ups. Do the raise one more time. So go down. Yeah, And then go up. Let's do that again. That was really cool. Down. Okay, up. Ah, one more. Down. Up. Oh, okay, cool. Let me get a close up of just the release. That was pretty good, but let's do it again. Yep. And then put the new one in. Who, buddy? Now I want to get a battery drop, so go ahead and like throw it right in front of the phone. Oh, here. How about this? So I'm going to angle down a little bit and just like like like, you don't even have to do any of the battery stuff, I'm just not going to get your feet but go ahead and like drop it here. Yeah. Oh, yes. Got it. Okay, perfect. So we got the different shots. We got the before shot, that's just kind of one tripod shot, and then we got the multiple montage style. So, let's see, the before and after of that one shot versus the montage of multiple shots. I'm followed by my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my perfect. 58. Learning Exercise: Create Your Own Montage: So it's a pretty cool example, right? Just a very simple action that when shot on an iphone with these kind of techniques and these kind of principles of using different angles, using different frame rates, using camera movement, we can create a completely interesting and extraordinary scene. So now it's your guys turn, it's time for you to film one action shot. This can be anything that creatively that you can come up with. It can be making a smoothie. It can be getting ready for school. It can be whatever your heart desires. Hopefully, it's something for a video that you'll actually use to upload to one of your channels. But I want it to be shot in two different ways. The first way is just a standard wide shot that you might normally document the situation with. Okay? And the second way is the same exact movement, or action, or activity that shot with five to ten cutaway shots with different shot types and the different types of movement that we covered in the previous lectures. And then I want you to edit it into a five to ten second montage. Now you can use music that you add or you can use the live audio, the actual audio in the surroundings of what you're shooting as the backing audio track. And then you're going to export that montage and share your video link with the standard shot first, and then your updated montage second in the Q and A section, just like this video example right here, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my. So let's go. What are you waiting for? I want to see those edits guys. Come on. Put your edits together and then upload them to the Q and A section. And I will see you guys in the next lecture. 59. Introduction to Your Shotlist: Perfect, so now that we've used our action scene, that you guys just got to shoot as a practice to really nail down how to shoot a normal scenario and make it look extra ordinary and not normal. Right now we're going to move into creating your shot list for your talking scene. And your shot list, simply put, is just the cutaway shots, similar to what you just shot. But we're going to be listening to our talking scene that ideally you've already shot and we're going to be picking out the visuals that match up with the words that you were saying to further tell your story. Whether that's a funny story, an Instagram video, Youtube video, whatever it is. This is the same exact technique and principle you can use across all these videos. So let's get into it. So we're going to be synthesizing these techniques. We're going to blend all these different learning exercises into one video. Our talking shot, which is our main role, and our cutaways are our B roll footage. And we're going to use the addition of a shot list to help you lock down all of the cutaway shots you need to get. So this Shotlist can be followed very lightly as just a very rough, you know, outline. Or it can be followed very strictly and very heavily depending on how intricate it is, what you're shooting. And like I mentioned, this is great for all different types of videos that you do. Whether it's Instagram, Tiktok documentary, it's just really an outline for you to get all the shots that you're needing for your video. And I also wanted to mention that these things can be done in different orders. Right now, we kind of did things in an interesting way where we like shot our talking footage and there's been different learning exercises and now we're going to do a shot list to that talking footage. You know, of course you can do the shot list up front and do that first. That makes sense for the video that you're doing for the course. I try to outlay outline it in a way that made the most sense for you so that you could like learn everything as we're going and then be able to put things where they need to go. But of course, in future projects and videos that you create, you can outline it and really do it in whatever order works best for you. Which can mean starting with your shot list. So it just depends on the project. But let's jump into the shotlist that I'm going to be working on that you can do along with me for your talking footage. I'm going to hop into the one for my coffee video that you guys have seen. 60. Learning Exercise: Create Your Shotlist: Okay, perfect, so what we have here is our shot list. So if you haven't already, please download the shot list in the downloadable resources tab in the lecture of this course. And so I have my blank shot list here and I also have my overall kind of script that I just kind of typed out some bullet points of what I'm saying. This will be the easiest way for us to follow along and create the shot list. So first I start off with this, I have a confession to make. It's tough to say I'm addicted to coffee. This is going to be definitely a shot of me. Okay. So what I'm going to do here is me sitting a desk. Okay. And the shot type is going to be a medium shot? Yes. Because we remember the different shot types and because it's a way, step shot, this is a medium shot. Okay. Character is going to be Julian and a location is going to be living room. Now for the cells where we have the actual imagery, this can be hand drawn or you can pull these shots from the Internet. I'm not going to do any hand drawn stuff for timing in this course, but you're more than welcome to have this printed out and draw just an overall general aesthetic of what you envision that shot looking like. For this example, what I'm going to do is pull a screenshot. The framing that I know I'm going to have, okay, perfect. Since we know this is going to be our framing, I'm going to take a screenshot and you're more than welcome to download the shot from online, go through Pinterest, go through Instagram, whatever it is, screenshot it to get the right style. That makes sense for the video that you're shooting. Boom, there we go. So yeah, you know, this realization hit me earlier today and so we have our first overall shot done. Okay, Now I'm going to move on to the next main part of the video where I know I'm going to have another important shot. I say I just love the whole experience of it from start to finish, the beans. The texture of those sweet beans. So what I'm going to do here is definitely grab a shot online that I like. That's a close up on the coffee beans. This is definitely the vibe I'm going for. What I'm going to do here is save it to our screen shot number two. Okay, perfect. And of course, you know, you can really fill this out as much as you want and get as in detail as you need to, depending on, you know, if it's a more straightforward online video that's kind of you doing something that's a funny montage and it's kind of more candid and more casual. You can maybe have three main shots that are very important that you know, that need to make it into the video. That could be your opening shot, your middle shot, and your ending shot. You know, if it's more of a serious tone, characters and dialogue. Or you got hired to do a project for a doctor's office and you're doing interviews they're going to want to see. And you're going to want to know ahead of time the overview of what you're going to be doing. So please use this as in depth as you'd like for this purpose. For time's sake, I'm going to be a little bit more brief here, but I want you guys to be able to get the idea of the workflow and how this process works. So for the next shot, the scene is going to be in my kitchen and this is going to be close upshots of beans and coffee making process. So I could list out those specific processes. Processing processes, I don't know about the word, but I could list out those specific ones of being, you know, heating up the water, getting out the beans, getting out the French press, the coffee maker hitting the button. I'm going to keep it broad here, but have enough information so that while I'm glancing at it, while I shoot, I know exactly what I need to shoot. And this is B roll, okay? And I'm going to put close ups because I know a lot of these shots are going to be really tight close shots, so you can see the detail of the beans and the coffee, and the steam and all those cool things that I want to be accentuating with what I'm saying. So the next main point here is brewing it, taking all the finely ground coffee beans ring and piping out water. So what I want for that is going to be something that is. Yes. Okay, perfect. Yeah, I want to see that shot that's showing the ground coffee going into the coffee machine or the French press, depending on what I end up shooting with. Okay, we're going to call this shot three. This is a very important shot. Okay, I really do. Also like one thing about this, one is directly overhead. That's going to be a unique view for this kind of scene. Where it's like a creating process of a quick montage of different steps of a final process. It's cool to have the top down angle, so this is perfect placing coffee, coffee grounds, into machine, hot, hot water. And I'm just going to skip forward here a little bit to pouring coffee. Let's see, Yeah, I want to do something like this. I like the vibe, We see the condensation, good lighting. This is just a really cool style. So I'm going to save this as a reference. Boom. What I'm going to do now is skip to the final shot, because we have the part in the video where it cuts back to me. I deliver the punch line, and then it's the end of the video. I already know what that's going to look like. So let me just as a brief description, I'm going to say final punch line. Me cut to me holding coffee cup. A role character. Yeah, on second thought. There you go. This is really an overview of how to properly use a shot list. And of course it's important to be flexible with this feature films go all the way over to the very structured side where these are used like a science and like complete with complete perfection. Because there's so many people on the project, there's so much time, and there's so much money being poured into it that every second counts. And so it's really a guideline or a framework for you to use that the professionals use to a T. But for us video creators that are creating for more online content, of course you can ignore using something like this. And your videos may be okay. Of course, you can implement using something like this to the degree that makes sense for you. And it's going to make your videos just a little bit better because not many people are taking the time to really plan out what's going on, what's happening. And this little extra step really can go a long way with making your videos more impactful, more enjoyable to watch, more straightforward and to the point. So go ahead fill out your shot list or finish filling out your shot list, because in the next lecture I'm going to be doing a crash course with you guys on filming your epic B role. So you want to have an idea of what you want to be filming. You're going to be working alongside me as I'm shooting these shots that I just laid out in this learning exercise with you guys. I'm going to be actually filming them using shot types, using camera movement and all that good stuff. So with that said, let's get into the next lecture. 