Video Production - The Complete Filmmaking Course

1. Welcome to the Video Production Bootcamp: Hey Phil here. Thank you so much for enrolling in this class. Will sam and I are so excited to have you here and to teach you how to make better videos. In this video, we're going to be explaining exactly who this course is for and what the structure of the course is. So you're ready to get going. This course was made for complete video beginners. Maybe you're someone who has never made a video before, but you have a smartphone or a webcam and you need or want to make videos, or maybe you've made some videos by, you wanna make them look better to make them more professional. So this class is for bloggers. Bloggers, YouTubers maybe work at a company and they're asking you to make a video for them. Maybe you're an aspiring filmmaker and just want to make your own video content. This class is really just to teach the basics of video production. Number one, you'll learn how to come up with great video ideas and then create a plan so you can make those videos come to life. Number 2 will tell you about the equipment that we recommend the most. But also, we're going to teach you how to make great videos with the equipment you already on. Number three, you'll learn to shoot with any camera. Number four, you'll learn how to record great audio in any environment with different types of microphones. Make your videos better with professional lighting techniques, even learn how to use DIY lights. Number 6, learn to edit videos, make your videos more engaging, no matter what application you use. Number seven, someone needs to see a video, write, learn how and where to grow your audience with distribution, we're a group of professional filmmakers that have had hits on the big screen and viral videos on YouTube. I'm Phil and I'm a professional video editor and motion graphics artists. And my real passion though, is about making documentaries. Hey, I'm well, I'm a professional cinematographer, photographer and director. Currently I'm working on anything from a YouTube video all the way into indeed, low-budget features. Hi, my name's Sam. I'm a director, documentarian, cinematographer, and I work out of Los Angeles and the film industry, but really I've just video to travel the world. We've come together to show you the essentials and how to make great videos. You shall not pass. 2. What Makes a Great Video: What do you need to make a great video? That's what this lesson is all about. Hey, Sam, tell us what the first element of the video making process is. So, first and foremost, you need a camera. We've shelled with everything from our smartphones to pro cinema cameras that do crazy slow motion or four K resolution, which are all cool things. But you don't need that to make a good video. Right now we're rolling with multiple cameras, a smartphone and a professional camera. And you can see that while the quality of the professional cinema camera is better, you can still record great videos with a smartphone. At the end of the day, all you need is something that can record video. Now that you have a camera, you now need a subject or a story, something captivating, something that's gonna get people interested. Something's gonna keep someone watching your video story and subject will come back to the why why are you making this video? Is it because of a passion? Is it a three act structure that you want to tell people? Or is it just a video vlog that you want to share your life experience with its gonna be important that your viewers can connect with you through your story, subject or yourself in general. So once you have your camera in your subject matter what type of video you're going to make , the next thing is to think about exposing an image. Having enough light for you came in to be able to see what you're trying to capture. This can come both from artificial light or from daylight. What official nights are like those that you find in your house or the lights that we use on film sets. Natural light comes from the sun at a very basic level. It's just like being able to see something. But as you get deeper into it, you'll start being ableto shape, light and really tell a story by using it. Lighting can also really affect the mood of your video. Take, for example, this one big soft light for a very dramatic interview. Another aspect of video making is audio, and this can sometimes be for gotten. This includes stuff that's recorded on set like a nice, clear voice during an interview or dialogue between characters. This will also include stuff that's done in post stuff like sound effects, voiceover, recording and music. All this comes together as your audio track in your final video, and this can really make or break your final video. The next element of video making is editing and editing, or post production is where some say the story really takes shape. It's where we take everything that we've worked on so far, the writing, the shooting and we put it all together. And editing is more than just taking your best shots and putting them together. It's about adding emotion or even comedy with proper pacing or using techniques like adding music or doing some color grading. Teoh give a certain style to your film. It's ultimately about putting your story together and getting it ready to show the world. Think about editing throughout the entire video making process from pre production or when you're out shooting. It will help you understand what shots you need. Do you need close ups? Do you need wide shots? What shots will helps tell your story. So you figured out your camera. You figured out what story you're going to be telling. You've talked about your lighting and you figured out your audio. You've taken all that and you've edited together a nice video. What do you do next? It's time to distribute that video film has been around for over 100 years. It's never been easier for you to share your video with the world. It's a great time to be a video maker. 3. What Type of Video Should You Make: let's start the video production process, and the first thing we need to know is, what type of video are we going to make? And to know what type of video we're making? We have to know what our end goal is, who our target audiences and ultimately, where we're going to be sharing our video. No, your end goal for your video is very important. Are you trying to entertain? Are trying to educate? Are you trying to sell? This is really gonna inform you on what kind of genre and video you're making and what you're gonna need to create that video as well as getting it out there. So music videos and comedy sketches are more on the entertainment side of things versus a promotional video or a commercial which is trying to sell things, or a tutorial or documentary, which is more about education. Knowing the difference between the genres will help you make your video, you'll be able to figure out details like what shots they're gonna do, what your character's air gonna be like the lighting, the compositions, how to edit your film and what graphics to use. It will also eventually help you on knowing where and how to share your video. Once you know your end goal and what type of video you'll be making, you need to know who you're making your video for. This is your target audience. Your target audience are people who are already interested and searching for videos about your topic. And it's important to engage with this audience because they're the ones more likely to like and share your content and open you up to a bigger audience. So their main different places to share your content. And here does a few key tips of how to choose the right platform for you. Tip number one. If you're gonna be consistently making videos and trying to build an audience, YouTube is really the best place right now to do so. There's a lot of people that have entire careers around YouTube videos. Tip number two. If you're making a video that on an under a minute and really is more so to advertiser company and try and get people towards your website, Instagram and Twitter are great platforms to share those videos. Tip number three. If you're looking to make more creative videos and be a part of a community of filmmakers. Venue is a great place to do so. Tip number four. Facebook's another option. A lot people choose to share from other problems onto Facebook, but you can also upload straight to Facebook. And, of course, now there's Facebook live so you can live stream things to it. And this is a great way because it shows up cleanly on the news. Feed. A lot of people we're just so scrolling through, and we'll watch a lot of videos throughout the day and they can share to other platforms, which is really nice at the same time directly. Uploading to Facebook can detract from your YouTube views or from your instagram shares or whatever it is, and to go right into our tip number five. We believe that when you're first starting off as a video creator, you need to pick a platform. You need to be focused and know what type of videos you're making, who your audience is and where they're going to be. Watching. It will help you grow faster and get more shares and likes all around 4. Come Up with Great Video Ideas: great videos start with great stories, and video is the perfect medium for storytelling in our modern world. Many people carry around a device in their pocket where they can watch videos all the time , and video is both visual and audio. So it's a great way to give your story to an audience. Now, figuring out what story you want to tell with video is a whole nother story. Sometimes you might already have that story in mind, and you know that it would make the perfect video. And for me, this came about last year when I was thinking about making a short documentary, and I had a friend who was unfortunately diagnosed with a less or blue Gerrick disease in his mid twenties. And he was a professional award winning photographer, and he basically couldn't use his hands to change the settings on his camera anymore. But after a couple of years, he figured out a way to still take photos from his wheelchair, and this whole story was just so inspiring to me that I knew it would make a great documentary. Now you might not have that perfect story to tell right now, as filmmakers were always on the lookout for a great story, even when I was shooting the Anthony Carvajal documentary I'm always on the lookout for inspiration for my next video. If you're struggling to find a story, shoot something you're passionate about, you should always be really excited about what you're shooting. So if you start by shooting your passion, you may be able Teoh evolve and develop a story or something out of that. I, for example, really like hockey, So I shoot a lot of hockey video. Sometimes I just take my camera out there and before and after games, I get out there and I shoot. And really, because I'm passionate about it, this story will sort of find me. So our advice to you to get started with finding your story is to get out there and shoot your passions. It's a great place to start looking for inspiration, and hopefully it will spark your next idea. So if you have an idea, subject are the type of it you want make. Or even if you're still a little lost in trying to figure out what you want to do, you should really just go online and see what else is out there going to you to going to Instagram search companies that you know you like, where they're similar to your own company and just start grabbing inspiration from those things. See how they may. They look at each shot individually and think of Oh, they went in and they shot this. Why, John? They shot this close up in, So I analyzed how it was made so you can go in, Use your own Styler. Use your own techniques to make a video better than that one. Be better than the videos of governing inspiration from or, you know, use similar tricks. I know for myself when I first started with Major Lazer, I had shot some events but never at that level. And so I went and saw what other big acts were doing, seeing how people cover their events. Were they doing behind the scenes shots where they're doing just really cool, fast editing all these different things in over time I developed my own style. I developed the my way of approaching it, and it's really it's been a great learning expense for me and each videos different. Each approach is different but I'm always looking out there and seeing what other people are doing to know. Oh, my gosh. You know these guys about this video and it got 500 million views. Okay, well, people obviously like that. Stellar. They like something that they're doing there. So all going, try doing something similar. But again, my subject matters different. I'm a different filmmaker, so it's gonna be my own style. When you're coming up with your video idea, you gotta think about how engaging your video will be. With engagement. It comes down to a couple of things, but one is the length of your video. There's no perfect length for a video. I always say that your video should be as long as it takes to tell your story. For some stories, this might be two hours. For some stories, it's 10 hours. It's a full season of TV shows. For some, it's like 32nd clip on Instagram. There's no perfect length for your video, but remember that we do live in a world where people's attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and shorter, so trimming the fat and keeping it short will make it more engaging aside from the length of your video, engagement comes across with how you make your video as well, including what types of shots you have. A video with. One long shot of someone talking at the camera isn't going to be as engaging as that same video with multiple shots or multiple people telling that same story. Also adding things like music, graphics or titles can make your videos more engaging. Here's a checklist to help come up with your next video to think about what you're passionate about. Research, other videos that you're drawn to, that you can gain inspiration from about your video ideas off your friends and family, because getting a second opinion can help you develop your idea. Use a tool like Google trends to see what's currently trending, or just hop over to YouTube to see what the trending videos of the day are. Think of things that will make your video stand out. Among the rest. Use these tips to start thinking about your next video topic 5. Plan Your Video: Once you have an idea for your video, the next step is to make a plan. This is the pre production process. Preproduction is extremely important. It's something that helps your production in post production all run much, much smoother because you've gone and you've had the foresight to know what you're getting into. Just for this course alone, we've been outlines. We've done scheduling. We've gone back on the outlines. We've written scripts. I mean, it takes a lot to make this all happen. But now that we're here shooting it, we know what to expect. We know what we're trying to get, and we just need to film it. Preproduction for us includes things like creating a timeline, creating equipment and personnel lists and also creating a budget. All of these things together can be put together as a treatment. If you're doing a more professional shoe with a client, this is something you wouldn't want to be presenting to your client. It can also be used as reference so that you can keep track of everything you're doing while you're shooting. Setting up a timeline is an important part of your pre production process. Now this is going to look different from your feature length narrative to your YouTube channel timeline. But for any type of video, it's important. Let's look at YouTube, though, because I think a lot of you watching this video will be starting your own YouTube channel . It's so important to have a schedule on YouTube. We're really any social media platform when it comes to video. Putting out consistent video is one way to grow your audience faster because people will expect and know that you're coming out with more content on a weekly or a monthly or a bi weekly basis. Now there's no perfect rule for how often you should be posting, but once or twice a week is a great rule of thumb. So once you know that you want to be posting videos once a week or twice a week or whatever it is, you can come up with a timeline for how long it will take to create that video. That is going to include things like planning out the video, shooting the video and editing the video, and any time it takes to put it online and publish it and actually do this start from the end. When do you want to publish a video? If it's Monday and you want to publish on Friday, think about when you want to shoot it. Maybe you want to shoot it on Monday or Tuesday. When are we going to edit it? When are you going to set it up online? And maybe you can do it all in one day. But just start to think about how big what the scope of your project is and work backwards to create your own timeline. And next, you'll need to think of your crew and equipment. So who's gonna be on the set with you? Do you have someone to help with lighting camera audio? Who's engaging with the subject? And these can all be covered by one person? Or they could be a whole team of people alongside that. You need to know what equipment you have or what women you'll need to rent. Do you have your own camera? Do you have lighting? Can use natural lighting. You know there's so many different tools and toys you can play with, but when you're first getting started, just use what you have use what's available to you and really focus on your story. Focus on what's in front of your camera. Now that you figured out everything you need to shoot this, you can create a budget. Basically, the budget includes your costs from beginning to end. That means paying for production and post production. So for the total budget, things to think about our equipment crew, transportation fees, food postproduction such like editing or assets like creating new graphics and also music, composition and potentially distribution fees. This can all seem a little daunting, but we're gonna walk through our preproduction checklist in the next lesson. 6. The Pre-Production Checklist: we're gonna talk about our preproduction checklist Now, this is helpful because we can take everything we've learned in pre production and now go over it all in a kind of a distinct, quick way to make sure that we're hitting all the elements that we meet. You can download this. Pdf on our download section. We like to use Google docks because it's an easy way to collaborate. Um, filler Sam can both be joined on to their own account, as you see here, up in the top. And it's really great way to collaborate and make sure all on the same page. Let's dive in with a project that we're already working on. Phil, Sam and I all have a channel on line on YouTube called Video School Online Tech, where your view different tech gear. So we have a concept for this next video, and we're gonna be doing a BSL Attack channel video next week. And so we're just going go over the basics off that video next week. We're doing the XY to four k footage. Review the budget. You were doing this all for ourselves, and so there really is no budget. We own most of our equipment at this point. So we're able to use all that other than maybe buy lunch for us lunch. So I don't know what is a couple bucks? 20 bucks. OK, 20 lunch schedule wise. What are you thinking about? You know, Tuesday's probably best for me can't do Monday. No, no, I'm supposed be editing. Okay, so Monday might be good, cause we can prep on Monday. Whatever we need to do. Yeah. Um, office. Well, I'd love to get it out by next Friday, so we could just guess at it are Wednesday. We'll download all the footage Tuesday and then Wednesday, Thursday, Gettinto, all that. Okay, this is a great way to plan, because I know we want to distribute this. We want to go live with this video on Friday. It's great that we have this plan out so that we know that we can just get everything, don't you? It's also easier to prep on a Monday If we're like working that we can leave your Saturday and Sunday free. We were also shot most of our videos in our office, so we should continue to do that. That's really easy to do easy to light. So because we're shooting in the office, what equipment do we end up saying that we need normally for that probably bring the led light maths being the five as our main camera. Okay, we'll need X t to obviously to review that. That's like a prop. It's problems, really? So equipments a good time to not only talk about stuff you need. If you're doing a tech channel, you might also review. Johnny might need to use that equipment as well. And the shocking Mike's been working really well. I dig the shock and Mike so shock on Mike, we could use our labs potentially. I'll just put it on there, so, yeah, for us all our equipment is in our place that we shoot, which is really helpful. But it's always good to go over this stuff because you never know what you're gonna forget . What you've went to friends, what you've used somewhere else. Just check checklists, checklists, checklists. And this really is on that Monday prep going to equipment, going through all the items that we said we needed, building the camera, making sure the lights are working so that come Tuesday when were actually shooting. We're not missing something, and this is really important. Especially if you have a client or someone. And you go into the shooting. All senate. Something's not working. Well, had you prepped, you wouldn't know what you were missing in advance. Great. So that's our schedule equipment postproduction. We're going to edit it in the office, right? Editor is you or make you okay. Your camera As far supposed protection. Do we have hard drives for that? We want to make sure to drive. It ends back. Yeah, s so we just need to make sure that we have those clean and clear distribution that's going on the BSO Tech channel on YouTube. So, yeah, I think once it gets in, that fills hands hill posted on our channel. So that's a very quick preproduction check. Let's go over with Sam and I I think we would actually probably sit and go over stuff even in more detail. The big thing for you is to take this pdf and kind of go over it several times in the week or so before your shoot so that you know, you're to the t. And you got everything ready to go, and you're not missing anything while you're shooting or even in post production. You can go over this list 100 times, and each time you'll think of something new you should be doing. But do it a few times before you actually get into, uh, into your production. 7. Intro to Equipment: Let's talk about the elephant in the room equipment I know alive. You are interested in equipment, and that's why we've created this section to help you determine what equipment you should buy or use for your video production. It's one of the most popular requests we get from students. What camera to buy, what microphone to use, what type of lighting should they get. But we're gonna be honest throughout this entire section. And this course that making a great video doesn't come down to buying camera X, y or Z. Technology is changing all the time. New camera models air coming out every year, So it's hard to make an all encompassing list of what specific camera we recommend. At the core, you need a camera that can shoot video. Hopefully, that camera can record audio as well, and maybe you need an external microphone to record better audio. You need some type of lighting, but this can come free from the sun and some editing equipment to allow you to put together your video, and this can also be free in the next. Few lessons were going to be going through each thing individually, talking about camera choices, microphone options, lighting and post production applications that we use and recommend. So if you're really interested in equipment and you want to know what we recommend, continue with the rest of the lessons in this section. If you don't really care about the equipment and just want to get straight to the video making process, skip on to the next section. 8. Camera Options: So now we're gonna talk about a couple. Came is that we recommend, and this really goes from smartphones to more professional cameras. But at the end of the day again, you know, these are just recommendations. You can make great videos with any type of camera. So first and foremost, we recommend a smartphone. This is something that most people have, or or maybe it makes more sense to purchase because you can use it both as a phone but also as a camera. And it's really pretty incredible what phones can do these days. So if you're looking for a more economical choice, maybe look at a phone to start off with for the people that are going to shooting in their homes off of their computer or laptop. Well, the Cameron Side your computers does work well. We recommend getting an external camera that just clips onto the top of it, or you can place in different positions. For this, we recommend the logic texi 9 20 or C 9 30 So the next level in video making is really getting a mere lis, or DSLR camera. So on the less expensive side of things to really get started. We recommend things like the cane and 70 d or 60 d. Also, the Sony a six thousands of incredible camera, and those are all $400,000. So really a great starting point. Ah, long time this you will need to get lenses in a couple accessories so it does add up. But this is really to take your video making to the next level. Beyond that, we recommend cameras like thes Sony's of Ness two or one, which is a little bit cheaper now. The GH four from Panasonic or the Canon seven D Mark two or mark one there. They're all great cameras that can shoot HD footage. And while sometimes you might want four K and I get that, that's a thing. I really think starting off 10 80 is enough, and you don't need to go spend that extra $1000 just to get four K footage. And if you really want into the pro level and star having a video production company, maybe you go through this class and you start getting clients and really building yourself out. Our recommend looking at more pro level cameras that don't have a car cost you an arm and a leg. The can see 100. The's Sony Fs five. They're good, more economical cameras that allow you to shoot professionally and really move to that next level of video making. So a lot of the time people ask, you know which branch of the pick or which came was better than the other one. And, well, I have my personal preference. I think every video maker does have their own preference as to which one they like most. The most important thing is to pick a path and stay with that. If you're going to shoot with a canon camera, you're going fishing with canon lenses, and thus you're going down that path. If you start shooting with another camera, you need to think of the accessories you're gonna be buying because to go from a Sony to a canon or canon to ah, Nikon, it adds up when you go and sell everything off and then have to buy all new accessories. Also know that these benefits to different ones. Sony currently is leading the way in low light sensitivity, whereas things that can and you have so main lens options and much more economical price point. So there's pros and concert every camera, and you just have to decide what's right for you. So once you've decided the camera of really important step is picking lenses, this is ultimately going to affect your image quality quite a bit. And it's something that I've always said. You know, you can pick a cheaper camera, but invest in lenses because these things will last you much longer. Time starting off most cameras Most yes, Lars or merely scammers will come with the kit lens, and this is very generic zoom lens that is typically a little bit slower. Doc Newme not going, give you the really professional look, but it's a fully functional lens. For most professionals, the 24 to 70 f 2.8 zoom lens is so the gold standard. It's medium range. You can get wider shot, you can get tighter shot. It's just a good standard lens and Canon Nikon takina Fuji. Everyone has er 24 to 70. It's very, very basic lens and good kit lens. From there, the 72 200 range more telephoto is another important lends to get, and that allows you to be farther away and zoom in on someone. And while zooms air great and whether it's the kid zoom or aim or expensive zoom lens, the quality can be diminishing. A zoom lens, so really should be looking at prime lenses as well. And by prime lens, I mean fixed focal length, meaning you can't zoom in or out. It's one set length, so it's either wide lens. It's a telephoto lens, but you're not zooming in or out. The glass of these lenses will be much better for the price point, though, so you can get really professional. Look to your videos by using them. It is a little frustrating cause you can't just do more in or out more easily, but you can get a really great looking shot as an example. The 50 The Nifty 50 is really a favorite of filmmakers because you're able to get it for such a cheap price. And whether it's Sony or Nikon or Canon or whatever manufacturers, they all make this cheap 50 millimeter prime lens, and it's really a great way to get professional looking interviews. Professional portrait. It's those air so far, basic lens recommendations Again, we don't want to get specific on which manufacturer to go with. I think if you look at the price, you'll be able to know which lenses better quality or performs better in low light. It's fairly obvious when it comes to lenses. So while this all might seem like a lot of confusing jargon and from a filmmaker, when it comes down to is you're gonna probably by camera will probably have a kid lens. So it's gonna be 18 to 55 more than likely, and it will be an F 3.5256 and that's based standard lens. But as you get into more video making and if you purchase a camera DSLR amir this camera we recommend looking into prime lenses, looking into nicer zoom lenses. And again it comes back to what type of video are you making 9. Microphone Options: Let's talk about our microphone and audio recording recommendations. First, though, we have to understand why using better audio equipment is so important. And it comes down to the fact that audio is just as important as our video as our visuals. While getting great visuals is important, it's often easier when you're watching a video to forgive someone who has subpart video. But it's harder to do so when they have bad audio. You just can't make it through that video. So to get better audio, you usually have to use an external microphone. The built in microphones of most modern cameras, especially the smaller DSLR cameras. The handy cams if you have one of those or our smartphones just don't pick up that great of audio. So now we know that getting good audio is important, and there's a couple ways to do that. One is with an external microphone that you purchase in. Another thing to think about is just the environment where you shoot If you're shooting in a quiet environment. Yeah, you can get great audio with the internal microphone of your DSLR camera or your smartphone . Here's an example of recording in a quiet room with the smart phones. Internal microphone sounds pretty good, but recording audio with the internal microphone of your smartphone won't sound great when you're in a loud location. But a lot of us will want to purchase a microphone to get that better audio. And here are some of our recommendations. And don't worry. If you don't know exactly what these different types of microphones are or how to use them , that's OK. We're going to be covering exactly how to use and get great audio in a future section. Now let's go through our recommended microphones and audio recording equipment. First Laval ears, Laval ears or lapel microphones are great for interviews or talking head videos. The ones that we recommend are the Sennheiser G three wireless set or the Road Link Wireless set. We can also recommend the Road Smart Law for those of you who are shooting with a smartphone. Now, these air all wireless options, but you can get a wired option if you have a tighter budget. Next, our shotgun microphones or boom microphones and these air also great for talking head videos or for more professional narrative films. They do pick up a little bit hard quality thin. The Laval Air Microphone The shock of microphones that we recommend are the road anti G three and the road and TG to also the Sennheiser M E 66 with the K six module or the Sennheiser M K E 600 for a cheaper option. If you're looking for an onboard shock on microphone that plugs into your DSLR, check out the road video Mike Pro or the Sennheiser M T E 400. So you have your lovelier or your shock on microphone, but your camera might not have an option to plug those microphones into it, so you need an external audio recording device. The ones that we recommend are the zoom H four, N, H five n and H six N. H. Four n is sort of a gold standard, and it's the cheapest option, and I love that thing. Task AM also makes a recorder called the Task AM D R. 40. If you're looking for a recorder that actually plugs directly into your DSLR, the task and er 60 D is a great option. Now you might be saying fill, this is adding up. So if you do want a budget option, you can use your smartphone to record audio. You can download an audio recording app for pretty much any smartphone. Some of you may be interested in making videos at your desk. We're doing more professional voice over recording, so you might be looking for a studio microphone at the top end. We recommend the Heil PR 40. The Audio Technica 80 are 2100 or the Shure sm seven b. The road podcaster Mike is a cheaper option. Thes studio microphones are great for doing voiceovers, webinars or just any sort of Webcam productions. Now these studio mikes are a little bit fancier and more expensive than a USB microphone. The Blue Snowball and the Blue Yeti are great USB microphones that you can use for recording directly into your computer. Even as the most inexpensive option, the Blue Snowball is a great way to record amazing audio. I used it for hundreds of tutorials that I put on YouTube 10. Lighting Options: So let's recommend a lighting kit. If you're first starting out, it's easier just to go by very cheap homemade lights. You can go to Home Depot or you can use paper lanterns. You may find it somewhere like Kia. We're going to talk more about this in the lighting section. In this course, another great way to use cheap home lighting is just grabbing the lights around your house . You may have some nice lights around your bed in your living room that you can kind of move up close to you or use their ambient light toe. Light your subjects. Another great technique that I use all the time is just putting your subject or yourself or whomever you're shooting next to a window. There's nothing better than the free light coming from the sun, although you are gonna be sort of slave to the weather. However, soft lighting is usually nicer, and if you have harsh lighting coming through a window, you could always use it as a backlight. You'll just be racing the sun for mid tier lighting. You can go three different ways. You can rent a lighting kit for your shoot. You confined a cheap new kit online somewhere. Or you can buy a pro use kit online somewhere. So if you're going more in a pro level, I would suggest going into the led world. We use lights made by like your and they're led lights. L. E D lights are great because they don't put off a lot of heat. They draw very little power. They're dimmable, and you can buy color them, which means you can have them be tungsten light. Or you can have them be daylight to match the sun. Lighting really depends on different projects and different locations. You can really figure out what light you need based on the project that you're shooting, so it's kind of hard to really invest in one light that will encompass your entire project . Unless you're doing something specific all the time, you can really get away with natural light for shooting outdoors a lot, and if you have a home office set up, it's really easy. Just set up lights and leave them year round, whether it be a China ball or a Home Depot light. If you have specific questions on what lighting would work great for, you feel free to ask us and contact us. We're happy to give you recommendations on lighting for your project. We'll list out some of our recommendations in the attached pdf. 11. Editing Tools: Here's our list of recommended editing applications. When you're just getting started out, you can use whatever is on your computer so you might have a Mac and want to use my movie. If you have a PC, you can use Windows Movie Maker taking it up one level. Let's talk about some great options for those of you recording screen cast or with your Webcam screen flow for Mac or Camped Asia, which is available for Mac and PC users, are great options. These allow you to record your screen, audio and video and put it all together while you're editing it. You can even use these applications toe edit video not shot on your computer. If you're really getting into video production and need an editing application that can do basically anything we recommend. Adobe Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro 10 Adobe Premiere Pro is available for both Mac and PC users, which is great. Final Cut Pro is only available for Mac users, and I use final Cut Pro for a long time until switching to Adobe Premiere Pro a few years ago, and I haven't looked back. Both programs will allow you to basically do anything you want. One thing to keep in mind, though, is the price. With adobes products, you have to subscribe to a monthly payment plan with Apple's Final Cut Pro 10. You can buy it for a one time fee. If you're looking into adding graphics and doing more professional visual effects for your videos, think about Adobe after effects or Apple motion again. Adobe Aftereffects is available for both Mac and PC users, while Apple Motion will just be for Mac users. And for those of you interested in editing your videos on the go, there are some great mobile application video editors out there. Spices great for GoPro footage. Apple II movie actually has an application version for iPhone users, and Video Shop is a highly recommended mobile video editor for me. Personally, I do all my editing on my desktop computer, and I used Adobe Premiere Pro for most of my project and screen flow for my screen cast tutorials. 