61. Optimize Your Settings For Your Montage: Perfect. So what we're going to do now is I'm going to take you through the process of taking your shot list that we've created together. And I'm going to shoot this coffee montage that you've seen, the kind of silly voice over that I did for it. But my friend Laz, who's holding the camera right now, is going to be our subject doing the coffee ninja things. And I'm going to be shooting multiple shots, knocking out the shot list, knocking out the different shot types. And I'm going to kind of walk you through what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. So before we kind of switch into that mode, I want to first set up my camera for the best looking settings for this scenario now, because I know ahead of time that this is going to be a montage with a bunch of shots strung together, edited to soundtrack, and a voice over. Definitely a voice over, maybe a soundtrack, maybe not. But I know I want these to be slow motion shots with movement to make coffee beans and pouring look a lot more interesting. Movement helps and everything looks better in slow motion. So what I'm going to first do is go into my settings and I'm going to switch my recording mode to 60 or 59.94 which most cameras shoot all eye, which is the highest quality for my camera. My picture profile is going to be my homemade, personally made neutral setting that we've talked about earlier in the course. And for my white balance, I'm going to actually turn and look at the scene. I'm going to be shooting to find out what kind of color temperature is going to be, right? We can see here that that's a little bit to tan, right? About 4440500 should be perfect. So now my camera settings are on point. Now it's time to start shooting. 62. Hands On: Main Techniques to Film What's On Your Shotlist: All right, so perfect, get your lats. So we have my buddy lats. He's been recording the behind the scenes for us during this course. And what we're going to do now is translate our shot list that we worked on and I'm going to go through and get these shots. Now I want to say that before we hop into it fully, I'm going to be shooting on a 24 to 70. And the reason I'm doing that is because for this specific type of B role that we're shooting for, the voice over that I made, we're focusing in on details, almost macro shots, very close up. So I want to be able to get to 70 Mill so that I can shoot real close ups of the details and of what we're seeing. It's not a big wide landscape shot where I want to lat in the background and everything we're focusing in and getting really cool slow motion shots of very small objects. So that's the premise. I'm going to flip my camera on and we're going to first start with the coffee ground shot shot number two. Shot number one is already shot. That's my voice over where I'm start the beginning in the video about my love for coffee. Then the next shot is going to be what we mentioned, close ups of the beans and the coffee making process. So I'm going to turn my shutter speed to double my frame rate. So I'm shooting at 60 frames per second. That means my shutter speed is going to be at 1:25 And then I'm going to have my aperture all the way open at 2.8 And I'm going to be kind of moving around, tapping my screen to focus and getting all the good shots that I can. So flats. Why don't you go ahead and start with, why don't you go like zoo with it with your hand so kind of like dry, you know what I mean? Go ahead. Okay, that was not in focus. Go ahead. Perfect. Okay, that right there is our intro shot with the bag of beans that I was at 24. For that one, I want to do some close ups now because we see the bag here and we want to cut this little tab. If I were to do that with this kind of wide shot, go ahead and pick up the knife in the bag, and I just want to show what it looks like. Go ahead and pick it up. We're not going to actually cut it, but if you just hold that angle yourself so that you're in the light a little bit other way, angle yourself so that, yeah, there you go. If he were to do it like this, it doesn't look too dramatic. Now, if I move from 24 mill to 70 mil, we can see that this is a lot cooler of a shot. Yeah. So maybe what I want you to do is kind of like this. And then you see how I'm really close here, we can see the details of the bag. Now, go ahead and cut it perfect. Now we can, why don't you? Yeah, why don't you kind of hold it up. It's good when you're kind of angled a little bit so that that light is coming in. Yeah. And you see, it's a lot more dramatic because I'm really pushed in this framing compared to that. Framing is way different. Yeah. Roll it back down and then go ahead and unroll it perfect. Go ahead and do that one more time. I want to get a side angle. 1 second. Okay, go ahead. So what I did right there is I did a camera movement with kind of almost a tracking shot of his fingers as they were moving. Oh, that does smell good. So there was a tracking shot moving with what he's doing. And the other thing I want to mention is our table has other stuff on it, so it only matters what's in the frame is what you really want to focus on. I'm not all the way back here with all this stuff. I'm really choosing as the cinematographer, what the audience should see. And shooting it in an interesting way, as much as possible, to get the most impactful imagery. God, that feels so good. So I'm going to get a little bit of a lower angle here because his knife is going to pierce through the bag. So one sec and I'm going to kind of do a push in shot where I'm moving in as he's doing the cut ready. And go ahead. Perfect. And then I want you to kind of like. Yeah, exactly. And we'll try and get some light in there. So I'm going to bump the Iso up because it's pretty dark inside this bag. So go ahead and close and then go ahead open. Okay, we just got to do it a few times. Yeah, go ahead. That was pretty good. So I'm directly above shooting straight down because this is the best kind of angle to get this dramatic shot where I'm kind of directing him on how I want to open the bag. I can just shoot the beans like this and there's no movement or there's no reveal. But kind of directing your subject or your actor or yourself in your video For the be roll, it helps for you to get more dramatic shots. One thing I also wanted to add a little bit of a hack. See I'm doing this all handheld be cause I want this to be very applicable to people who don't have stabilizers or anything like that. If you use your camera, you can get a pretty solid base. If you position the strap across your shoulder and you're putting tension against it, this minimizes the shake of the camera. So as you can see here, if I'm not using the strap, it goes like this. And as soon as I press into the strap, I have a much steadier shot. But let's get back to this kind of bean shot. So we'll do a test. Go ahead and pour a decent amount in slowly. Go ahead. That's a lot, Ty. So what I'll do is I'll kind of get some. Why don't you kind of do this, Okay, like that a little bit. Yep, go ahead. So here I'm at 70 Mill. Just kind of going back and forth to get a cool movement with the beans. Okay, I'm going to increase my ISO a little bit, because these beans are pretty dark. But you can see the difference between 70 Mill and 24 Mill. This looks very average like a home movie style, but if we really push into it, creates a lot more depth and focus on only what we want the viewer to be looking at. 63. Hands On: Camera Movement and Enhancing Your Montage: Okay, so we got the cool shots, the slow motion shots of our beans, of opening the bag, of doing those kind of cool cinematic things. We shot everything close and tight to make it look more dramatic. Now what we're going to do is hop to having the coffee grounds. Putting that into the French press. Now, I don't have one of the coffee blender things, so we're going to kind of magically jump here from the beans to the grounds. But let's shoot this process and see what it looks like. So on this shot specifically, I'm going to do a relatively quick pushing like that to add drama to him turning the spoon and dropping in the coffee grounds. Okay, go ahead. Perfect. Now, let's do one more. I want to tilt the camera like this when you, so point it directly at me, like if my camera, my camera's here. And then we're going to do this together, okay? So you can just hold it right here. So I'm going to kind of try an experimental shot here. I'm going to have the camera here. And then when he turns it, I'm going to turn with him, so I'm going to shoot a little bit wider. That gives me more room for error, for turning the camera. But on the counter here, I say 123 and then we go. So 123, sweet. Okay, cool. Now this is brewing, so we're going to wait until we start to get some bubbles. And I'm going to shoot a slow motion shot at that. And then we will get our cool pouring shot. Now the reason that as I'm going, I'm doing movement is because if we shoot this stationary and it, and it's just kind of a tripod shot with not a lot of movement, It's not going to create a whole lot of character. So camera movement creates personality. If I move the camera and I dramatically push the camera towards an object, that creates a sense of urgency. Now if I have that same exact object and I slowly pull away the camera, that creates a sense of calmly leaving scenario or situation. So you're pointing at what you want your viewer to see and how you move. The camera tells them how you want them to feel about what they're seeing. So I want the viewer to feel excited and kind of like whoa, you know, because to make it look good, you want to add a little something else. So you can do that with lighting, you can do that with camera movement. And you can do that with kind of having your subject that you're shooting bureau with do things that are synchronized with what you're doing. Kind of planning things out a little bit. So we're taking our shot list and translating these images and descriptions into impactful imagery that makes it uniquely yours. So you don't always have to be doing camera movement, you don't always have to be doing close ups like I'm doing. These are just tips that you guys can do to really make it your own and make it your own personality and your own style. Should be chilling. Okay, cool. So we're starting to get some bubbles. So I'm at 70 mill and I'm on manual focus with something like this, that's a little bit tricky to shoot. You kind of want to shoot at multiple different angles. Because something like water with bubbles in it, can look really interesting if it's shot, right? Or can look really boring if it's not shot, right. So I'm experimenting with multiple angles and different framings, different distances. Okay, Perfect. So now we should have plenty hot water shots. Boiling water shots, What I want to do is I'm going to start with the angle down here, because we can only get that shot once. We can only get him the water hitting the coffee grounds once. So I'm going to start with the close up down here. And then I'm going to pause what we're doing and then I'm going to get a close up of the pore of the water coming out. So you really want to think ahead of time what you can only shoot once you have one opportunity to get, we can only get these coffee grounds getting wet once. And plan that out as you're going through your shoot. You want to have as much of it planned out before you start shooting as possible, but sometimes you get things set up and then you plan it out just before you get shooting. So let's go ahead and get that set up. I'm going to do a little bit of an orbiting shot here where I'm going to slide the camera kind of along the table to get kind of a dramatic wraparound shot. And this is by no means like perfect framing or anything, but it's kind of, you know, it'll do for this kind of sheet. So let me set my focus and I'm going to do a practice shot because like I said, we only have one go here. I want to start here, set my focus. And when I get rolling, then I'm going to tell him to pour. So I'm going to go to the beginning of my shot. You can go ahead and start pouring slowly. Perfect here, I'm going to do a rack focus where I go from the water to the coffee. And now I want to get a close up of the bubbles. So I'm going to use the rim of the glass as a little bit of foreground and then move in like that. So go ahead and do some more pouring. So I have the rim of the glass in the foregrounded. I'm going to move into the inside of the cup. Okay, perfect. Now I want to get just the stream. Perfect. Okay, good. And you want to also keep in mind that not everything you shoot you're going to use. So you kind of want to shoot stuff as much as you can because out of the 20 shots that you shoot, you may only use eight, You may only use five, you may only use four. It really depends. 