12. Exposing Your Shot: Hey, welcome to a new section in the course. This section is all about actually how to shoot video with your camera. In this lesson, we're talking about exposure, basically, how to make sure your video is bright enough. Not too bright. We're not too dark with whatever camera you're using. So we're actually gonna head out to a real world location where Sam is going to explain how to properly expose your video. So now we're going talk about exposure. And really, what this comes down to is how much light is in your frame. And we decided to do this in Phil's Kitchen just because the law times in documentaries air , even shooting something for yourself. You wanna be in the natural environment so it comes to exposure. Light is really what we're talking about. It's how much light is on your subject. How much light is in your frame, and there's three ways that you control this with a smartphone. You won't necessarily set thes, but they will be affecting your image and for days, Lars or merely cameras. It's really essential. And that's your shutter speed your F stop or iris or aperture and your eyes So So. The first is shutter speed back in the day and, you know, for old film camera, this would be you Take a photo. And how quickly do that shutter expose your piece of film. Now, when it comes to film or video, think of every second this shudders moving up and down, allowing light end. Ah, slower shutter speed allows more like a faster show. Speed allows less light. So currently I'm at 1/50. Shutter speed. Eso Let's go a little bit slower. Oh, man, we're going way over exposed here like get exposure. All right, so I'm at a one. Let's go. 1/10 shutter speed. I'm now at F 6.3 Aiso 200 And you know when the image is still you can't really tell the difference. But still, if you could There we go. See, the hand is all blur. You can't really see if you're moving. The camera has this weird sort of jittery effect. It can be really cool. And this is actually a lot People do this at night, time to get a cool of ghostly effect. Now let's bring the shutter back up and I just want to show that movement again at 1/50 shutter. And this is really what I consider to be the standard, so you can see there's still a little bit of that blur, but it's manageable. It looks more natural. Now let's go up to Let's go crazy. Let's go toe 1 4/100 each other. And I think this is where law people go out into the day and they need t exposed properly so they bring their shot way up. Eso I'm at 1 400 shudder. I s 0 200 f 2.8 and you can see there's a lot less blur on its hand Now it's a much sharper , crisper image. Some people like this effect. No saving Private Ryan's a great example of higher shutter stuff, but it can look a little too sterile little to digital for me. So personally, I like to shoot 1/50. Next is F stop. It's how much light your lenses allowing in. So on the inside there's an aperture. It's very similar to your eyes. You know, when there's a lot of light, you'll have to close down the aperture, making a much smaller hole. If you want to allow more light and you open it up. So we're at 2.8 here. You can see that the backgrounds slightly out of focus fills nicely in focus. And there's depth there. So let's close it down now to let's see, let's go, Let's go crazy after 11 Now, which for indoors is kind of crazy, said, Well, bring the eso up and now you can see that a lot more is in focus. You can see the background image you can see fill in focus. Everything's kind of in focus. So this can be great if you're running and gunning. Or maybe you're trying to have everything, just look nice and firm and everything in focus for me. Personally, I love being as open as possible. I think having that shallow depth of field is Ah, really look, I prefer. But it's different for everyone. The final thing and really, as I've been adjusting all these things, the shutters remained the same. It's about 1/50. Well, I have to point a but the also served the last last piece to this puzzle. Really, What I so used to be is it was the sensitivity of your film it was. How well did it perform in low light versus how un sensitive was it? No, if you went out into the sunlight and needed something that took more light to expose. So currently I'm at ESO to 50 which is pretty good, and you can see now let's go up to 1600. This is also 1600. It's so much more sensitive to light its way overexposed. I have to bring my f stop all the way to F eight to look, we'll expose. So all these numbers do coincide with one another to keep it simple. It's how sensitive is your camera, and at that certain cameras perform better with higher. I So's the reason the A seven s two is so popular is that you can shoot at these crazy high . I esos other came is not so much for a smartphone. The ISO sensitivity really only takes you so far because it's just a smaller camera, smaller sensor, all these other things, so those are really the essentials for exposure. And as we go into DSL, ours and other cameras will get more in depth about how you actually exposure image and how you use these tools because if you're trying to really get serious about filmmaking, while this can seem daunting and like a lot of information, it's something important to learn. And really, it's it comes second nature after so long, so we'll get to that later, and now we're going to be talking about composition. 13. Compose Your Shots: in this lesson, we're going to be learning about how to compose better shots. The first thing you need to understand about composition is aspect ratio. Basically, how big are the size of your video frame? Today, the most popular aspect ratio is 16 by nine. This is the standard aspect. 16 is the with nine is the height. This is what you're going to be shooting on with your DSLR cameras, your smartphone's. This is how most TV's are built today. While back, most TV's were made a little bit more squished, and that was a four by three aspect ratios. Not many people are shooting or creating videos in four by three anymore, and if you go to the theatre, you will see even wider aspect ratios. And this is something that you can even do in post production to make your video Seymour cinematic. Now that you know what frame you're using, you're ready to compose a shot, and this is really how you frame the shot. Specifically, we're gonna talk about several ways to frame your shop for coverage, and that's really a wide a medium, a close up on extreme close up and inserts now keep in mind. These are the most common ways of shooting. But there are infinite ways of composing your shot. So if we're shooting a narrative or really documentary, we have to have a story, right? So Phil over here is getting ready to plan his hiking trip, and we're gonna shoot it first as just a normal narrative. Or this would also act really well as b roll for your coverage in a dock. So we're going to start with a wide shot so you can see here I have Phil framed up in a wide shot. He's sitting here, you can see the entire scene, and really, you can kind of use this whole frame for your wide coverage shot. It's something they can always cut back to when you get in trouble, or if you need to really show the entire area and the world and set the scene. So this is a very basic wide shot. If I would've frame up a little bit more negative space, I might do this. So in this white show I have a ton of negative space. It's a little more stylistic. You can see all the ideas and all the empty space that Phil may have in his head. It really kind of speaks a little bit more to your audience. The emotion that a frame evokes is really dependent on how you compose it. So now that we have different wide shots, let's get in and get a medium shot of Phil. Since I'm on a zoom lens, I'm able to just zoom in on my 24 to 70 and achieve this really quick medium shot. Normally, if you're in a primary on a different lens, you may have to get up and move your camera, whereas a wide shots great to show the area you're in and really give your viewer space and show you where you are. A medium can be used for several things. It's really just to start to connect with your character, start to see what they're doing in the frame. It's also something that's used mostly for interview shots and for dialogue covering talking back and forth. So here's a good medium shot. It's composed, centered. It's very basic, but it allows us to get the amount of action that he's doing with some of the background. It's not as wide as the wide shot where we can see everything going on and it's not as emotional, but it's a really good way to cover. Next, we're gonna jump into a close shot. I'm at the end of my zoom now with a smartphone, General, you're gonna have to move around to get your shots because the zooms aren't great. Digital zooms, air basically zooming and digitally and you can start to lose quality. So for here, we're gonna have to change to a longer lens or I'm gonna have to get up and move over there . I think I'm gonna do that. Here's a close up shot of fill. This has a little bit more emotion were right in there. He's reading his book, the books a little bit in frame so we can see what he's doing. We've gained Mawr emotion by being closer to him. The audience is connecting a little bit more with our subject versus the wide where we see everything in the medium where he may not see his face were right here, right here with them, and we can really get in his head almost. We can see what he's doing. So here's an extreme close up of Phil. You can really see his eyes and what he's reading. We could really connect with the character here through the eyes, and we can really see what he's doing. It really brings an entirely even deeper emotion into it. So see how fills reading his book right now Watch what happens when he looks over here between this shot and the wide shot, you know, as an audience member what he could be looking at because you've already been here. You've already seen the wide shot. You're inside his world and now you're with him emotionally. So next is an insert shot. This is really kind of detail ing what arc subject is doing. You can see here what book Phil is reading. He's planning a hike in Los Angeles, and these types of shots can really be used for narrative or B roll for a documentary. The big thing about him is really just kind of pick up on detail and see exactly what your subject is doing in order to relate back to them. These are the basic shots you need to tell a story 14. Filming Yourself: If you're gonna video yourself, here's some quick tips. Tip number one. Put the camera at eye level. This really puts you right in front of the camera like you're talking to a person and you're in a conversation. It looks a little bit more amateurish if you're looking down into a laptop and you're shooting up someone's nostrils. Unflattering tip number to put yourself in the center of frame. This draws the attention right on you. Since you're the one speaking, you could put yourself on the third if showing the background adds something to your story or you're trying to create space for a graphic tip Number three. Put yourself in a medium shot that way. You're not too small when you're being watched on a mobile phone. So how do you do all this? If you're by yourself, try to find something that's your same height and put it in the same spot that you're gonna be standing in. This tripod had is pretty much right where my eyes aren't where I can stand. So now I can make sure to get focus and frame up correctly. It's also much better looking than me. Some newer cameras have flip out screens, auto focus and face detection. Also, some smartphones will do the same thing, even when shooting on a smartphone. Remember the rules of eye level and setting yourself unless you're trying to show something behind you. 15. Getting the Right Shot: we're gonna be talking about what shots it takes to tell your story and really thinking about both beforehand and while shooting What? What do I need to get to tell my story? What is critical for me as a video maker to share what I want to share. And this is both, uh, getting your main interviewer. You know, this type of stuff to getting the inserts, getting the shots that help tell the story further beyond just seeing someone talking. So one important thing to think about is your April versus your B roll. Your April is really, ah, the meat of your story. It's where you're going to get your narration or your interviewer talking. It's the thing that's gonna form your entire story. Your B roll is just as important, though these air the shots that you're gonna put over your interviewer or over your voice over. This is the things that really show and bring to life, your character, your subject. So, for example, we worked on this documentary and we spent the morning getting to talk with the subject, learning about his life, seeing some things around his house. But we really just spent the time to talk to him and to have learned what he was all about . From there. We did get some shots in the house, but we went out with him into into the world and got shots with him on the streets, got him doing actions, got different stuff that really helped tell his story. What was really helpful, though, was getting this interview first because we knew what type of shots we needed to get later in the day. So in this instance are able was the interview shot. It's what we got sitting with our subject and talking to him are be able, then was all the other footage is important to know what is said in the April and then getting the bebel that matches that feeling in matches. That sentiment. This can be really critical to telling your story. Be rule in a way brings toe life. Your April, whenever I go out on events, are shooting with Major Lazer. A lot of the times it's just me shooting and so I'll go and I'll think, Okay, I need to go get a wide shot of the crowd. I need to get these specific shots and I know before even thinking about the edit, really, that these are the shots that will help tell this story. These are the shots that I want to get to tell this, and this takes a lot of practice cause each show I do. It's something different. Have a different style, a different idea of how I want approach it. Sometimes I only want use close ups. Other times I only want these wide shots. That being said, having a second camera, having 1/3 camera could make a massive difference, because I can have someone always getting a wide shot. I came someone getting all the close ups and Aiken myself be getting those magic moments. That may be, I would miss because I was getting that other coverage. So next time you're going into a shoe, maybe do some research, go and look at other videos online, and don't just watch it. Don't just enjoy it. Actually, look at each shot. Think of Okay, if I'm going into this, I want to get this wide shot, and I want to tell it all. From this perspective, it's something to think about and don't get me wrong. There's plenty of times. Everything changes, and what you thought you could do is radically different. But at least you have some idea of what you want to get going into it. I think the greatest thing you can do to learn more about what shots you need and what shots you want to get is just to watch films. Go see how people cover scenes and really analyze it. Look at they're wide shots to their mediums of the close ups. And it's a great way to see how other directors have developed a style and especially watching the first film to their last film. You can see their take on filmmaking, and through that you can decide what type a filmmaker you want to be. 16. Choose a Background: in this lesson. I want to talk to you about backgrounds and how important it is to your story. Overall, you can be standing in front of a background like this, or you could be standing in front of a background like this. Background is an example of a real world environment. This is a very plain kind of corporate video background, and the reason we picked this was so that we can have some sort of consistency through our videos. You can see through the lessons we change the color of the background to sort of keep cohesively within different lessons. Another great thing about this background is that we can set it up wherever we want in any place we want. Really, We can set up a quick, professional looking backdrop in a house in a garage, in an office, really, anywhere you are, you can set this up and it will still be the same background, no matter what. So for this background were using a very inexpensive paper roll that you can buy at your local Photoshopped or video shop is done specifically by savage. It's sitting on a pipe which you can't see, is a backdrop and it's just rolled across and it's a roll of paper. This is great because you can make it as big or as small as you want. You can also cut off if it gets dirty, and you could even draw on it if you ever wanted to. For any reason. Lighting for this type of backdrop is a little different than lighting a scene that has depth. We started with a key light. This is a nice, big soft white source that's coming from behind the camera. It's defused a lot, so I get a nice soft light on the subject. To get rid of shadows into separate is from the backdrop, as well as making it look a little more professional. We added ingredient light. This is a tiny small light that's diffuse right behind me, and it's putting a knife soft, white, light, radiant that's on the backdrop. This really makes it pop and look even more professional and really work on any kind of wall or flat backer, and that you have be a little careful of doing this with a white background. It might not work as well. We're going to go into more detail about lighting every scene in Backdrop a little bit later. But for now I wanted to show you this Grady int backdrop right here is really important for the light and the backdrop toe work together to create this nice look for a background that's in the real world. Make sure that the background is all cleaned up, and the items that are placed makes sense to your story and what you're trying to tell. We're in the kitchen, and we're talking about food stuff, so it makes sense to have bottles of wine, another little paraphernalia that have to do with the kitchen. This is also great for this kitchen because we have big, giant windows that are letting in a lot of natural light. It's nice and soft, and it lights the background very well. So just keep in mind when picking a spot in your house that you're gonna have to think about lighting as well 17. My Office Video Setup: this video. We just wanted to demonstrate what you can do in your own home office and really, what I've chosen to do in my office, where I shoot a lot so you can see are set up. And obviously we wouldn't be filming with a shot like this, composed where you can see the lights and the microphone and the window and everything. And you've seen some other lessons in this class like that. But it's a great set up because it's actually relatively cheap to do with the lighting. We're just using paper lanterns that I purchased on Amazon. You can get a pack of 10 for less than $15. The light bulbs. While these are more powerful light bulbs, they are still only 10 to $15 per bulb. You can even use some daylight balanced bulbs that you find at your local hardware store. You want to make sure that your light bulb temperature, the warmth of your light bulb, matches the light that's coming from outside, especially if you're shooting during the day. Another thing I like about this room is that it has carpet, so that automatically reduces the echo that you get from recording in a room with hard walls or hard floor. Sometimes I'll even put a blankets or hang blankets around the room to soften and dampen that echo even more. Right now, I'm recording with Road Anti G three boom or shotgun microphone, which sounds really good. This is a more expensive shock on microphone. You can get the road anti G to which is a little bit cheaper, or you something like a lovelier microphone. Or if you're recording to your computer USB microphone like the Blue Snowball is a great option. In terms of my background, I really wanted to show off a bit of my personality, but also keep it clean behind me. I've seen a lot of people record their vlogs or their their online courses in there bedroom , or you can see their bed unmade clothes on the floor, and that just looks bad and unprofessional. I designed my background to look good in video, so I put up a couple pictures that I've taken in a poster I like. When I do shoot wider shots, you can see this deaths or this shelf behind me and I have my typewriter and a couple old cameras on it, and this shows my personality and a little bit about myself. And if you do have a YouTube channel where you are the face of that channel, showing off your personality with things in your background can help. The last thing I want to mention about this set up is it's great for recording with my Web cam to I'm going to be showing you how to shoot great videos with the Webcam later on. But with my backup drop, I actually have a desk that is mobile has wheels so I can move the desk and the webcam and the lights, the whole set up, forward and back if I want to get closer or further from the background. So it still looks good on the webcam. So I just wanted to share with you. This set up because not only is it a set up that we're using in this course for a professional online video course, but also I set up that I use a lot for my own YouTube channel. Thanks for watching 18. Shoot with your Smartphone: So in this lesson, we're gonna talk about shooting video with your smartphone. Now, I have iPhone and some of you may have other phones, but I'm just gonna kind of go over the basics so we can get into it. So first, let's talk about settings here. I'm gonna go into my settings and we're gonna look for the camera part, depending on your phone. You have different options for resolution you can do on this phone. 7 20 at 30 frames per 2nd 10 80 at 30 10 80 at 30. And you can also do four K at 30 frames per second. The default best for iPhones is usually 10 80 p HD at 30 frames per second. That's gonna get your standard best video on this phone. It will do slow motion, and we can have 10 80 at 120 frames per second or 7 20 at 240 frames per 2nd 10 80 is the typical resolution for your standard 1920 by 10 80 TV in your living room typically. So we're gonna leave it at 240 frames per second for slo mo because I like that slow mo and we're gonna leave the 10 80 at 30 frames per second for the normal video shooting. So let's go back to our camera. And we got Phil here doing some would work for us. We're gonna swipe over to video. So now we're in video mode on our smartphone and we're looking at Phil. The main thing with video for me is to make sure that your phone is horizontal. Because when you end up exporting this or you showed on YouTube, you want to get the full range in the full sensor of your phone if you're vertical, which a lot of people tend to do because you hold your phone that way, it's just gonna be a little sliver of video. And it's gonna be really hard to show that on full screen. So let's see, we have Phil here automatically. The phone is gonna trying to just to his face. You can see that it's trying to look for your face and for this phone. It's very much trying to focus on that. Most smartphones are all gonna be auto focus. There are a few where you can adjust it, but generally because of the small lens, it's going to do it itself. So let's go ahead and record video. You can see I'm really kind of just using my ideas of rule thirds and composing a nice shot , and I'm trying to hold it a steady as possible because it's such a small iPhone, you can see there's a little bit of shake and you're just gonna have to kind of get used to that. And just like the focus, you're just gonna have to kind of get used to practising it and making sure that you can kind of hold it steady. Another great thing with the phones as you can see how it's exposing automatically. This phone's doing it pretty subtly. When you turn out here, you can see how it just exposed greatly for the for. The tons of sun were in a garage right now, and when I come back into the shade, it does it automatically for this phone. Also, I can tap on a position, and I can move the exposure up and down. You can see the little son going up, and that's making it brighter, blowing fill out and blowing the sun out. And then I was like, Come down manually. It's getting dark and darker, and that may be Sometimes you need to fight with a smartphone itself, cause it's trying to expose it automatically. But here I've exposed little bit lower. It looks a little bit nicer. The shadows are little deeper and the black soul dark. It's a little more dramatic. So here's another thing for smartphones focusing. It likes to do auto focus typically. But here, if you tap in a certain area, it will focus itself. I mean, it really close to this would block and you can see I'm tapping here and it's focusing directly on the wood block as opposed to Phil's face. If we tap on Phil's face, it should focus slowly unveils face again. This depends on the model of phone you have. This is an iPhone seven, and it seems to be doing a pretty good job of that. So let's try slo mo. The big thing about slo mo is shifting over to it here now are in Slow Mo, and you can't really tell right now because we have a lot of light coming in. But when you shift into slo mo, you're gonna lose a lot of light. What it's doing internally is it's shooting mawr frames per second, which means there's frames that air in front of the camera for less amount of time, which means the lights gonna hit those less. Phil is gonna start to sand this little piece of thing really, really fast as soon as we start shooting and we'll see what slo mo ends up looking like. So checking out this clip, it's really cool. This is 240 frames per second, and it's actually at 7 20 It's not a 10 80 shooting. Something that has a lot of motion will look a lot better when you're shooting slow motion , it will actually show the effect more. Keep in mind if you're shooting yourself for a vlog or for instruction, you can always do selfies with your video camera on your smartphone. So remember, there's a little button in the upper right corner. Now we see me and I'm looking into the camera. It's nice. Remember keeping our rules in mind, but also paying attention to what's behind you and also making sure that your finger doesn't cover the camera. So right now I have a lot of white light coming in. It's lots of soft light from a garage door. If we spin around, we can see our crew back there. There's Phil and Sam. The same rules apply with the tapping weaken tap to expose over here, and we can kind of manually tap as well as focusing and focus on me and the exposure. Or it can focus on these guys back here by tapping. So a couple of pro tips for re recording yourself on your own smartphone is one looking into the camera on your phone. It's much better and engages the audience as opposed to looking at yourself. Another one is keeping the camera eye level, keeping your self centered. And finally, if you want to show some stuff framing up to see your friends and shut, there's also lots of different things that you can get for your smartphone. You can get try ponds, you can get stabilisers. You really can set it down anywhere. It really is a camera that you're carrying with you in your pocket all the time, 19. Exposing with DSLR and Mirrorless Cameras: So now we're gonna walk through. So the basics of 80 s lower mere lis camera. When you go into menu settings, you wanna select basically, what resolution of shooting and what are the frames? Per second resolution is, you know, a shooting HD are shooting 1920 by 10 80 0 shooting 7 20 Are you shooting four K? You'll be able to find all these in your camera, and you should be able tow no pretty easily what your options are in terms of resolution For most things today, you can get away with 1920 by 10 84 K is obviously a hot topic right now, but when you're first starting off, it's not necessary, and it's not necessary by any means. What is important to know about is frames per second. So in the film world, 23.976 frames per second is what is considered standard for most people. It's served gives you that cinematic quality has a less digital look to it. TV, for example, is actually 30 frames per second, so those air serve you two options to go between 23 98 in 29.97 or 30 famous for a second. If you want to be shooting slow motion and do some work in post, you can't shoot 60 frames per second in love these cameras. But really, for now, we're just going to stick with 23 98 It's served that go to for most people doing narrative or commercial work unless you're doing SOMO. So Mike Amos said at 1920 by 10 80 23.976 frames per second. Those are the 1st 2 things you want to go in and check what those are now when it comes actually shooting, we get to exposure and how to expose your camera properly. There's three key things for this. There's your shutter speed, your f stop injure I S O. I always set my shutter at. They serve set speed more or less, and this is really just industry standard, more or less so for 23.976 frames per second, you want to double that for your shutter speed, So typically I do 1 48th But for this cama, I have 1/50 currently, this allows you to have a little bit a little, very, very little bit of motion blur, but not too much. You can see if I go to, let's say, 1/15 shudder. Uh, I'm starting to get really stopped a little bit. You can see him being much more motion blur, and this could be very distracting for your audience A same time. It can give a cool effect. Sometimes. You know, maybe you're doing a dream sequence and you want that sort of ghostly effect. It can be really cool on the other end. Let's go up to You're 1 1/1000 of a shutter. And this is, I think, for a lot of young filmmakers You go outside and you have all this light. And so you being the shutter way up because for photography you can do that. But when it comes to video, what that does is it. It makes it much more sterile feeling image. It's very sharp. There's no blur whatsoever, and some people really like this look, but it can feel very Darryl. My recommendation is to just stick with 1/50 again. Use of double your friends for a second, so if you're shooting 30 frames for a second, you wanted to be at 1/60. If you're shooting 60 famous for a second, you want to 1 1/20 per second. That's all for shutter speed. And so I'm at 1/50 shutter and I'm at F 1.8. What f 1.8 means is inside the lens. Here, you more or less have thes blades and they open and close. This affects how much light is actually coming in through your lens. So 1.8 is extremely open. It's allowing a lot of leaden and in return, what this does is it gives you a very shallow up the field. The reason people love mere listen, DSLR cameras is because they give you that cinematic look. Then they have, you know, your subject nicely and focus and everything else behind it out of focus. Now, if you stop down Europe stop, what happens is you. You start to lose a lot of light, but more becomes in focus. So where if you're f 1.8, maybe only this plan in the front of the elephants and focus as you open up that auras you close down that f stop to a larger number more will become in focus and this is really great for TV A for sports when you don't necessarily need just this one small plan in focus . But maybe you want the entire face and focus there. Or maybe you're shooting something moving really fast, and it's just harder to catch focus like that, so stopping down can be really good. Obviously, I'm at 1/50 shutter and F 11 now, so it's much darker. So the third thing that you have to do is adjust your S o your eyes. Does how sensitive toe light your sensor is. How much light do you need really to expose that image? Because I've now closed down the iris. What's living in less light? So have to make this the eso higher after make it more sensitive to light. So I'm at eso 100 now and again, F 11 shutter speed 1/50. So I'll bring the ISO up and you can see So I just bought up all the way to 3200 I s O for most cameras. I would not recommend going over 1600 Aiso for the Sony a sadness. It's known for its low light capabilities on being able to really push the is so you can see now compared to earlier, much more than focus. You can see that table in the background more clearly. It still has a depth to it, but you can tell what's back there. So these are really three key things when it comes to exposure, your shutter speed your eye so your f stop and they all sort of. It's all dance between the three of these to get a well exposed image. But you also want to side. You know how shallow depth of field do you want. Maybe it's not 1.8. Maybe it's afford. This is really well. A lot of people shoot out, so you go to four and then you realize, Oh, well, I need more light. So keep the shutter that at the same thing, bring up your eyes. So, though, and this is also where lighting comes into play, maybe you need to bring in an extra light. Maybe I need to move around so that I have more light coming from this window here. These are all important things to pay attention to, but those air So the basics of getting good exposure with your ears Lower middle, this camera 20. Focus with DSLR and Mirrorless Cameras: So once you start shooting with the DSLR or merely camera for video, specifically something that I think can be so difficult for people starting off is focus. Some cameras have great autofocus and even have face detection in these different cool things. But to be honest, I don't think the technology is quite there yet. It's good, it's decent, and some cameras are even very decent. But pulling your own focus, having manual focus on I think it it can give a lot of character in life to what you're doing. So I'm in may know focus here, and it really just takes practice. It takes practice of Okay, that's in focus, and I'm going go that table back there and now I'm on the table now you can see well on his phone there. You just get used to pulling your focus, knowing if I go to the left, it goes far. I go to the right, it comes close and it's just hitting that focus. It's really tricky and takes a law practice on big films. That's for example, you have a first a C, and the entire job is pulling focus and this really you never notice it until they screw up . Basically, it's no takes a law practice, but these guys are so good that they're just they know all that six feet away that's a feet away and the game focus every time. So as you get started with shooting with your DS lower mere lis camera practice manual focusing practice, moving between different subjects So that you no. Oh, well, I screwed that one up, but, uh, you know, that's why you practice it. So I'm here. And if I'm going, go here bright and focus that just it takes practice on prime lenses, and especially when you start shooting at F 1.8 or F two, your plane. If focuses so small, it's really tricky. And that's why you know, starting off, I think shooting at four or 5.6 can help with this. It can help you keep things in focus, and even if your subjects moving you, you're still able to be adjusting your focus while going along. Some people also think this could be a great cinematic effect where things are falling out of focus and you're sort of searching for it, and it as almost a life to your video. In a way, that's something I think about. You really need to practice it. Autofocus is okay for getting your initial mark, but I think practicing your manual focusing and skills is really important and in the long run will greatly help you as a filmmaker. 