64. Hands On: In Camera Transitions and Impactful Ending Shots: Now I want to get the kind of French press going down shot. So you can go ahead and kind of put it there and then slowly move it down. So I'm going to kind of do it tilt down as he's pressing the coffee. French press down. So you can go ahead now, let's do that again. I want to get a little bit of a wider shot because I'm not sure if that's the one. I want to use, the close up. And I'm going to do something a little bit different for this one. So we'll go ahead and do that same movement and I'm going to move down as he's doing it, so go ahead. Perfect. Okay, perfect. So I did a transition down with him as he was pressing down. And we're going to use the wipe from this table for me to use as a transition into the next shot. The next shot is going to be pouring, so let's get you a cut buddy. So I came down under the table. Now I want to match that same exact movement into the beginning of the next shot to make a seamless cut using camera movement. And kind of that we effect, it'll make sense when you see these two cut together. So we're going to take a moment to what's called block this out. Where you work with the person who's doing the camera work. And then you work with the talent in front of the camera to set up the movement correct for the shot. So flats. What I want to kind of do is like the cameras here on like this and you like wipe down and then like ninja that. It's okay. So we'll do it a few times without you pouring. Okay. Go ahead. Okay. So I kind of want to move everything a little bit out of the way because we're doing a little bit of a wider we're not going to be shooting this at 70 'cause there's movement happening. And I want to keep everything in frame as much as possible. So we'll go ahead. Yeah. I mean, this will be the first real deal test. Go ahead. That was a pretty heavy pour, bro, but I think that'll look good. I really like that one, but we're going to do with stuff like this where it's your ending shot of your montage or your video. You want to make sure you nail it, So we're gonna do that one again. Yeah, that needs to be lined up. Okay, go ahead. Amazing ending shot by lats. Now I'm going to cut these shots together, add the slow motion, do a little bit of stabilization, and we're going to see what the final product of these raw shots look like compared to the final edit where we kind of add that little gloss and refinement of all the tools and tips that we learned so far in this course to these was shots for your montage. And here is that final edit. So yeah, you know, this realization hit me earlier today. Kind of It's hard to say. Yeah, it's hard to say. But I am addicted to coffee. I just love the entire experience of those lovely textured beans. And then brewing it when you pour that piping, hot water over those freshly ground beans, you know what? And then sometimes I feel like maybe I don't need this. Maybe this is something that I should stop indulge. Yeah, you know what, I think I'm gonna stop today. Yeah, on second thought. I think I'm gonna get a second cup. Yeah, boy. 65. Learning Exercise: Shoot Your Epic B-Roll: Okay, so now it is time for you to shoot your epic, amazing looking role. We've been really working up to this point in the course and yeah, I'm excited to see what you come up with. So what we're going to be doing is making your own upgraded video. So I want you to choose a specific action to shoot B roll footage of. This should be the visuals that match up with your role or main speaking footage. Okay, the audio of your video here can be from what we shot or you can add your own new soundtrack. So you can either use the audio if I were to shoot my hand doing this and if I use that sound that's using the audio from that footage make sense versus putting in a soundtrack like so. Right. So you can really get as creative as you want. But yeah, there has to be some form of audio that's being used next. The point is to make your average looking video sound and feel amazing using the techniques that we've learned. So I'm going to demonstrate potentially what that can look like with my coffee video. So yeah, you know, this realization hit me earlier today. It's kind of, it's hard to say. But I am addicted to coffee, those lovely textured beans, and then brewing it. When you pour that piping hot water over those freshly ground beans, you know what? And then sometimes I feel like, so you see, right? You're using cutaway shots to really upgrade the feeling and the production value of your video. So now it is your turn. I want you to film the B roll for your talking footage. Okay, First step is to use the abril as your base layer of footage. The second step is to shoot five to ten shots with different shot types and camera movement that we've learned. Then you're going to edit your footage together and you're going to export and share the video link with the combined A role and B roll footage in the Q and A section. And with that said, I don't want you guys to get too hung up on making an amazing edit or having crazy editing transitions or tricks or like coloring or anything that's super in depth On the post production side, this is not a post production course, this is a production course, filming course where, yeah, we're really focusing on getting all the ingredients right before getting all crazy with the edits and trying to make it look cool. I really want you guys to focus on what you shoot, what you use in your shot list, and really what you basically what ingredients you create that are really good before trying to make it seem and look, and feel better in post production. So if you do want to get into the post production, that's a different course, this one. I really want you guys to focus on what you're shooting. So I'm excited to see the edits that you put together and share in the Q and A, And if you have any questions, feel free to ask those as well. And I will see you in the next lecture. 66. Introduction to Learning Session with a Full Time Photographer and Video Creator: All right, so I trust that you have been utilizing all of these hands on learning exercises to really put to work and embody, physically experience the information that we've gone over and really been taking advantage of these learning activities and sharing your content with your fellow students. So in this chapter we're going to be getting some expert advice from a close filmmaker friend of mine who's had years of experience working with high end clients. You met him earlier in the course. He's really an equipment and technology specialist, so he's going to be sharing a lot of insights for you to really think about what kind of camera you want to use, what kind of camera you're using, how to maximize that camera, the different available technology and equipment that's out there. And what will really match up with what your desires are, what your end goal is, the type of content you want to produce. And really mixing all that together. So grab a pen and pencil. Sit back and really soak in these next learning lessons. 67. Advice From an Expert: Entry Level Video Equipment: What is guys? So here we are. We are with Louis today, how's it going? Yes. We got to see him earlier in the course on that onset experience that we did in our downtown Los Angeles video shoot. Now today what we're going to be doing is kind of just going over entry level cameras, more professional cameras, shooting on a phone, and shooting on different ranges of cameras. And Louisa and I are going to kind of just chat about what the pros and cons are of each type of equipment, and really, how far you can push each kind of equipment depending on the sensor and depending on all of its functions. So where do you kind of want to start off with? Do you want to start off on the lower end? And then we kind of work our way up. What do you think I could say where I started? I mean, when I started filmmaking, I would say I have a good friend of mine named Eve, who is a really well known videographer that does beauty work and eco and, and mostly in the beauty, in the beauty world. But he started me off with this camera as a GH five. And to this day this camera is still the workhorse king. I mean, honestly, like you can get this camera for less than two grand, maybe less than 1,000 And, and you can put a variety of lenses like the 18 to 35 cannon. It's a micro four thirds sensor. So what that means is that you can put a speed booster and really just upgrade the lenses as you go. You could put all the way to like PL mounts if you wanted to. There is limitations when it comes to that. I mean, there's things like what is it called, noise and stuff like that, like low light, it's not a good low light camera or anything. But if you want to be a Youtuber and you want to get a good content, commercial grade videos like this is the camera, honestly. Because it has all the flavors, it has the Panasonic code and stuff like that. You know, not pros but video like Mov do those things that you can use for your editing. And Ali and this camera, I've used it for so long. I buy and sell. You know, I buy and sell my cameras like crazy. And I've had Sony's for the years. Have you known me? And this one has been the most that has done the work for me. You know what I mean? So you'd recommend this for people that are wanting to do more than lo this was more like short film, like I want to stylized video that you want more colored fidelity that you want to be able to color at an affordable price. Uh huh. Mm hm. And then then, I mean, you know the iphone, everyone knows the iphone. They've gone through a lot of generations. And I feel that now since they added the hylands on this one, it's been a workhorse on its own and on its own look, when you get that we lens, you realize like, damn, I never knew that I needed a why lens. And then you start getting really creative with your shots, with the wide shots and all that. But I like using this as like a directors, a director's viewfinder. And I use this app called Filmic Pro, okay? And when they released the iphone 11 pro, right, they released this app. And then this app gives you all the flavors audio, different video code, slow motion, and it activates more parts of the camera. And then they have this thing called double take. So if you're a logger and you want to get a front and back interview of you talking to someone, you can record both cameras. So front and back. And you choose the lens blank, so I don't know if you can see it, so what it is like so I could see him and you can see the background, but yeah. Yeah, There you go. Yeah. So this is a good way of like, if you want to get that quick, you know, interview status or like go because kind of like everything that's happening right now with Tiktok and Instagram, everybody wants to do very quick and dirty. You know, like let's, let's get it really quick and go, you know. And that's kind of been my last resort kind of thing. And I've had used this on a couple of beauty bloggers. When I went on set with them, they wouldn't allow these cameras inside of a restaurant. Stuff like the things that need permits. So I would put this on a cage with a little handle and an LED on top. I put a small rig cage is what it's called and with audio and everything and this thing is fully ready to go and rig auto focus go. And honestly, a lot of people don't notice the difference. They think it's DSLR sometimes. So I would say that, yeah, like we're speaking on now, smartphones specifically. But yeah, for that one, it holds up really well. When you do get to let's say color correction, you want to push and pull colors around super, it kind of falls