21. Stabilize Your Shots: So another thing you need to start considering when shooting on DS alarm Ulis cameras is getting a steady shot. It's no longer where in photography you set up, you take one shot and that's it. You're done. You're now having to follow a subject you're now having to move the camera. You're now having to be able to get that steady shot. For example, our current camera is on a tripod. No one needs to be touching it. It can sit there. It's a nice, stable shot, and Aiken source it here. I know where, where, how far I can go and all that type of stuff and keep a good looking image. You can do pans until it's much more smoother. This is one my favorite mono pots. You have a head on the top here, so you're still able to Till then, on the face. Here you have these little legs that enable you to spin it and get nice painting shots. It's great because it's lightweight. You're able to move around quick with it, especially when you have a small deals lower merely scammer on it. You're able to get steady your shot with it, a lot of people starting off. They like to shoot, you know, like this. And this is very, you know, this is how you shoot with one these cameras after so much time, though, if you're working for a long day or if you start walking a lot, you can get so this up and down, shake to it. I mean, it's hard to keep this really study if you're putting on longer lenses that can get hard because you know something like this is so front heavy that it just it can get a little exhausting. A pro tip for this, though, because a lot of times I am shooting hand held is trying to just find a way to make s stable. It's possible you're bringing your elbows into your body can help create of rest against it . Also, if you have a strap, be ableto have that around your neck and then you have three points of contact. That's really serve. A rule of thumb for getting a steady Sean is having three places that you can have tension and stabilize your camera from bringing your elbows onto the table can help get steady. Shot leaning against a wall can help. And a lot of times, if you're running gun situation, you just have to use your surroundings. Maybe use a chair, maybe used a friend's shoulder. Whatever is, you can find different things to stabilize. You came a with no what your shot is set up beforehand. Maybe practice a couple times and then hit record So you don't have all this footage of you just shaking around trying to get the shot. I will say also, when shooting events. I always like to have some form of civilisation with me. It just it's easier to rest with it. And when I'm not shooting, I don't have to always be holding it. Really, It's It's all about practicing and then looking at your footage because you can think like , Oh, yeah, I'm great at this and then go look at the footage. You realize that you're maybe a little little shakier than you expect, So review your footage. It's a great way to learn what you're actually getting. Andi make you a better filmmaker 22. Know Your Lenses: so the last thing to talk about is lenses, and this is really what may DSLR such a big deal in the independent and pro filmmaking world, you're able to put different lenses on your able Teoh change What type of glasses in front of your sensor for the first time. You know this brought to indie filmmakers that that cinematic look that really beautiful looking image, the very basic lens is the 50 millimeter prime lens. You cannot zoom on it, but for very, very cheap, you're able to get a good looking lens that can have a very open F stop. So this is F 1.8. This lens, I believe, is under $200 and it's it's a quality piece of glass. You can get really nice looking image out of it, and you can't just zoom in or zoom out for a wider shot with the same lens. So it does take a little more work and you're moving back and forth. But the quality is is really great for how cheaper lens it is and compares into this we have. The 24 to 72.8 can also choose one's, um This is really sort of an industry standard. I mean, everyone shoots with this lens, both photographers and video makers. It's just serve, Ah, go to lens for law people because it covers both wide and tight side of things you can see here. So I'm about 70 millimeters here and nice and tight. Go to 24. I never wide shot. I'd have to move the camera. All I had to do was spend this ring to get a different focal point. It's much easier that being said, where this is under $200 this is over $1000. This is closer to $1500. There's a huge price difference, and this is quality piece of glass, but it costs exponentially. More money. There are cheaper zooms like this. Cannon tend 18 and there's made different kit lenses similar to this. But I really think that quality glasses is far less and what's a good place to start? The important thing to know is that your glass you have lenses will last a very long time, and your cameras will keep changing every five years. You're gonna new technology and new great thing, but you can keep using that same glass as long as you stay with same company. A big thing that me it. I switched from Nikon to Canon to Sony Nikon being photography by first shot on the Canon seven D for video. And when it switched to Sony, I had to get these adapters to keep using the same lenses. It wasn't the worst thing in the world, but now I look at people shooting with Sony Glass and, you know, I kind of wish I didn't have to use an adapter. So it is something to consider when you first buy a camera that this is an investment and beyond your camera. It's really about the lenses because those can really add up and cost. So I hope this lesson was helpful. I know it's very broad overview, and everyone's shooting on different Kim of these days, and there's always gonna be new. Kim is coming out, So if you have a specific question for what your set up is, please feel free to ask. Also were happy to help with gear in terms of what the best came over what the best lenses for you to purchase again. This is all very. It's kind of personal things. So we don't want to get too specific in any of these videos. This is to set up. I happened tohave. I'm sure you're all shooting on different things. So feel free to reach out to us. Let us know what questions you have. I'm always happy to help and, yeah, see in the next lesson. 23. Shoot with Your Webcam: in this video, I'm going to show you how to shoot better videos with your webcam. My number one tip is toe. Add light, actually light your desk or toe light your set up. Right now, I have my paper lantern set up behind my webcam to paper lanterns with 100 watt light bulbs in it, both evenly lighting both sides of my face and for my webcam set up. That's what I want. Here's the same shot without any video lighting. The Webcam tries to brighten up the pictures so that it's exposed. But in doing so, it creates this weird digital noise, and it just doesn't look good. This is going to look way better Then, if you recorded video without lights or if you have just the light from your computer screen, a desk light or the light from the ceiling above, especially with that light coming from above on the ceiling or behind your head, it's going to create weird shadows that don't look great. So light your webcam. At the very least, turn on your desk lamp. One other tip is to open up a blank white document in Microsoft Word or even Google docks, zoom it in, so it's filling up most of your screen. Then make sure that you turn up the brightness of your monitor. This can add additional light that will help light your video. Lastly, if you don't have any lights, you can always turn your camera or your desk around or place it in front of a window so that during the day you have nice natural light coming in through their place, a curtain or a sheet over that window to make it even softer. Obviously, this isn't going to work at night, though. One tip is to manually adjust your webcam settings. A lot of people just let it do auto gain for exposure and auto white balance, but you can actually dive into the webcam settings in most applications with the Logic Taxi 9 20 It comes with a little application that allows you to adjust things like focus and exposure in white balance. I downloaded this separate application from the iTunes store, called Webcam Settings, that allows me to do all sorts of other things, like exposure time, which is basically shutter speed. All of these things address the brightness or the contrast you can also adjust the saturation if I just want to be black and white or super colorful, the sharpness increasing, the sharpness of my video or the white balance you can see here if I want to make it more cool or more warm. Sometimes the automatic white balance of my camera doesn't work properly, especially with different types of lightbulbs and but light coming from outside. So here I can automatically adjust everything to make sure it looks amazing. The next thing is to properly compose your video, so you want to make sure that your eye level with the camera or at have the camera just a little bit above eye level that's going to make it look more natural. I see so many people recording videos with the camera below eye level. It just looks bad. Make sure you put it. I level another thing. I see people doing by mistake is giving too much head room. That's the room or the space above my head to the top of the frame. Even though the camera is I level right now, it just looks awkward. Another one is cutting off the top of your head. It's distracting to the audience, and it just doesn't look good. Try to have it so that your eyes are in the top third of your video frame. Break down your video frame into thirds, and if you have two imaginary lines, put your eyes on that second line. Place yourself in the center of your shot if you are the main focus. If you're talking directly to camera and you want people to focus on you, put yourself in the center of your screen. You also want to make sure that you're close enough to your webcam. If you're too far, the quality isn't going to be. It's great. And if you're too close, it can just look kind of awkward. So place yourself a foot, foot and 1/2 away from your webcam because this is the prime focal length of prime spot for your webcam to focus on you. So that's the sharpest and the Crispus. It will be for most of this video. You haven't seen the microphone that I'm using, which is the Heil PR 40 studio mike. It's on this boom arm that's attached to my desk, and I can move it around. It does pick up decent audio when it's out of frame when it's a little bit lower. But it is better when it's close up like this. And there are some times when I want to get the best audio possible, and so having it and frame is okay. I just try to make sure that it's not covering my face or distracting for the audience. And my tip number three is to design your background whether you wanna have a background like this showing off your personality. Of course, it looks a little bit different than my regular shot when I'm using my DSLR professional cinema camera. It's not as blurry in the background, which I like, but for my webcam setting. I still like to have my photos, my typewriter, maybe a guitar to show off my personality, especially for my YouTube videos, which is really about my own brand. Here's another background option that I have in my office. On another wall. I just have a blank gray walk. This is great. If I do want a cleaner set up, please, please, please clean up your background. I've seen so many videos, professional videos, online courses, videos that people are trying to sell something where they're sitting in their room at their desk and they've got their unmade bed with clothes on the floor behind them. Just clean up, even if you're not going to show off your personality or design it clean up. So these are my top tips for recording with your Web cam. Thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next video. 24. Record Great Screencast Videos: In this lesson, you'll learn how to create great screen cast videos. Whether you're creating application tutorials on your computer or doing a slide show with a voiceover, I'll show you my best practices. So let's head over to the computer and see how I do it. Tip Number one is to use the right software. There are free options out there for PC Mac and Lennox users. O. B s studio is a free option that allows you to do screen recording on a Mac. Quick time player allows you to record the screen. Just go up to file new screen recording. You can even do new movie recording and new audio recording. If you're looking for a more professional option, Camp Tasia is the perfect application for you. It's great for PC and Mac users. Basically, you can record your screen a Web cam and audio, and it's automatically sync. When it comes into the video editor, which is part of Camp Tasia. It's easy to add titles, annotations and zoom in and out of your screen with Camp Tasia. Another option for Mac users is screen flow, which basically does the same thing. The next tip is to clean up your screen. Close any tabs that you don't need clothes, any windows or projects you're working on and clean up your desktop. One thing you can do is just create a new folder on your desktop. Name it whatever you want and then put all the files on your desktop into that folder. Or you can just right click and say, cleanup selection If you have a bunch of things on your desktop that you don't want to move around because your desktop will automatically at least look a little bit more organized. If you're recording Web browsers, go up to view enter full screen. This will clean up your Web browser. Make sure that you don't see the tabs or any of your favorite bookmarks at the top. Also, if you're doing a Power Point presentation or another slide show, make sure that you open it up in full screen beach for you record. The other option is zooming in after the fact and cropping out what you don't want to see. My last tip is to make sure things are going to be at the right size. I'm recording my monitor, which is a 27 inch, 2560 by 1440 pixel screen. It's easy to see things for me, but I know a lot of people are going to be watching my screen cast on their mobile phones are on there laptops or tablets. So one thing you can do when you're recording a website is to zoom in on a Mac. Just press command plus on a PC. It would be control plus or minus to zoom in on the text in this website. Now it's much easier to see what I'm doing on the website. If you're recording something that's not on a Web browser and you want to make things appear bigger, you can actually decrease the resolution of your display here. I'm on a Mac, but you can also do this in the control panel of a PC. If you go to display scaled, I can scale down my screen. What this does is it makes everything appear larger. If I'm doing a tutorial of an application like Premiere Pro here at full resolution, all of the buttons and the text it looks very small. Imagine watching this on a mobile device. Maybe you are right now. Everything is going to look so small you won't be able to see what I'm doing. If I'm clicking around by actually decreasing the resolution of my screen, everything gets bigger for you when you actually watch it. I can upscale my recording, which will be at 1600 by 900 to 1920 by 10 80 so it's still an HD video. You don't want to go down too far, because if you decrease your screen resolution too far and then upscale it in post, you will lose some quality. But I would argue that's being able to see the buttons. And what I'm doing more clearly outweighs what you lose in sharpness by recording at the highest resolution possible. So those air my screen recording tips Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in another video 25. Choose the Right Microphone: everyone. Welcome to a new section in the course. This section is all about audio, choosing the right microphone and how to use that microphone for your shoot first, remember what our microphone options are. We have lava Lear microphones, shotgun microphones, onboard, shock on microphones, internal microphones or studio or USB microphones. So one of the first things you have to think about is who is going to be recorded? Do you have one person speaking? Do you have multiples? People speaking? If you're shooting a talking head video or an interview of just one person, you can really use any type of microphone. Ah Laval Ear microphone can be agreed option if they're just sitting down, or even if they're moving around. A shotgun microphone is also a great option. If they're just sitting in one location or if they're moving around, you could get away with using a boom operator. If you're just in front of your computer, a USB microphone or a studio microphone is a great option for projects where you're shooting multiple people in the same shot. You might have to get to lovelier microphones so that you can record high quality sound for each person. If you are using a boom microphone, you might need a boom operator toe. Be able to move the mic between the people when they're talking. The other thing you have to think about is where your camera is going to be and what your camera composition is going to look like. If you're shooting a big wide scene of someone outdoors, or just a scene where a person is smaller and frame, you might not be able to use a shotgun microphone because it's going to be have to be in frame to get great audio. So in that case, a lava Lear might be a great option. But if your composition is closer and your tighter in on your subject, a lot of layer or shotgun might work. Even if you're shooting in a quiet location with your camera not too far away from your subject, the internal microphone could be a viable option. Here's an example of recording in a quiet room with the smart phones. Internal microphone sounds pretty good. So if you are shooting video and using the internal microphone up either on your DSLR camera or your smartphone, you might be wondering Why doesn't my audio sound good? You have to understand a GC or auto gain control. This is how your camera or your phone monitors and sets levels for recording the audio. If I'm in a quiet room and I'm the only one talking, then it's going to set levels for however loud my voice is, and it might actually sound fairly decent. But recording audio with the internal microphone of your smartphone won't sound great when you're in a loud location. But if I'm outside and I'm speaking and something louder than my voice happens, a thunderstorm or a car drives by, then the camera will automatically set its levels to that loud sound, making my vocal sound my voice at a lower level. And that's why when you're outside, you might not get that great of sound with your internal microphone. So we really only recommend using the cameras internal microphone If you're inside an environment that's quiet and you can control the sound or if you're just trying to capture the sounds of your environment so hopefully by now you know how to pick the right microphone for your video shoot. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us with your specific case and will recommend the right microphone for you 26. Record Better Audio in Any Environment: Here's some tips for according better audio in any environment. Tip number one. Get your microphone as close to the subject as you possibly can, whether it be a lot earlier or a shocking like closer to your subject. Tip to make sure it's as quiet as it possibly can be in your environment. Close windows, turn off air conditioning. Turn off computers and appliances. Closed doors. Hide the cat. Tip number three. Getting rid of echo. One of the hardest things in a household is sometimes sound. Bouncing off hard walls, tiles, mirrors, everything like that in a room with a lot of hard surfaces, you're gonna hear a lot of eco making a video to help dampen the echo. Fill in hard services with pillows and blankets. It really helps. Get rid of the echo. You're gonna hear a lot of echo. It really helps. Get rid of the echo. You're gonna hear a lot of echo. It really helps get rid of the echo, or try shooting in a room that's already carpeted or has a large rug. If you're shooting a lot in one environment, look into using soundproofing foam where you can hang on the walls and stuff dead and the sound inside. And the last tip is to make sure you're monitoring the sound with headphones, because sometimes what your camera picks up or where your microphones pick up, it's not what you can actually hear. 27. Lavalier Microphones: So now we're gonna talk about Laval ears, and these are really great microphones for interview situations. Or maybe you're doing more of a documentary on on the run type of things, and you're able to use wireless law packs that you just clip onto your subject. They have a mic on, and you can be as far away with the camera and still get great audio from the speaking. You don't need to always have a shock and Mike really close to them. There are also Wired loves. They are good for interviews like this, but at that point we really recommend bringing in a shock on microphone. The ultimate is to have both a shock and mike and a lovelier so you can get audio from both of them and certain mix them together. One limitation or difficulty with lovely ears is that you don't always have somewhere to place them. You know today were wearing collard shirts because it's really easy to clip love in here and hide them at the same time. Maybe I'm moving around. You would start to get movement from that, and it can make a scratching noise on your lovelier Ah, long times in running gun situations. You run into this where, Yes, everyone has laws on in your getting audio, but then someone starts running or someone starts doing something or someone starts scratching themselves. It ruins all of your audio, So having a shock and microphone that's external toe, all that is really the best way in, and easiest way to make sure you're getting clean audio. But if you are going to use the lovelier, make sure that you have a subject that has something that you can clip onto because you're gonna need to hide the microphone. Granted, sometimes people just clip it right on the front. That's fine, But to make it more professional looking, we recommend hiding it, uh, down below. So typically you go right around the sternum, 68 inches from the mouth pointed up. These microphones are typically omni directional, meaning they capture all all sounds coming from here. So as long as the mouth is the loudest thing here, you should be able to get decent audio you don't want place it too far up because you'll get closer. The throw and a lot more of those Basie sounds from from the throat at the same time too far away. You won't hear the subject very well. Necklaces are something to watch out for as well, because I've had those sometimes hitting against the lovelier. And if they're just weighing a plain shirt and you don't want to just show the microphone clipped onto them, either get a little bit of tape. You can use body tape, which is less painful to rip off. Or you can use normal Scotch tape and just have hide it and tape it to their skin. And another tip is that if you don't want your the microphone, but they're wearing a shirt, maybe just get a slightly tighter shot and just frame out where the microphone is That way , you know you can still get clean audio. You might have to be a little bit closer in, but maybe Yue doing a wide shot, also, where it's less obvious that they have a microphone clipped to their shirt. The most important thing to do is to be monitoring or listening to the audio you're getting . They can be great, but the second someone start scratching or something, you need to know that you're knocking that audio and ask him to either stop or reposition the mic so it doesn't get that ruffling sound on it. 28. Shotgun Microphones: in this lesson will teach you how to use a shotgun. Mike. Shocking Microphones are awesome because they're very directional, and they allow you to get the subject sound without any background noise. Shocking mikes are very directional. You'll notice as soon as I turn away, you're gonna start to lose my boys and you will be able to hear when I turned back. You can hear me right away. It starts to get muffled as I turn away in. The direction has changed. You may still be able to hear me, especially if I speak louder. But this is really going to be the clearest sound you're gonna get with a shocking mike. Shaka microphones are great. If you're subject isn't moving and a stationary, it's a little bit more difficult. If your subject is moving around, you may then need a boom operator to get the best sound from a shock and mike, make sure it's pointed directly in front of your subject's mouth. Ideally, you want to place your shock and microphone above frame just so it's out of your shot. You can also Mike from below. If you need Teoh, it's helpful to shoot from above with your microphone because you're less likely to catch extraneous sound 29. Recording Audio with Your Computer: Here are some tips for recording straight into your computer, which a lot of you might be doing. The first tip is to use an external microphone. Typically, the internal mike of your computer isn't going to pick up high quality audio. So, like cheap option is the blue Snowball, and it's a great USB microphone for its price point. First, you gotta plug it in. Next, you have to place your microphone. If you're on camera, you have to be aware of how close the microphone is to your face if it's blocking your face . And if you care if it's on the screen or not. With these USB microphones and studio microphones, you really do have to get close to that microphone to get the best sound. So you might have to deal with it being in the camera shot. But just make sure that your face is showing as well. If you're shooting a screen cast video, get the microphone as close to your mouth as possible. You might have to use a pot filter to make sure you're not getting the popping sound when you're saying words that start with a Pete. Lastly, once you place your microphone, you have to set your microphone levels. We always recommend doing this manually and not letting your computer do it automatically. Typically, you can do this in the input settings for your microphone, or you might be able to do it in the application that you're recording with. So that's how you record great audio with your computer. We hope that this audio section has really helped you out in terms of choosing the right microphone four years shoot and how to place whatever microphone you're using. If you have any questions, shoot us a message and we'll help you out with your specific situation. 30. Why We Light: Welcome to the section on lighting in this section. We're going to talk all things like. But first, it's important to talk about why we like the biggest thing about lighting is it can make your video look way more professional and add a lot of production value to it. Most of you are going to start with house lighting like this. So this is how citing this is just coming from a fluorescent energy saving light ball that's in the ceiling of this room. It's kind of bad. This is a thoughtful lighting set up. Now we're using kind of bigger professional lights, but later we're gonna show you how to do that for pretty much no cost of very cheap flights . Also, keep in mind that you can make house lighting look good. You just have to be thoughtful about it and take your time with lighting can make your video look really awesome, even if it's on a professional camera like an iPhone. The whole idea is to make your video look more professional by adding production value to your video, things that you can do, like removing shadows from the face, making sure your subject is evenly lit. Also making your subject pop from whatever background that your subjects on. Now we know why we're lighting. Let's learn how delight. 31. Use Natural Light: So for those of us that don't have lights or don't want to have to buy lights or set up lights and all that stuff natural leggings a great resource tohave because all you really need is the sun. And some knowledge of how to use that to your best ability currently were out on the sidewalk just out here, and the sun is setting over there. It's behind some trees, so it's creating to this diffuse speckled lighting on me. Typically, I'd say you don't want to shoot outdoors until the afternoon or in the early morning, when the senate straight above you, it can create very unflattering light on you. So it's better to wait until this hour when you have this nice golden light hitting your subjects. So let's move the camera now to see what this light looks like as a backlight. So we've literally just flipped around 1 80 You can see in the background that the sun is completely blowing out. It's over exposing the sky, so you've lost a lot of definition there. At the same time, it's given me this nice little rim light. It's coming. Nice way to break your subject away from the background and give a very cinematic look. Now, at the same time as that sun goes down, it's gonna be harder to see the light on my face. So if you're gonna shoot at this time, just know that your your time slot is very limited, based off of how quickly the sun's going down. So when using the sun as a backlight like this, sometimes your subject can become a little under exposed because you have so much light coming from behind you. A good tip and really easy resource is bounces like thes They called flex fills. Many people make them and they're not too expensive. You can also just get white cardboard or just white paper. Really? And all you have to do is hold it up right next to your camera. Have it bounces, sunlight, and it gives them just a little extra light to your subject. Um, you didn't need to Hanzo Probably. It's a little hard doing this by myself. So go hand this to will. Now they will stand here, have this nice rim, have a little bit of feel like coming in, and you just have to serve, move the balance accordingly to get as much out of it as possible. A good way to test this, too, is toe on off your bounce. So right now it's on, Let's go off. No, it's off on. Oh, you can see a very subtle difference, but it's just enough to sort of help bring your subject back to life whatever time of day you're shooting. A lot of times having, though, directs, unlike adds a contrast or make the image seem a little harsher. So I always try and find a good area. We have nice, diffused lighting. There's no direct sunlight hitting me right now, but it makes no. It's just nice soft lighting. Everything's will exposed. It's much easier to keep this sort of lighting than if you have the sun directly on your subject. Granted, it's afternoon right now, so the sun has set behind this house and were able to completely block in direct sunlight. Also, my background is also in the same diffused lighting. A lot of times people will put themselves in diffused lighting, which is great, but the background then has son or something going on back there. That's just way over exposed it's harder to make the image look really nice. So now I just want to show you how we use natural lighting in our own work. We just saw a lesson out here, but you can see that outside. It's so bright. There's so much light out there that you wouldn't really want to show that in your frame. So what we did is we punched in a little bit and we put this diffusion so it's nice soft lighting and you still get great looking shot. You don't need to see outdoors, but you use that light. And by being in this garage, we don't have other light sources we don't have lamps on or anything like that. It's purely the ambiance of the sunlight, going a little bit diffusion and having a nice looking background. So it's a really easy way to get professional looking shots. All you need to do is just pay attention to where the lights coming from and please use subject correctly. Over the years, I've shot in many different locations and always depended on natural lighting to really get still cinematic shots. Ah, big thing to pay attention to is what the weather's like in the place that you're shooting . I know personally, my hometown, Santa Cruz. It always has foggy mornings. And I love going out and shooting with this nice diffused lighting. You have the clouds overhead area of the marine layer, and it just has the nice mood to it. And thats feel to it at the same time. Maybe you're going off on shoe and you're really excited. But you forget to look and there's gonna be rain for the next three days. You need to pay attention to weather and you need to know what, how that's gonna affect your shooting. 32. Three Point Lighting: So let's learn about three point lighting. This is when you're going to use artificial light. The basics of this is a three point lighting set up, and you can do this with any lighting kit from a homemade K all the way up to a professional kit. It's really a great way to kind of start off and have a really based structure of lighting . So we're going to start by lighting myself right now. I'm lit by this very toppy kind of grungy garage light. We're gonna turn that off, and we're gonna see if we can make this look a lot better. So Sam's gonna run around and set up our lights, starting with the key light. Who so typically I like to have the lights at a 45 degree angle just above the camera and to the side of it. This is gonna be your key light. This is where your main source of light is coming from, and it's a good place to start. Whatever your most powerful light is, move it there. That's gonna be your biggest source. So whatever your biggest light you have, that's gonna be the best place to put it right now. It's really harsh. We're gonna put some diffusion on it later. But let's add in the fill light next, So they're fillet is gonna be just to the left of camera, really Just to the opposite side of the key light. And what the fill light is doing is making up for whatever shadows the key light may have started. So if the key lights coming from this direction, we may have gotten some shadows here. It will go over this in a little bit. But the fill light is gonna fill in anything that the key light is not hitting. Same thing. I would love to have a fill light, a little bit of a 45 degree angle just above the height of the camera. So Sam has Arc Eli and fill light up. Next, he's gonna put up a bath light. The back light really is designed to give a rim to the background and also kind of give a separation from the background. There's many different ways to set up a backlight. We're going to start with it like this, so let's start to break these lights down. First off our fill it is being diffused by some diffusion, which basically lowers the intensity and makes it much softer. You can see there are lights, have a little bit of cloth that come with it that we put in front of it. The key light right now is harsh. It's hard light coming on me right now. They're led lights that we have. So they're not as harsh is a tungsten for Nell Light maybe, Or a Home Depot light? Maybe, but we're gonna put some diffusion on it anyway and make it softer. Make it less harsh, and I'll also help with the shadows on my face, and it will help with spilling around the background. So it's sanded. Here is he put on a grid diffusion, so this focus is a little bit more light with still defusing it. At the same time, it's definitely softened things up. It's helped the shadows a bit, and it's not as harsh on the subject. I personally like to what they say in the industry, double break it or put double diffusion on it, which is what we're kind of doing in our interview set up in front of our backdrop. I want to see if I could do double diffusion on this light right now, it's even soften it up more great. So now are key. Light is double braked or double diffusion on, and it's incredibly soft. You may notice that the light is much even on me. There's hardly any shadows, but that's hopeful cause of the fill light and the