apart. One thing I want to mention about if you are shooting on a smartphone and you're going in that direction, because you already have maybe an iphone 11 and you don't want to buy a new camera on top of that. It is a definite possibility. But what these phones do is they already optimize and bake in color correction, sharpening stabilization on top of the footage, so it looks great coming out of the camera. But if you get some of those shots into your editing software and you want to update them, make them look a certain way, color them, stylize, it's really difficult. That's where the biggest differences are between shootings on something like this, that's a little bit more expensive. And then shooting on something that's a lot more practical, like Louise said, you can roll up in a restaurant and start shooting Yeah. And get away with it. This is the kind of trade off and also the dynamic range is another big thing. Although these are getting a lot better. Yeah, they So what would you say for someone wanting to go in this direction? What kind of equipment You mentioned your rig that you have and we'll have cutaway shots on screen. What are some must have items that you'd recommend for the phone For sure if you're going to do the phone a cage. Because if you get a cage with mounting points on it, those mounting points help to do like tabletop shot. I've done tabletop shots many times with the iphone where I couldn't rig up this big old behemoth down and on. And I did it before, but it requires a lot of work. Sometimes I'm a one man band and they won't notice because it's all ten ADP and I hardly get four K. They ask for a four K and this thing is very capable of four K but color is worth it lax. But Right. I would just rig this. Yeah. With some mounting points on it. Like like I said, like the small rig, they make really good cages for every type of phone, Samsung iphone, even the older iphones. And with that saying then, once you have that, then everything is a possibility. You could put this on a little cart, you could put this on a drone. You can do things. You could get way better footage this than the drone can get. You know what I mean? So things like that and then it's light weight, you know? What about audio? What do you do? Audio? Audio has always been a big issue because they got rid of the iphone jack which is all piece Yeah. Piece. But what I usually do is I get like a splitter that has a audio jack or something. But honestly, I try to do get like a professional microphone like this is what I would use. This is actually my microphone that I just got and I use it for it. Is this road TG? This is supposed to be the video mic pro, and an NTG professional microphone smashed into one. And what I like about this one is that you can use it as a laptop mic so you could do podcasting. That's what they made this for, is for people that want to use it on our laptop, connect it straight to USBC, and get that podcasting kind of audio out of it. If you don't want to do that, then you want to put it on your iphone. Then they made a special TRS or whatever so you could put it on the iphone, but what you wouldn't need there, your adapter that comes with the microphone. Yh. 68. Advice From an Expert: Pros and Cons of Cameras and Equipment: I kind of want to move to now. I think professional, The lowest. Yeah, The more professional side. So we have the more entry level you want to shoot with your smartphone then, this is the more entry level camera itself. You said this was about, I would say it started, it was like a 2000. And the lens and everything, because the lens is pretty expensive. This is a 12 to 3,052.8 This is equivalent to the 18 to 3,051.8 but 1.82 0.8 And we'll get back to this lens, but this one I know you can get it way lower than what it is. And they already made better versions like the S one, which is the full frame flagship. Right? And these cameras, the Panasonic, are just workhorses. Okay. And what the one thing that you will trade off is, yeah, the auto focus may be not that great but it's a good overall. Like if you want something where you damn, you can just change colors and really work on it. This is the camera and the file is so huge either. And you can use SD cards, which is awesome. You use two of them. It's a good camera, it's a good photo camera too. Has good skin colors. And that's what I look for is like something with good coloring and dynamic range and what Yeah. And that's why I like this one and I still use it to this day as Cam. I just have to match it. And sometimes a pain, but I got good enough at coloring that I can actually make it look like it, look at anything. Right. And that's something that's a really good point actually, is the practicality versus the payoff of the footage you get. I think a lot of the times we can be like, I need this stabilizer and I need to buy this and buy that and buy this and buy that. Some of equipment that you purchase, you will use one on every ten times you shoot, once in a blue moon. The other stuff is things go in and out of trend on the way that they look at one point. Those lens baby distorted lenses were so popular and they would create these cool distortions. Now the whole prism in front of the lens is pretty popular. So you really want to keep in mind that you want to buy with longevity. You know, like you can get away with the stabilization on your smartphone. Probably if you want to buy one of those, like 60, 70, $80, gimbles for the smartphone, you can. But it's just something to keep in mind that as stuff changes now the really smoothness of a handheld shot on the R five to me aesthetically actually looks better in a lot of situations than the straight up gimble shot, so yeah. What was your opinion on the footage you saw in the R? I loved the footage. So of course we all went through the footage at the beginning of the course together. And the R five, I had it side by side with the one DX mark two that we're shooting on right now for this main camera and the coloring, the smoothness, I really liked color correcting this footage. I was able to really make it look how I wanted to, which was really good and I was blown away because I'm filming behind the scenes of you and then you're doing a hand held shot and walking. What was your old yoga? Yeah. Yeah, like straight up. So all the video techniques I learned in the past ten years ago, I say seven years. A long time. A long time. I learned it from this guy. Yeah, this guy is the one that those yoga videos like when I was watching the footage, I'm like, Oh, Pacman, he's doing this with every show. Yes. Because that's the best way to do it. I mean, just learning how to do your stepping and all that. But the reason why I got this camera, I had Sony's right. If I had the 6,500 I had the seven, two, I had the 7373. But those are my photo cameras. Seven, three was actually a good camera and if you're someone that can't afford this camera, which is brand new and just came out the seven, Sony R three is a great camera still to this day. Great autofocus, great everything. But don't get stuck in the technical stuff because it's not really about the technical, it's about the story. The only reason why I got this camera is because the clients that I deal with, it's beauty, right? And they just love cannon color. And they always ask for cannon, they always give me gift about it. So what is the main reason that you went with the R five? So on, the main reason was why I switch everything from Sony to Cannon was the glass. I just love the glass. I've always loved it and I've already have it. So I don't need to like I won't lose money if I switch over. And the stabilization. The stabilization and the codec. So the codec I mean like the ten bit four two to that sort of thing, Judge, and can you explain that briefly so I get more range of color like I mean, everything now is giving you 42210 bit now and just having ten bit is fine. There's some cameras like this one does 12 bit, right? And the Alexa, the more higher and like red, that was like 16 I think or I don't know, like really high numbers. But those are high data. So this camera, I mean I can shoot ten bit 422 all day. And that gives me the flexibility to go and post and really play with the color. If I feel that it's wrong or my blacks are too black, you know, that's something that happens a lot where I lose the blacks. And it's kind of like this faded, grainy look. And I just, I can push and pull, you know, lift a person out of a dark environment and give them a bright look without sacrificing artifacts and stuff like that. And those are technical things. But I'm not telling you, it should not deter you from telling a story, right? Because all this is doing is telling a story. I mean, you are a creative and the creative should be not limited by their gear. And that's something that you taught me, I think, and a couple other people on set. And I've seen a lot of huge professionals on set like like Tony Duran, all right? Yeah. And those guys, they just go with a cannon and they're just like doing like what I was doing and their shots look amazing. You know? Like I did that one thing with Kim Kurd, Ashan, and that was done for the holiday campaign. That was done with the cannon five, four. Yeah. You know, and he said, set it up for me, you know. Alright. I put it in ten, 80 because he does not like shooting in four. Uh huh. He finds it very hard for himself to edit. So I'm just like, wait what? Like, I'm like, I got this dope camera here, let's just use this 16. And he was like, No, no, no, no. It was like, it's too much for me. I need under like a few hundred kicks because he doesn't want to do a file. Yeah, yeah. And then when I saw the after was like, oh, it's because he threw all these layers and they already have like a look to it because it's social media. But when you want to go into like film, like real film, then then we start going into these big boys. Right, right. This camera, the pocket six. Hey, literally does everything I needed to do. Yeah. I mean, I can do a commercial job on this. I can do weddings, I can do the stuff. Anything I needed to do, I could do it. Just the file sizes are huge. But what I like about this camera a lot then then all these is that it's bare bones. And what I mean by that is like I can plug and play. I could put a hard modular, right? Very modular uses cannon mount. It uses a Super 35 sensor, so don't get wrong like micro four, three, full frame and Super 35. All that doesn't matter as long as it can handle the ten bit 422 and it can transcode it at a nice file structure that you are able to edit on your computer. Because some people don't have supercomputers and high end Max and stuff like that, and I don't have a high Mac, and I use Premiere or Da Vinci and literally just throw that in there and it's ready to go. I don't have to transcode, you know. Yeah, I think one thing to mention too that makes this large leap is that these all shoot these three. Shoot photo and video. That means they both, they shoot both those things pretty well. When you get to something like this hybrid, this is just for video. So it's going to do just video really well. It's kind of like similar between a zoom lens and a prime lens. A zoom lens is going to get you a multitude of different focal lengths. And it's going to do each focal length really well. But a prime lens is going to get you, like for this example, this is what, 28 or 50. 