background has sort of softened up a little bit. What Sam gonna do now is he's gonna dim down the fill light just a little bit to kind of match the contrast year. So there's different ways of evoking different emotions with our lighting. But we're just trying to do a nice, basic clean interview set up with three point lighting, where there's a key light and Phil Now, if your life isn't dimmable and you're in a big enough space, the best way to adjust intensity of your light is to move your lights forward or backward. Sam is gonna move the feel like closer, and you can see how it gets more intense without dimming it. You can move all the way in almost. You can see how the filet has gotten a little bit more intense, just by moving the light closer light starts to fall off as it moves through distance. So the closer a light to the subject is, the more intense it will be. The further away, the less intense it will be. Let's actually see what each light is doing. Sam is gonna turn off and on the key light, and you can see the main light that's lighting me from our source right here. So let's turn it off. See how much it's filling in here. The key light really is our main source of light on our fill lights, just filling in what it can't hit. So let's turn it back on. Great. So that's what are key lights doing now. Check out what our fill lights doing again. It's filling in what we're missing from the key light off so you can see there's a little bit more shadow here, and it's really not filling out my full face as welcoming. It might be a little more menacing, so let's turn it back on. Great. So now you can see what both flights air doing. You can see the shadows. Let's check out the back light. So are back lights giving me a slight rim, Sam. Just turn it off. Watching turns back on. It's very, very subtle, but you can see how it breaks up, the background and kind of ads not majestic, but just makes it a pop a little bit more. It's a lot like the Grady int that we used in the interview kits, but it helps break it up just a little bit. So just to see exactly what the back lights doing, let's turn off the fill light. Let's kill our key light and you'll be able see exactly what the back lights doing. Now here I'm probably very silhouetted, and all I can see all you can see is just a rim. But when you turn the key back on, you'll be able to see exactly what the backlight sort of doing great. Now this is a nice one, Light kind of set up a swell with the backlight, a little bit more dramatic. Sometimes. Documentaries and dramas tend to use this for a very nice dramatic effect, and again we start with the base of our three point lighting, and from there you can decide just what you want to use specifically So let's have another option for the backlight. What we're gonna do is Sam's gonna take off the diffusion on the backlight again, not keeping the light from being soft any more harsh. Say it's a lot more heart, and he's gonna put it exactly opposite the key light and raise it a little bit. So this is just a different type of backlight that still adds separation, and it's a little more halo. We I notice it will hit more of the back of my head. The big thing is, because it's opposite are key. Light is we'll have to Barn door are kind of keep it off the camera itself to avoid any flares. If that's the style you're looking for, you can always flare your camera up, so this is a little bit higher and harsher backlight. This light has no diffusion on it, so you can see how hard it is right here. It's very different from our key, like Sam is gonna put some diffusion on it. You can see how it softens it up, and it makes it much more subtle. It's a little more pleasing to the eye and a lot softer. The great part. About three point lighting is it really is a base structure to kind of get your concept around lighting. The cool thing is that always remember there's a key light, ah, fillet and a backlight. And if you're indoors and you don't have any lights, you might be near a window. Just pretend that window is your key light, and you can kind of work off that. Or if you have a bounce card in your outside and you need the harsher light, I always put the harsher light on the backlight. Imagine that, as your son, a Sami, have explained in the natural light section and use a bounce card to act as a fill, so it really kind of works your way. In any concept, It's really a great way to kind of learn lighting and learn the basics of lighting because you can build off it throughout your entire video career. So we recommend three point lining for pretty much any situation. It's a great place to get started when you're shooting an interview when you're shooting at your office or really anywhere. It's a perfect structure to build off of, and you should be able tow. Always rely on it throughout your entire video career 33. Should You Diffuse or Dim Your Video Lights?: A student asked, Why would we diffuse light rather than just use a dimmer to dim the light? The short answer is that diffusing the light makes it softer. It makes the contrast between the highlights and the shadows of your image, not as contrast deep. To show you this in practice, I've set up a situation where I have an LED panel I'm sitting in front of. Right now. You can see it with 100% power with no diffusion. It's pretty harsh, right? It's too bright, it's overexposed. So what do we do? We can drop down with the dimmer to 50% power. This is a 500 watt equivalent light, Still a little bright. So let's drop it down even more so now the side of my face that is exposed properly, on the left side of my face. Looks good, but there's a ton of contrast, a ton of shadows you can see in my note on my nose, on the side of my face, and this is at 15% power. The background also gets super dark, which is not necessarily a bad thing. This is perhaps a style that you're going for. This light is very focused and directed on the subject. On me. It's not soft, light. Hard light. Let's go ahead and add some diffusion. My drake has lights have these little plastic diffusion filters. So to start out with, I added that and that cuts down the light a bit. You can see that at a 100% power, it's still overexposed, but closer to exposure. I'm going to add this soft box on top of that diffusion as well. So combining them, this is going to cut the light down quite a bit. And you can see that with both the diffusion filter and the softbox, I'm exposed properly in the Light is a lot softer. We're going to see a side-by-side comparison in just a second. It is a little dark though. So I'm going to go ahead and take out that diffusion filters so you can see what just the softbox looks like. And this is with 100% power. Remember with 100% power without the softbox, it was so bright. It was so contrast is so bright and too hard. For this first side-by-side, I'm comparing the 50% power without diffusion to 100% with diffusion because it has a similar overall exposure. If I pause it here, you can see that with the diffusion it spreads out the light. So the background gets a little bit more light. And that could be a good thing, that could be a bad thing. Maybe you want your life focus with your subject and the background to be a little bit darker. And so this video isn't supposed to tell you. You have to use soft diffused light. There's a time and place for each type of light. But as you can see, the light is spread a little bit more evenly with the diffusion card on the right-hand side, the shadow isn't as dark and we're gonna punch in here just a little bit so you can see even more details. But that light, those shadows are a little bit brighter and it's not as contrasted with the diffusion. Now let's see what it looks like with the softbox. So here you can see that the light is even softer with just the softbox compared to the no diffusion. Overall on my face. The light is softer. My entire face is more exposed. It's still a little bit dark. I would probably play around with the position of the light if I wanted to make sure that the shadows weren't as harsh on the side of my nose, like it is on the left side of the screen with no diffusion. Here's the same setup with just the softbox, not the diffusion card. And if we pause it here, you can see that the shadows and the contrast from the bright to the darks is higher with no diffusion. Then on with the softbox. And don't just pay attention to the shadows because the shadows still are dark in both of these video clips. But notice the highlights, the contrast, that's what we're talking about. The bright side of my face with no diffusion is a lot brighter than the one with the softbox. Overall, the softbox spreads out that light and everything gets a little bit more even. So one more wide look with the two shots. Notice the background, notice the contrast of the light, the shadows versus the highlights. And that's what you get. By adding diffusion. Again, it doesn't mean you can't use just dimming your light to get proper exposure or changing the settings on your camera to get proper exposure. Hopefully, this helps you understand what diffusing light does. Alright, thanks so much for watching and we'll see you in another video. Thanks for the question. 34. Intro to Editing: and welcome to the section on learning how to edit your videos. I wanted to create a quick intro video just to preview what this section is all about. And just to talk about the set up I'm using because I'm sure you might be interested in a change that I'm doing in this section. I'm just editing or recording in my own office. You saw this set up briefly a couple sections ago, but using my paper lanterns, my HD logic texting 9 20 Webcam Just the gray backdrop. So I don't have any lighting back here except for the two paper lanterns I'm using my how PR 40 microphone, which is right below frame. So I like it the frame to be clean. I'm also standing on the third using the rule of thirds putting myself in the third rather than the center, so that I can add more graphics up here, which I'm going to be doing a lot more of in this section. Speaking of this section, I do wanna talk about it and just give you a heads up. Really? We think this section is a great one. If you're brand new to video editing or if you already know how to edit, using whatever application we aren't diving into a specific video editor. I prefer Premiere Pro, and I have a complete course on how to use Adobe Premiere Pro. I just launched it before this course was launched, so it's a great course if you want to dive in and learn everything. That in itself is like a five or six hour course, and we couldn't add that to this course. We couldn't do something similar in this course, so the lessons in this course about editing are all there. They're very their general in the sense that you can use any editing application to use our tips. These are best practices that I've come up with that I have learned that I use as a professional video editor myself in my day to day life, because that's what I do professionally, not only in my teaching online courses, but I at it. Commercials, documentaries, short films, narrative films, anything you name it. I added it and do motion graphics. So I put together my top practices in this section. If you're not as interested in editing, go ahead and just skip this section go onto distribution, where you'll learn how to get your video out, get more views growing audience online on places like YouTube or social media. If there are specific video editing questions or applications that you want us to teach lettuce note, we would be happy to do it ourselves or get someone who is a professional and expert at the application to create a course with us. Thanks so much, and we'll see you in the rest of the lessons. 35. The Post Production Process: here are the basic steps to editing your video. Remember, no matter what application you're using, these air the steps that you should be doing the first ISMM or of not just a step, but something that you have to be aware of throughout the entire process. That's organization even before you start filming. But especially after you stop filming and you bring that footage into your computer, importing onto your computer or to an external hard drive, you want to think about staying organized. I always have a similar folder structure for my video editing projects. So within one Project folder, I'll have individual sub folders for footage, which includes more sub folders for each camera or each day that we shoot. Also, ill have a folder for audio, for music, for graphics, for exports and for sequences or projects. I often create a new project or save a new project every day or every couple of days, so that I have the last one available if I want to revert back to it. I also have auto save turned on on my application while I use Premiere Pro, but you can typically turn on auto safe in most editing applications so that if it does crash, you do have that back up. And I keep that organization on my computer, whether it's on an external hard drive or on my computer itself, and I copy that organization inside the editing application as well. So when I bring in footage when I bring in music, when I bring in photos, graphics, whatever it is into Premiere Pro, I keep a folder structure there as well. That's the same so that if I ever lose footage or misplaced footage or need to add footage or moving around, I know exactly where I can find it both in my project, but also in my documents. So the key here is to stay organized. Now, the next step, once you have your footage organized on your computer, is to import it, bring it into your application and organizes. Keep it organized. The next up depends on what type of video you're doing. But if you're recording something like what I'm doing right now, where I'm recording video and perhaps what we were doing outside where we were recording with Lava Lear Mike and a webcam or a regular camera, you have to sync up your audio and video footage. This is matching the audio and the video so that what you're saying, sentence looks right. You want to make sure that the voice matches the lips. It'll look really awkward if it doesn't one trick that I dio if you don't have a professional film Slate is that at the very beginning of recording or at the end as well. Clap in front of the camera section 1.2 so that when you are editing and you see that clap , you'll also see the spike in the audio wave form in most video editors you actually see, and you can expand the track on the timeline so that you see the way form of audio, and you can match that up, move it around to match the visual collapse. That's how you easily sink video and audio after you have sink your footage. Or, if you didn't have to do that, the next step is to pull selects. This is pulling your best shots your best takes, and getting it prepared for putting it together in the attic. Would all typically do is I'll create a new sequence, which is basically a new video of new timeline, and I'll just start taking the best clips from all of the takes that I've done and put it on there. Or if I have an interview, or if I'm recording a class like this, I'll put the entire take the entire recording, whether it's five minutes or 10 minutes or sometimes I have interviews that are three or four hours. I'll put that all down on a timeline. Then I'll just start cutting it up, keeping the bits that I like and deleting the best that I don't like. Sometimes all also duplicate that timeline or that sequence as I go on, so that if I have to refer back to what I was doing yesterday or the day before, or some of it takes that were as good, then all have that saved, and then my final take or my final sequence will only be the best takes. After you've pulled selects it's time to do the edit. This is moving things around, building your story, making sure that the flow is good. The pacing is good, cutting out the bums and the errors. This is the fun part of editing or really not the fun part. That was a little sarcastic, but a lot of people don't like editing. I actually like editing and have fun doing that. After you've put together your story with your main footage. The next thing is to add B roll and graphics, so sometimes you might only have B roll and not graphics. Sometimes you might just have graphics and not be role. But you put together your piece, and you add that extra footage to make it even more interesting. So adding titles. If you have created graphics, you can add those or the cutaway footage that adds to your piece. This might also be where if you're shooting something like a narrative film, where you're cutting together different takes or different shots and matching it up after that, it's all about tweaking and making it look and sound better. So adjusting audio levels to make sure that dialogue is relatively at the same level throughout making sure there's nothing that's too loud or too soft, adding music and making sure that the music isn't too loud changing up the music so that it adds emotion or drama or excitement or comedy or whatever feeling you want with your video also affecting our adjusting the colors of your video. This is called color correction that encompasses all kinds of things, but including adjusting the exposure so that it's bright enough or not too dark. Also, the white balance. So it's not too yellow or two blue or to green or to magenta. You wanna have it look natural. Make sure that the colors look natural. You can also, there's another term called color grading, which sometimes people get confused by it's different than color. Correction. Color correction is making sure that your video looks good. Normal color grading is giving your video a style through those same techniques. So maybe making it dark or blue to make it look like nighttime or maybe really warm or adding a c p a tone or making it black and white to give it a sort of effect. That's what color grading is, and that can really make your video a little bit more interesting as well. Visually, and once you put that all together, you've tweaked all the things to make it look and sound great, added any effects or titles or anything else you need it's time to export. Now I am going to go into some best practices for exporting in the next section, but right now I just wanna mention as well the best setting that I used for exporting my videos for publishing online. And that's using a quick time. Kodak. So a Kodak is basically