50, right? Yeah, this is a 50. It's gonna only shoot a 50 mill, but it's gonna do 50 mill really well. So 50 mill on this compared to 50 mill on this is going to be like the night. This is the same thing where it doesn't do multiple things. It does one thing really well. And what's the price point of the. So this one, this, the camera body alone. I think you can get it for now. See black magic, Black magic wants the filmmaker, the indie filmmaker to, to thrive. And, and like you said, no compromises and being creative. And they put in all that software like Pros that all the things that, when it, when you go and edit, you don't have to transcode, you have to do it, it's just ready to go edit. And it's just like a plug and play a camera. And I love that about this camera. And what I like about it is they give you so many IO options like audio. They even give you an auxiliary for you could put a professional microphone so you don't have to go and buy these expensive microphones like a zoom, you know, H five or any of that. It's all built in. There's, there's phantom power. There's everything. And so for the body, I think you can get them for like 2,100 That's enough. Which is not bad. I mean, this one was what? 30530800. And that's just the body in the lens is another grand, right? So I did spend a lot of money. The only reason why I got this is because I needed something to run and gun. I mean, there's scenarios were I need run and gunning. Yeah. And this one I can't do it. I can cause I can put it against my chest and shoot. But how long can I do that without getting tired? And also there is limitations in this camera. But other than that, you're getting this camera if you want cinema quality imagery and the files to be able to do all types of things, you know what I mean? You will be spending a lot of money on cards and possibly batteries, but I rig this up so I can use V mount. So V mount, it's kind of like a standard V mount and gold mount are standard batteries. And I highly suggest anybody that wants to really get into it is get V mount batteries or gold mount V mount is my favorite because they're really affordable. And then you can last for days. I mean that for days, I'm sorry, you can last for 6 hours to 8 hours plus just one battery. And this battery will power your monitor, your lavalier, mix your antennas. Because I have an antenna that, so this whole rigged tilta is rigged up so I can put an antenna, I can put a monitor, I can put, you know, just all kinds of rigging materials. I can hang it off of a ceiling. That's why it looks like a cheese plate. Yeah. Because I need those holes to like move it. I'm moving around or take this off and, you know, me turn it this way, use it as a handle, You know what I mean? So it's a very modular system, like extremely 69. Advice From an Expert: Lens Specifics, Choice, and Advice: There's a lot of lenses you can recommend people. It's just what it is is what you can afford. It should always be that way. Like what you can afford, you go for it. But if you want a lens that can do it all is this lens. You know what I mean? But if you already invested in full frame camera gear like these hybrid shooters, then this won't be an option for you. I mean, there is lenses like Tamron that makes that are really good that I've seen, but Cannon and Sony make their own good, you know, zoom lenses like they're 24, 70 and stuff like that and those are good, just overall, just to get the job done. That's what I would say, that regardless of what kind of Sony or Cannon or Luminex, whatever it is, you really want to have at least two main lenses. You want to have something in the 16, 35 mill range. Right now, we're shooting on 16 Mill. We can see the entire room, Louise and I, all the equipment. And then on this angle, we're shooting on 50 Mill. This is giving a much more telephoto feel. If you get a lens here and here, you're going to have basically 16 all the way up to one oh five, Which is going to get you through a lot of the scenarios you're shooting. The way I see it is Get what? Like there's like a lot of rental sites like Share grid. You know, I don't know if your fans know about that or I mean your students in that room. So I use share grid. And when share grid puts any of these lenses out or a new thing or something, I like to try them out before I buy or I buy them used. And the hardly buy new. I mean some people like to buy new because they don't want the damages. And the is something that, one thing you don't know about zooms is that when you buy them used or even new, sometimes they're slightly off. You won't notice it to the first glance, but when you put it on the computer, you'll notice that slide blur. Yeah, that just slide blur. And that was getting that on the 2470s for the longest on Canon and Sony and all my buddies that were hardcore pixel peepers. Yeah, they saw that. And then they actually had a good copy of the 24, 70 and they showed me the side by side. I'm like, damn, that is a big issue. Is that something you can fix by taking it to a shop you had to take it to Wherever they get it fixed, and they will actually realign it for you. I think I have that on one. Yeah. So like that's the reason why I don't buy, I went with a 24 to one oh five this time on a cannon. Because I saw this on the original mark three EF version and I really liked it. I was like, wow, it's already, it has stabilization built in. It's the 4.0 this is F four, that's the only issue. But you give that for the stabilization. I give that and it already has great low light. So I don't really go higher than what 64,000 or maybe. I mean, I never even Dallas. Yeah. Those are numbers that we never even wow, I don't even like going above 3,200 on my mark tube. But that shot that you saw, those were all, like, some of them were about 64 and up for the fashion. For the fashion, yeah. And then something with the Mandy Moore, I just did. Yeah. Yeah, That was above that because there were some shots where we try to use more ambulant than artificial light because it was supposed to tell. We use lighting to tell the story. Yeah. And so we didn't want the lighting to be too flat and you know, so we used the dynamic range of this camera to push and pull. You know, honestly, like it all depends on what you want to do. If you want to be a beauty photographer, video guy or girl, you want like a macro lens or a zoom lens that can push and pull from here and here or get close eyeballs 'cause these camera lenses, you cannot get close to the eyeball. You wouldn't need a mackerel. You know what I mean? Especially depending on your client, You know, that's another thing. Yeah. So it all depends on what you want to do. If you're going to be a wedding or like a little family, indie filmmaker or whatever, family. And the filmmaker, what is that somebody that wants to just shoot stories or like film their own personal projects, But like wanted to get into advertising and then get like a lens that does everything and then rent everything out. You know what I mean? But if you can't rent and you're in a different country and stuff like that where it's harder to rent like because there's not sure grid everywhere. Then just try to find and invest on a lens that does it all. You know what I mean? Or get these old vintage lenses too. Like this is an old ebay, contacts ice and I got this like years ago for like 300 bucks. And do this lens still still slops, right? Like when I can put this on this camera, I can put this on this, I can put this on this because it's a fool frame from 1980, somewhere in the 80s. And this class is so good. It's still good that is used for cinema, you know what I mean? Or just indie films, you know. But that, that brings up a good point too as well, that with the lens choice that you're doing, you're going to see a lot of different 16, 18 to 35. You're going to see a lot of different 247024 to one oh five for your camera. And there's going to be a big price differences and the price that you're paying is directly. Linked with the quality of the glass. You know, a $200 there's like the $200.50 millimeter, 1.8 maybe it's $100 The 50 mill the cannon, and then there's the 50 mill, 1.4 and then there's the 50 mill, 1.2 And with each one, it's almost double the price before. So it's like 100, 300 then like 1,200 or something like this, 1,500 maybe. So what you're paying for? Yes, there's a slight increase in the maximum aperture, meaning you're going to be able to get more light. But what you're paying for is the amount of time and energy that went into creating such high quality glass. It creates sharpness and clarity. And that is the look that when you see much more high, highly produced videos, you're like, wow, how does this look so damn crisp? It's because they're not shooting on a cheap kit lens that has cheap glass. A click it Kant lens, Bls. Exactly. It's like if you have just your eyes and you're seeing everything clearly and you put on opaque sunglasses and now things are a little bit blurry. It takes a lot of work to get all the impurities out of high quality glass to remove those impurities. So it's something to think about is when you go about lens purchases, you want, if you're shooting action, if you're shooting travel, blogs, and you want scenery and landscapes and something that's more fun and action oriented, wide angle, if you're shooting more beauty blogger, if you're shooting more short film, something more stylized, you want depth of field in the background to be blurry, more telephoto or something. That'll get you in the 50 mill, 60 mill, 70 mill. But when you're making those decisions also keep in mind there's going to be different price ranges. And you want to pick something that's not going to be the cheap, $100.24 to one oh five. Okay. You're gonna get what you pay for in this area? Yeah. I mean, a lot of the lenses when you buy now are like above 500. And the thing is you could, like I said, I bought this 50 mil for the characteristics. Uh huh. Because the element, the coating that was on here, when it flares, it flares beautifully. Same thing with cannon. They flare blue beautifully. The z, I mean, the zest, sigma. Yeah. They flare a little differently. More cold, I want to say. Yeah. But it has a weird 'cause I've used plastic lenses, those cheap 50, 50s, the ones like you get for like 100 bucks sewing cannon. Everyone has one of those pancake lenses, like they're tiny as hell, but they're made out of plastic. And those have plastic glass. And you can tell right away when you hit, when you put it against the sun, you'll see the flare and you're like, oh, and it just looks bad on the skin and all that. So that's what you're paying for is that glass that's been refined to mimic light in such a beautiful way where when it hits the sensor, it does it right for you. And it gives you that sense of feeling like, wow, that's a beautiful image. You know what I mean? And that's one thing that I always look for. It's like everyone else is trying to look for that perfect look, that unicorn glass. You know what I mean? But it does not exist. It's all. So the way I got to here was, and I still got more glass. I have the 70 to 200 cannon and I have an old one. And I still use that to this day because sometimes I got to like back up and zoom in all the way. All the way to like from here to here. Yeah. And it just looks good because it's the compression of the lens, that's another thing. And I will never, possibly ever use, like, wildlife lenses like 1,600 millimeters or 600. Those lenses is very specialty. I would only rent those. I would never use it. So if you're a person that's a gearhead and just wants to buy everything all at once, that's like the one thing you should never do is buy it as you go. You know, everything here. I bought it as I go. So I started here and went here, and then I went here, you know. But these two right now. And there was a lot of iterations in me to eat. Oh yeah, there was a lot of self selling, Sony. So have you seen me with my Sony stuff? I used it but I never used it for video. I just like the photos out of it and it's still a great camera. Don't get me wrong, Sony's don't, don't disappoint, You know, if you have a Sony and a lot of people do it won't disappoint, just buy the right glass. I mean, you know, don't cheap out on your glass either and buy glass that you know, That's one thing I always tell you, buyer is always buy glass that's going to future proof your next purchase. So that's why since I already had cannon. Cannon. Cannon was Sigma, but it's a cannon mount. I can transfer these to this camera. And that's one thing I tell everybody is like if you're gonna buy a rebel or whatever or one of these, what is it called? Micro four, three lenses. You can't transfer these to any of the bigger cameras. So if you're starting off with a 300, $400 camera or $500 like like the 6,500 like those little pointy shoes, but they have really good quality stuff. You can't transfer that to the next one. And that's one thing that every person that calls me and tells me, hey, what do you think I should get Da, Da, Da. I mean, I started with a rebel. I started with like, what do you have? Like oh, I have those old cheap 14th to 13 cannon or whatever. You can't transfer those like you have to sell the whole gear. And that's one thing you should never do is like get the glass that you like and then use that and utilize that. So you know what I mean? And then if you get tired of it then, I mean, I'm pretty sure by then you'll be shooting Hollywood films, you know, because it's all practice, honestly. All this is just learning your style and learning how well you work with it. And then that's how you were able to determine where you want to go in filmmaking or photography. You know, that's a good point. You want to really when you are making your purchases, you want to be able to have longevity. If you buy some of these cheaper lenses, when you want to upgrade your camera two years later, a year later, you're stuck with these old lenses that don't really transition as your creativity and your skill set grows. You want to try and set up that your equipment is going to grow with you. So that's just a really good point equipment wise. 70. Advice From an Expert: Motivation Progress and Success as a Video Creator: We kind of went over all the different specifics about gear, different entry level pieces of equipment, and more expensive pieces of equipment. Microphones, as you can see. And I just kind of wanted to chat maybe a little bit about, you know, recommendations that you would have for new video creators or you know, words of wisdom, just keep creating honestly, Like don't learn all this technical stuff. And like, if you don't have the money to do any of it, I would say just get what you have or find a way to get what the camera you want or however you want to do it and just create honestly. That's the only thing I'm gonna tell you because I've seen people create off of iphones and create masterpieces and little cameras like this. And still to this day, I see people rock little cameras and still create really great content. You know what I mean? It's just one thing you should always do and this is something that I have to catch myself a couple of times is just keep loving to, I mean, just be grateful that you're able to do this. Because in some places if you can't, you know what I mean? And one thing that I tell myself a lot of times is like, all right, you know, I'm not happy with where I'm at, okay? Let's try to motivate myself to do something else, a project or a personal project. Because sometimes getting all this work, I get a lot of work on a weekly. And once that happens I'll just be like, okay, I need to step, step back, enjoy time with family or something, or pick up a hobby, a second hobby that's not related to this. And that's happened to helping me mentally because mental health is a huge thing. And honestly in this industry, you can get stuck in the nitty video of all that. But one thing that I can tell anybody, and I've told my interns and my assistants, is that always keep creating. And if you'd like something that you like from another creator, just do it because that's practice for you. And don't worry about failing either. I failed so many times where I've gotten yelled at, I've messed up a whole job. But I learned from those lessons and I use that for the next job. You know what I mean? Like okay, I know like not to do this or I'll practice this and I watched a ton of Youtube. But back in our day we didn't have, back in our day we didn't have Youtube. And, and like that was kind of a hard thing and I had to learn everything in college and people and so it was a different time then. But now like there's so much information that like honestly, like what you're doing is so awesome. Because I wish I had that when I was younger and doing this. But at the same time, like I'm grateful for what I know and that I got to learn so much. That I was even given the opportunity to meet people like you and assist. A lot of, one thing I still do to this day and a lot of people don't know is I assist a lot of people. And what I mean by assist is like, oh, what do you need serve, like you need lenses. Like I set up the cameras and I do digit teching and stuff. And why I do it is because I get to learn different new ways of like people's style and stuff. And I don't try to steal from them, I just like to learn from like how are they getting these shots or like because everyone has a different style. And that's awesome about being a creator is that you're able to, you utilize the technology that we have now, which we have a crap load of like technology right now, that there's no reason not to be able to create. That's one thing that I can tell you right now is that if the world were to end and all you had is your iphone. I'm pretty sure I'm going to be able to do commercials off of this in the desert or whatever, you know, like everything's done. But just create. And don't, don't let it hold you back from, don't discourage yourself. You know, always try to push yourself and if you know somebody that's a creator in your town or whatever I would say, ask him if you want to help him out. I mean, like I have a good story about one girl, Emmilyn Rose. She was a 14 year old, 15 year old girl. When I was 18, I was just starting photography. I was in college. She wrote me an e mail because she saw me on set doing lifestyle and she said, I want to be a photographer and I just want to go at it Just because she sent me that e mail, I took her in and and I was learning at the time, so I thought I was like, ****, I got an assistant, you know. But at the same time, she she worked her *** off to the point where now she has her own three studios in downtown LA. She's running her own company now she's starting a little agency like she's really killing end. Yeah. And she's producing and all that. Like this girl eats and sleep photography and now she's producing and directing. Yeah. And I give it up to her like honestly, like there's times I'm like damn like you're just going too hard. And but then I'm like, you know what, That's what you got to do is you just got to like want it till you become living off of it. And that's what she did 100% Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. And like I fully can second that. As well as the largest client I actually got for the past seven years was because I showed up to an event 'cause I was so hungry to just film. And it was something simple. It was like going to film some night life thing. And I was supposed to get paid like 50 or 100 bucks. Yeah. Legitimately, I never got paid. But I met someone there that led me to this, that led me to that, that led me to my largest paying client for seven whole years. And so it was really the desire and also getting my hands dirty. And like Luis is saying, just creating, just getting into it, not letting this hold you down, letting these be a tool that you get really comfortable with so you can translate your idea into something that you're proud of. And that comes from failing. That comes from saying yes to as many projects as you can. That comes from not getting hung up on equipment, but really getting out there and collaborating, meeting people, and creating as much as you can. So that's one thing I would say is just like always try to collaborate and just be hungry for it, you know. And then you, all that knowledge is just going to pay off, you know? And it's paying me off, honestly, just being hungry for it's been like, you know what I mean? Just be creative. You know, just find your own style too. You know, find your own style and upgrade as you go. You start here, you build your equipment, gets better, your creativity gets better, your skill set gets better, your client level and your final product get much better. And it's a process. And with all that said, that wraps it up for this learning lesson where Louise and I dove in really deep into cinematography tips and tricks and also a lot about the equipment side. So, thank you for coming on. Thank you for students and I will see you guys in the next learning lesson. Oh boy Al, right. 71. Better Looking Laptop Videos: Now, because of the situation of what the whole earth is going through with this whole covid thing and so many people are using their laptops. I wanted to kind of add a little bit of a bonus lecture around getting a better looking video with your laptop. Whether that's a zoom call, a face time, Google Hangout, Skype session with clients, with friends, with family, whatever it is. I'm going to give you some principles that you can use that from here on out. After this course, all of your laptop videos are going to look way better. So let's first start with me sitting down here, Okay. Now the reason I'm going to face this way is because there's already decent light coming from this main light source, which is this window that's directly across from me. Now with video on your laptop, it's really similar to your phone in general, where you want to have things as close to eye level as possible. This is honestly a little bit low for my liking. It should probably be something like that. You can that this feels a lot more presentable than this. This is a lot more casual, you're not really setting thing, else, things up. If this is you and your family, that's totally fine. I want to get this a little bit higher. So I'm just going to grab a prop in the house that I can easily use. Now, this is not a step that all people should need to take, but this is just a little extra step that whether you're doing this professionally or with friends and family, this will give you slightly better looking image on your laptop. So the next thing that I want to do is because I already have a decent main lighting source, I want to get the exposure down behind me because this is all blown out and the image is very grainy in the darks and around around the frame. Something you really have to keep in mind with laptop videos when you're streaming or doing one of these zoom calls is that you don't have the type of quality to work with that you have on a DSLR or more professional camera, or even the iphone quality is going to do so much more. So you really have to take a few extra steps to make this look good, which the next step is going to be getting the exposure behind me down. So let's see what that looks like, okay? And you can see that it's a lot cleaner of an image. So if you go to the before and the after, so you can see pretty well lit, of course. It's a little bit grainy. There's not much we can do about that. It comes down to the quality of the camera on our laptop, which the quality is not that good most of the time. One last thing that I wanted to actually add that we have available in this kind of situation is adding practical lights in the background. Like you probably already know by now in this course, this is one of my favorite things. So this is an okay looking image, a little bit dull, but we're going to really make things look a lot more stylized by adding on these practical string lights in the background. Let's see what that looks like. I love these lights. Oh, as you can see, a lot better looking of an image. Now, something to keep in mind before I wrap up this lecture is the video or the camera inside the laptop is always recording on auto, so it's kind of getting confused by these lights in the background. And I can see the exposure kind of changing. So, stylistically it looks really nice, but it's also, yeah, there's a, there's a lot of ISO kind of issues and some digital noise going on and whatnot, but this is just a little extra step for your laptop videos. 72. Advice From an Expert: Vlatz Introduction and Camera Talk: So at this portion of the course, it's a little bit of a bonus session and lecture that I wanted to have a really cool sit down discussion with a really good filmmaker friend of mine lats, he, Julian, Thank you for having me then, of course. So kind of today we're going to be touching on, you know, the real life experience of a filmmaker. I really want Vlaz to be able to share his story and offer advice, inspiration, motivation, and really just any other kind of information that he wants to share with you guys. After going through the course and getting all these techniques on upgrading your cinematography and creating better videos, I want to have someone else who's also been doing this as a freelancer and works full time as a filmmaking filmmaker to share his perspective. So as I just kind of want to start with, you know, maybe just a short little backstory on what got you to today. Sure. I'm from Colombia, so I was born in Bogota. And I remember the first time I started messing with video, it was doing stuff on Windows Movie Maker, actually just for fun, grabbing like different footage and making those awful like texts on screen with the fonts that they have in Windows. And just having fun with it, like getting creative the same way like DJ, started making mixes in tapes from radio. That's kind of the approach, like the to approach that I did, like just grabbing Windows movie maker. Then I remember I went to Miami to visit an aunt and she had like a video recorder super old school. And I just wanted to like put my hands on it and see how it works. I was always fascinated by it. And I remember I loved just to put it on check, like this little screen, the little red.it felt cool. I don't know, There's something about it that's always been present in like since I was a little kid. And then Youtube came and in Colombia, like Youtube, like everything gets so late, the huge Youtubers were not in Colombia, but like in different countries, I always felt like I wanted to be on Youtube, but I didn't know how everything was in English. There were no content creators teaching in Spanish. So that was a huge difference in like being here in the states where you had like a lot of academies, a lot of content teachers. That didn't happen in Colombia or in Latin America. So everything was like try and error. So I had like five Youtube channels. I bought a Go Pro like three or two. It was an old one and I started messing with it. I downloaded Premier Pro starting like getting to know the software, and I started doing mode logs in my motorcycle with a lavalier mic. It didn't work, so I had to learn how to make the audio kind of better. And then I bought a cannon. 60, started messing with it. It was so much fun taking everything that camera has to offer. And if you look at it right now, it's like so obsolete for video. It's like the quality is bad, the sound is awful. But it was the best camera that I could have afforded right there. That knowledge. Then coming here to Los Angeles, having the opportunity to take knowledge from the Youtube teachers. But like in English, that's a completely different step because it's like people are doing it here and there's a lot of good teachers everywhere. That's something I'm so grateful. And I met a really, really cool guy, Julian. You taught me so much not only like about cameras gear editing, but like perspective of how to even deal with filmmaking situations. That's something you don't get to learn online. That's something you get like from out human to human and experience in doing it. And that's something that I still appreciate. And it's with me and it's going to be with me forever. And it means a lot. Yeah, thank you, man. Thank you for sharing that. And thank you for Yeah, of course. Those like kind words but also your back story. Some of that stuff, I didn't even really realize the difference between. Yeah, sometimes where you're living creates certain scenario. So that's yeah, I think a lot of the times we forget these things, especially with the Internet too. It is an interesting kind of tool that we can use. But I also wanted to kind of touch in on So you moved to America. Now you're working with pretty high end client full time making good money, creating content on a monthly. Monthly basis. You're putting out how many videos a month for this client. Crazy. It's from little videos for Instagram to serious podcast series DJ routines. It's more than 30. Definitely. Damn. Okay. And so what are some of the tactics or tips or just maybe some things you picked up along the way, cinematography or filming wise, that you know now that maybe you didn't know a month ago, three months ago, three years ago. Anything you want to share out that? Yeah, So I sucked so much doing like hand held kind of footage and my videos were so boring because of the framing. So I wished I knew small things like you taught me once, like the ninja movement of how you don't. It's more interesting to have a video or like a short video of you have the subject and if you do it super slow and it's like a two second fragment, it looks way more interesting if you put the little effort of moving it, trying to make it like closer taking. Not only filming from one angle only, but like trying to get the other one like the opposite side. It's those little details that at the end the sum and they make it way, way better. And you have more footage to choose from being able to have more ball because you're not lazy and you're like, okay, you have to get this angle, I have to get that frame. I'm going to try it from above, I'm going to try it parallel 90 degrees. I'm this thinking of having the checklist, that's another thing that you taught me. Like having checklist to do that and don't forget. So at the end of the day, you have a bunch of footage to choose from that's huge and that makes a huge difference, 100% Yeah. My checklists are just, they've grown over the years. I was talking with Louise yesterday about it just like he saw my checklist. He's like, Bro, what is that I'm like, this is how I get things done. If I don't get it written down, it's not getting done. So that's huge for me, and I'm glad that you brought that up, because I think it's those little kind of structured elements that really make the shooting process better. And if the shootings, well, let me back that up. If the pre production structuring process is better, the shooting process is better, which makes the editing process better, which makes the final product and the audience retention and the interest in the video and the click through whatever it is. So much better. 73. Advice From an Expert: Equipment vs. Skill and Maximizing What You Have: So I also wanted to touch on what do you think has been. What would you tell yourself? Filming wise or maybe camera wise or equipment wise, three years ago that you know, today like lats, three year old lats don't stress on the equipment or, you know, maybe step this up or what do you think that would be? I remember thinking that if I had a better camera, I could be a better film maker and that's not true. Like your cell phone is a super powerful machine to record video. You have slow motion, you have HD video. You have a lot of tools there at your hand. Right now, that belief of like this is not enough. I wish I could have switched it to how can I take the most out of what I have. That's one of the things I would have told myself three years ago. Gear. I mean, obviously if you have a red camera, you can get different kind of results and better results for certain situations. But having the ability to take the most out of what you have right now, that's an important way of thinking, especially when you're starting. I remember taking the most out of my 60. It wasn't because I was having the mindset of taking it to the most 100% percentage, 100% of the camera. It was here after having it for five years that I took the time to. Okay. I'm going to check on Youtube. What are the best settings? And I actually was getting better footage after having it for a long time than when I just got it when I was back in Colombia. And that's crazy if you think about it. If it happened to me, that can happen to a lot of people. You might have a really good camera, but you're not taking the most out of it because you're not reading the manuals, you're not looking on Youtube tutorials on how to set it up correctly. I wasn't taking into consideration the frame rate like the 24 frames per second. I was shooting 60 sometimes and it looks so bad, and that's pretty much it sums, and that's the result of doing the hard work and doing the homework of researching. And that's so important. I wish I would have taken more time into educating myself. I would be so far a better filmmaker right now if I would have taken the time and the money to invest in education. That's the only way to get better in filmmaking. I love that because what I hear when you're saying that is I don't want to use the word mastering, but getting really comfortable with the fundamentals, right? The fundamentals, there's only so many variables on a camera, there's only so many ways you can move the camera, set up the camera, like we talked about in the course, Tripod shot, gimble shot, handheld shot, There's only a handful of different parameters for all these different things. Of course, there's complex different additions of equipment and settings and all these things, but it comes down to mastering the fundamentals as if you are a painter that knows the paint brush really well and understands the coloring really well and the canvas really well and then creates all these different landscapes and different types of art. That is really a big part, you know, is really those fundamental areas. What do you think was that? Because it can be easy to say like don't worry about the equipment as much. I love what you're saying about maximizing what you do have 'cause it's a totally different mindset. I want that or how do I make what I do have actually better or the best it could be. So you're going into research mode, you're going into experiential mode, making mistakes. What was the shift that made you able to integrate that truth versus just say, don't worry about the equipment 'cause I think some times even when I hear it, I'm like, yeah, but it yeah, no. But what was that shift for you that now you would say? I wish I could tell myself three years ago. This is the realization. I think at the end of the day, it comes down to results. Like I know people who invest in really expensive cameras and they don't use them, they don't utilize all the tools that come with it. It comes for me how bad you want it. For example, just to take an example, Instagram, you can make so many good videos with just your cell phone or Tiktok. You can make the best content, pretty much with any cell phone right now. It comes down to creativity, to what you have here. Camera gear like tripods, lights a better lens. That's a plus, That's a tool that you have and it's cool. I mean, I wish I could have like the best camera, the most expensive one, the best lens, like R cinema cameras. But at the end of the day, this is what you have here is what translates into making the bridge to build that dream that you have and make it come true. Eventually you'll have those cameras, you'll have those lenses, but it has to be a process and you appreciate everything more when it costs effort. And you have to go through the phases of, okay, I don't have that camera. I have this right now. What can I make out of this? People, even if you think they don't notice or they're not watching, people can tell if you are a creative person. There are so many examples of that on Youtube, on the Internet of people like retweeting. They think is that one video can change your life and probably that one video was more creative than gear based. Have that in mind. One thing that I, I think it's amazing about the creative world, taking music into consideration and filmmaking is that you can try 99 times. Those 99 tries can be awful. Awful songs or awful videos. But video, one piece of content, like one song or one Youtube video, or one Tiktok or one Instagram video, can change your life. Sometimes it doesn't come down to what camera you're using, what super expensive lens you're using, Crazy light and sounding, and software, and et cetera. It comes down to the creative ability that you have to put what you have in your mind to reality. That's crazy. It only takes one piece of content to change your life. 74. Advice From an Expert: Video Progress and Giving It Your All: What are, you know, some of the habits, routines maybe that you do to really work on this creative muscle to make you a better filmmaker. Or that's maybe brought you the business success that you have today. How do you know where do you want to take that? Yeah, I'm always checking on all platforms. I'm following the video creators that I like and I try to take all the tricks. Because there are no tricks. It's just have it. For example, there's one dude on the Instagram, he used to do the sickest stories. Uh huh. With handheld transitions. And he put the transitions and then he explained every day how he did it. And it's no crazy editing, it was just his cell phone. And he was doing the transitions like handheld and pretty much came down to the ability to do everything on set. Not so much focused on the editing like post crazy CGI staff, no. It was pretty much just thinking ahead of what you're going to shoot and something so simple, like an Instagram story, but making it the best. I was like, wow, for Instagram stories which are like, you don't see them after 24 hours, the amount of work that you're putting is not going to be able to perpetuate after 24 hours. That's huge. I mean, if somebody is working so hard, I was like, okay, okay, okay. That I like that way of thinking. What if I put the same amount of effort in every piece of content I make? It doesn't matter if it's editing, but if it's a 15 second clip, what's the best I can bring to it before, during, and after the shooting? That helped me a lot like to take that approach of, okay, let's make it better every time. What can I add? How can I make it 1% better than the video I edited or the video I should before? Mm hm. That's a huge, I like that perspective because, yeah, I feel like when I stopped trying to make, well, it's kind of interesting when I stopped trying to make this next project, the masterpiece, even though I was pouring all my energy into it. When I started to release more content on a more frequent basis. But try to more improve versus this is going to be the video that I'm the most proud of and that is this and that and this and that, that would keep me stuck in the creative process. Expectation, the expectation, and really the perfectionism of editing maybe a video two weeks a week longer than I, than needed. But really making this one is 2% better, 2% better, 2% than trying to make this final one, that somehow I arrive at this amazing video creating arrival or completion. And just kind of letting go of that need. Yeah. And that desire, but really keeping track of progress and wanting to make it more interesting as I go and try new things. And yeah, really pouring myself into it, but it's something to think about, is pouring yourself into your project in a balanced way, whether that's you filming on set or you coming up with your ideas. Yeah. Giving you your energy. But don't think that this is, that this is the destination. I think that's what I'm trying to say here. The destination is far in the future. Let that be the video that you're working on now is the next step of something that you don't know possibly where it's leading, but you're going in a direction. So I think that that's when you were saying that, that was bringing that memory up in me, that kind of was a good shift for me as well to kind of really change gears and be more creative and have more output. There was a video. No, no, no. I was filming and DJ Jazzy Jeff and he's just like full of frigging wisdom and everything he says just sounds so epic. And he said, you need to die empty. And when I heard that, I was kind of like, whoa, that sounds kind of harsh. What he was saying is, you don't want to die with anything left in the tank, you know? You don't want to die with anything left on the hard drive. You don't want to be a musician or a filmmaker with all these projects stuck on your laptop and stuck on your hard drive that doesn't get released because it's not perfect or good enough. You want to blow through all that stuff and get it out and put it in the world and shoot and edit, and create it, and go die empty. Die with it all out. On in the planet, you know what I mean? And that kind of connected with a few other realizations and was a really big, I think, milestone in a stepping point for my personal filmmaking creation process. One of the things that I realized is that you don't think about it, but like every successful Youtuber or video creator or artist, they start from zero. Mm hm. They just press record and put it online. The first video, for the most part probably will suck. Or the first movie or the first documentary that you make, it's probably going to suck. But like if you keep working on it, when you have 25 videos, 50, when you put on the work and you get to 100 videos, that one probably is going to look a lot better. Because you've put on the hours, people are going to follow and come to your channel. Eventually, opportunities are going to come and collaborations are going to open. Because you have a portfolio and you've got the experience. That's something that's hard to do. Because usually perfection is not something people are like having in mind when they're doing things, but that's hiding something else. It's like the insecurity of what people are going to think of. If I have put this video online, it's not perfect. I could have done this and that. But at the end of the day, people are not going to care for your first video, even if it's super perfect. Eventually there are some weird cases where people blow out from first videos. But you have to work and it's a process. It's not a one video kind of staff. It's a process. And when you think and when you do it from that perspective and you're playing on the long run, you enjoy it, you enjoy it way more, and you start like having fun. You know, I love basically the advice you gave. It wasn't on the technical side, it was much more on the human side. I love that because I think, you know, we can go on those Youtube rabbit holes where we're just going on these technical video tutorials and not really taking a look back and seeing the bigger picture of okay, am I being joyful while I'm creating? Am I balancing my desire to shoot videos with my joy and not burning myself out and actually as smiling during the process. So I love the fact that you brought up that side of filmmaking 'cause I don't think that's talked about a whole lot. But with that said, is there any other kind of words of wisdom that you would like to impart? Definitely. Ah, you just need to pray the record button. That's the most important step. You just have to start. After you start, you've done the step. The hardest step in filmmaking is starting to shoot. To press the record button on your camera or your cell phone. I love that. Oh man, I think I'm gonna get that tattooed. I'm like, I love that. Well, thank you so much, Blatz for sharing with you and yeah, I'm really looking forward to shooting more and continuing this process. So, thanks for being on, thank you for having me. I hope to see you soon man. Alright, thanks man. Perfect. 75. Course Recap and My Creative Challenge For You: And so this is it, the final chapter of this chorus. I'm so happy that you made it this far and just, wow, I can't believe this is it. Like I put so much energy and so much time, and just so much of myself into this project, into this information, into the pre production, the production, the post production of getting this content to you. And I'm so excited that you made it this far and that you now have all of the knowledge that I know that now you have to create what you want. So what we're going to be doing is recapping the information that we've gone over before getting into the bonus section of the course. Now I can't recap everything, but there's just a few key reminders that I want to give you. And we're going to do an overview. If I recapped everything, this would be a very long lecture, so let's check it out. First, we dove into our camera settings. We started off by really getting onset experience, seeing how things work behind the scenes. And then seeing how we can use our cameras settings and functions to really get the best looking and sounding footage and audio as possible. Then we got into the film techniques. We worked with Kimber Lea And we got to see how to get the best looking and sounding video in natural light, in artificial light, with all the different lighting scenarios and all the different types of environments to shoot it. We went over a bunch of other really important and essential film techniques and applied those techniques into the hands on learning exercises. And you got to upload your before and after shots and shared them in the Q and A section. That's when most people would be done and satisfied with their video. But we took things even further. We dove into audio and B role, using cutaway shots, using all the different kinds of framing, shot types, camera movement, creating a montage. Carving out your story by adding in a lot of cutaway shots, putting your ideas into a shotlist, and getting crystal clear sounding audio. Then we synthesized all that information, all the audio, all the video techniques, and gathered them together so that now you have all the tools that you need to continue to go out and create, to take your ideas and turn them into videos that you are proud of. Ooh. And now that we've gotten this far, I now have a challenge for you is for you to take all of these techniques and really, really apply them. I don't want you to be excited and having fun during this course. Well, I do want that, but I want you to continue to expand on that excitement and that information and that new knowledge beyond this course. So I want you to take the camera settings using proper exposure and settings for your environment. The framing, the creative use of framing with the specific purpose in mind of what the emotion is that you want to create in your audience. Using focus, right? Guiding the viewer's eye to where your story is being told. Using great background choice for your specific video to create a specific vibe. And using movement. One of my favorite parts, creating the right feeling with consciously moving your shots and using those different shots as a good mix of different types of framing. Blending those different ideas together to get really good, different types of roll coverage and B roll coverage. And of course, using great lighting. And lastly, sound. Getting clean and crispy quality sound from your subject or your environment. And I want you to take these ideas and continue to create, but specifically create a new series or a big video project. So take these ideas and take these techniques that you learned and really step out of your comfort zone. Create something unique, create something that is uniquely you and uniquely yours. And the other courses in this series will help you with coming up with that idea or editing that video, or really going out and creating that series. So I'll give the details to that as well in the final bonus lesson. But most importantly, be sure to share your progress with me on Instagram and in the Q and A section. Nothing makes me well. I really love coffee. It makes me pretty happy. But mostly nothing makes me as happy as seeing your upgraded footage, your upgraded shots, your new projects. And I love when you keep me updated on, you know, the stuff that you create after you take the courses. So be sure to tag me on Instagram. Be sure to keep me in the loop and be sure to really show me what you do after this course. And so we're nearing the end here. I'm sad, but I'm excited for you as well. But in the next learning lessons, I'm going to give some special bonus giveaways for you making it all the way through the course. Specifically, it's going to include some techniques for shooting on your laptop. Some expert advice from a filmmaker friend of mine. And links, like I mentioned, to my other courses that are connected to this course. So enjoy and always keep creating. Always keep growing. Always keep moving forward. Always keep following your passion. Thank you so much for going on this journey with me, for listening, for taking in what I'm offering, and really allowing this connection to happen. And I truly, truly am grateful for you, and I'm so excited that you are now a graduate of this chorus. Thank you.