the file type in. The within that Kodak or within the quick time family, is the H 264 Kodak and H 264 is a way that your computer can compress a video file, so that's still high quality. But it's a smaller file size, great for being able to upload online quickly and process great for playback on your computer or just for transferring between your computer and a hard drive. So that's the setting that I use whenever I'm publishing my videos online. So that's sort of a broad overview of what the video editing process looks like. If you have any questions, let me know, and we're going to dive into some of those things in the next few lessons to give you some more best practices 36. Craft a Story with Editing: as a video editor, you really are one of the main storytellers in the video making process. Yeah, sure, the director gets most of the credit. Even the cinematographer or the director of photography gets a lot of credit for being able to visually captured the scene. Producers get some credit for making it all happen, But at the end of the day, I like to think that editors are truly the storytellers that get to put it all together, because, really, that's what we get to do. We take everything, all of the work that has been done, and we put it together. Without us, there would be no videos, and as an editor, you're going toe. Learn through the process what it takes to tell a great story. What types of shots you need. Do you need wide exterior shots to introduce a scene? Do you need close up toe? Get in and show that emotion? Do you need cutaway shots or different types of shots to describe or to show what exactly is happening to explain your video even further? I know that for myself that even though I don't do as much of the cinematography or the directing. When I'm out helping other people on their projects as an editor, I they do bring me on set. And they do often asked for my advice on what shots are things we need. This is also going to make you a very efficient shooter so that when you do go out there, you're not shooting too much because you already know you're already thinking about the edit in the back of your mind. Oh, I need this shot. I need that show. I don't need that shot. Oh, that was a good good enough take. We can use that. Let's move on to getting more, more different shots. So being editing is awesome. That's basically the point of what I'm trying to say. I'm being adity and editor is awesome. The next thing I want to talk about is with pacing, because as another, you can really dictate the feeling of the story. You can speed up scenes and make it more dramatic with faster cuts. This is really popular and action movies. I challenge you. If you're going out to sea, your next action movie. Think of things like the born identity and the whole Born Siri's watch one of those movies and in one of their action scenes, try to count how many cuts and how many different takes they are actually using. It's going to be hard. You might not be able to count fast enough. It's incredible how many actual shots they use within, like 30 seconds to 60 seconds of a film on the opposite side. Slowing down a scene and giving space not only in the shop but also in the dialogue or the voiceover can help emphasize a point. Do you hear what I'm saying? This is not me editing, but the way that I talk. If I really want you to focus in on what I'm saying, then I'm going to slow down and I'm going to pause when I say something really powerful. Now what I'm saying right now isn't that monumental, but I bet you're focused a little bit more when I do have a little bit more space between what I'm saying. So as an editor, especially with documentary making, it's easy to try to cram in a lot of dialogue, a lot of sound bites. The hardest thing is to get rid of some of those sound bites so the other ones can even breathe a little bit more and have more of an effect on the audience. And with the Anthony Carbajal documentary, that was the hardest thing for me because he said so many amazing things. I wanted to get all these stories within the short film, but getting rid of some of those stories and just letting the ones that are most important live and breathe it really made the piece even better. So that's with action and getting a video excited with fast cuts and then slowing it down for more drama. What about comedy and comedy? Timing is everything, and I'm not a comedian. I am not a jokester. I would never get up on a stage and start telling jokes. I would just be bad at that. Honestly, when I try to tell my friends or families jokes, I just botch it half the time. But as an editor were an important role in comedies. One thing you can do is get to the punch line faster, especially when you're shooting, and I've done projects with friends or TV commercials that are funny, and it just takes too long to get to that punch line. Sometimes you can cut out some of the filler talk or even the space between words, to get to that punchline even faster. So it has a bigger effect. Also use visuals to add comedy, and this is more in the directing and the cinematography side of things. But as an editor, you can provide your input as well. But we live in a world where most comedies are just dialogue based. Nowadays you think of the latest movies, the late all the comedies that come out. Most of the scenes are just people talking back and forth and saying funny things to each other a while back in the eighties was really the time of this. Watch some of the great eighties comedies and you'll notice so much of the comedy is based off of action or funny shots or different angles, or just things that are happening in the scene. Not necessarily just talking. As you can see, I get very passionate talking about editing, and I hope that comes across through the Little Webcam. This is what I have to tell about story, and I hope it makes you a better video creator 37. Improve Audio in Post: in this video, I'll give you some best practices for making your audio sound the best that it can be. The first thing is to make sure that all the audio is at a proper level, especially when you are filming with multiple people here in this project that I'm editing . This is totally meta, but the project that I'm editing right now is this course. We have these different scenes with me talking with Sam, talking with will, talking and in different environments. I'm in Premiere Pro now. This is going to be different for you if you're not using Premiere Pro, but you can typically see the audio levels in some sort of graphical form. I can use my audio track mixer up here or see over here on the right hand side. If you're exporting for theatrical release or television, they might have specific levels that they want you to be hitting. But for us, we just want it to be even and to make sure that it's as loud as possible without getting distorted. So it sounds good on any device. So as I go through here, I could just make sure that the levels are bouncing around thes same level for all of us in all of our takes. And then if they're not, there are many different ways that I could actually increase the volume for each clip in Premiere Pro. You can actually just click up and down this level meter right here that increases it, and you see that it increases down here. It will say a number than D B. This is decibels. This is the audio scale that most professionals use in terms of audio levels. The next thing is to make sure that if you have music, it's not over competing with your other dialogue or whatever your other audio is. One rule of thumb that I have is to have the music 10 to 15 decibels below the average of your dialogue. And in the audio track mixer on Premiere Pro, you can tell that. So here on the top left, you can see Track one is my dialogue. Track two is the music, and if I play through this track one, you can see it balancing around. Negative five negative six. So between negative 0.5 and negative five, or says the average at the same time, the music is around negative 16. So about 10 to 15 decibels below Now this is just a rule of thumb, and it's going to sound different for different types of songs. Some songs with Maura percussion it sometimes has to be a little bit lower. I don't like using music that has singing in it, because that really competes with the vocals of my dialogue, whether it's a narrative documentary, an interview or an online course. If you're not using Premiere Pro and you don't have all of these options for seeing the different levels, just monitor both on your computer with headphones and without headphones, with the sound up loud so you can really tell if the music is to hire too low. My next tip is to use music to change the tone of a scene or to use multiple songs in a longer video. In some of the videos in this course, we've actually not had music play throughout the entire video because we would feel that it would just be too repetitive and kind of distracting if the music lasted too long. In other videos that are sort of a medium length around 2 to 5 minutes. We've included multiple songs, and what we've tried to do is break up the songs so they match different scenes or different tips. So, for example, in this lesson that was on screen recording videos, we have multiple tips. We have tip one tip to tip three, and for each tip, we chose a different song to play. Using music properly can really make or break a film. It will also help hide some imperfections in your audio like echo. In this lesson, we shot outside, and there was a little bit of noise in the background in one way that you can remove background noise, whether it's outside or inside is by cutting out high and low frequencies. Basically, all sound has a different frequency range. Higher sounds are higher frequencies and lower sounds are lower frequencies. A lot of time background noise, such as freeways rumbling in the background or wind wishing away in the background. You can get rid of some of that noise by cutting out the really high frequencies or the really low frequencies. So in Premiere Pro, you have filters like the high pass or the low pass filter, and you could just find this in the FEC's been you might have something similar in another program. You can apply these to your clip or even in premier, to an entire track, and then you can adjust the cut off. So for high pass, what this will do is if we set this to 150 hurts, that's the level of the frequency. It's going to cut off everything. Below that, it's going to let pass through everything higher than that. That's what's called High Pass. So this is going to be good for getting rid of some of the low audio. You gotta be careful, though, because depending on who's speaking and how their voices, you don't want to cut out too much of the frequency in their voice. And so, for men generally who have lower voices, maybe all only cut out the bottom 100 the same time. Let's do a low pass, so the low pass is going to be the same thing, but on the opposite end. So it's going to pass through frequencies lower than whatever we set it to. Typically, I start around 5500 or 6000 and see how it sounds now this was in Premiere Pro. If you can in your own video editing application, try to do something similar to cut out the high and low frequencies and get rid of some of that background noise. Some editing applications will have other audio effects that will help remove any background noise. In Premiere Pro, we have the di Essere, the D crack litter, the D clicker and the D Hummer. These are all things you can play around with to remove different types of sounds you won't want in your film. Cleaning up bad audio in postproduction is one of the hardest things to do. As a beginner, it really takes a professional who knows what they're doing and professional equipment to do it right. So making sure that you have recorded clean, crisp, great sounding audio on set is so important. But I'm sure that you can use some of these tips that I've given you to make your audio sound even better. 38. Find and Add Music: music is one way that you can make a boring video at least sound more interesting. But finding music that you can legally use in your videos is a pain in the rear. It's one of my least favorite things to do as a video creator, but it's something that I have to deal with on almost a daily or weekly basis, finding music for my videos. So here are some different places to find free and cheap music for your own projects. Remember, though, that you can't use other people's music in your videos without getting the right to it. Even if it's an educational video or a personal video, you're technically not supposed to use that other person's music. YouTube has always had a big problem with this, because it's easy and fun for creators to use popular music. For a while, they were taking down videos that used other people's music instead, what they do now is they actually give revenue from the ads generated from those videos to the musical artist. So if you use a major lazer song in your video and uploaded to YouTube, YouTube will automatically be able to tell that you're using major Lazer song, and it will actually put ads on that video, and the revenue from that ad won't go to you. It will go to Major Lazer. This doesn't mean it's fine to do it, especially if you're doing it not on YouTube, but somewhere else. If you're selling the videos, if you're publishing it in a commercial or on TV or in the theaters, it's just YouTube's way of dealing with it. Okay, so here are my favorite places to find music. The 1st 1 is a free option YouTube. If you sign up for a YouTube account, if you go to your creator studio and if you go down to create, there is an audio library with hundreds of songs that you can search through by genre by mood instrument duration and a lot of these you can use in your videos, no matter what. For free, whether it's commercial, whether it's on YouTube or not, some of them you have to attribute to the author and it will have this little logo right here. What this means is that when you upload, you just have to attribute it to the author by usually linking or at least writing their name in the description. The YouTube audio library is actually full of mostly high quality songs compared to some other free resource. Is that take days or years to look through and find good music? You can quickly find great free music here. The next place that I like is audio jungle dot net. It's part of the UN Votto Marketplace, which does a lot of stock photos, stock video, stock, graphics and you can find cheap music here, so you do have to pay for it. But tracks are generally between nine and $20 their high quality. They have almost 500,000 tracks, and you can search again by genre, by length, by all kinds of things, once you dive into their search or through their browsing feature. This is where I find a lot of music for my commercial projects because I don't want to use free music that really anybody can use and find on YouTube. That's the only downside about the YouTube library is that it's free for everyone. So now I hear that was same songs playing over and over in YouTube videos and across the Web, but with audio jungle. You don't have that problem as much. Yes, there's thousands of people downloading some of these songs, but a lot of them I have never been downloaded or have been downloaded only a handful of times, so you can get more unique audio and music here. In both of these, you confined sound effects to both in YouTube and audio jungle. Those could be helpful for different kinds of projects. There are also a few other websites that I don't recommend as much, but they do have songs. One is the free music archive, these air completely free songs that you can use in your videos. The quality, in my opinion, is not as good. And it's just takes a little bit longer to sift through the music to find a great song. There are two other paid options. One is Music Bed, which actually has some very high quality songs. I really love it. It's just more expensive. Some of the licenses are over $100 for a song. Premium B is in between music bed and audio jungle in terms of price and also has some great songs and sound effects. I just like using audio jungle cause it's a little bit more economical. The last option for getting music is to have someone compose it. Here is the website for my buddy Nick, who actually composed the music for my Anthony Carbajal documentary, and he's just a friend that I know does music. So he was an easy find. But you confined composers just through a Web search or by going to a local music school or a university that has a music program. Typically, there are students who are open to either doing projects for free or at a low cost. So this is where I find my music. I hope you enjoyed this lesson and we'll see you in another one. 39. Design Better Titles: adding titles and graphics to your video can make it more engaging and help emphasize a point. You can also make your video more mobile friendly. Have using videos on Facebook lately. Ah, lot of the viral ones have titles, subtitles or just graphical text throughout the entire video so that you can understand what's going on without hearing the audio. Here are my tips for better text graphics one is to use clean Sohn Sarah fonts. Sarah fonts have decorative flourishes on the ends of the strokes that don't show up nicely in video, especially if you have small text and they're more difficult for people to quickly read. So use songs. Sarah fonts like League Gothic Open songs Avenir or Railway Lee Gothic is actually a free option that you can find online, whereas Avenir is when you have to pay for de font and font Squirrel are great places to find fun, clean and professional fonts. Some of them you have to pay for to use in a commercial project, though, so make sure you read the fine print Tip. Number two is size matters. Understand what your distribution is. If you're putting your video online, make sure that your Texas big enough, especially for mobile viewers. We've talked about this before with composing your shots, but it's the same with text. If people are watching on their mobile phone or even the tablet, or if it's just on a Web browser. But in the small YouTube player or on a tab that's in the bottom part of the screen, you want to make sure that the text is large enough. I love using small fonts and small attacks because it can be more cinematic, especially for documentaries and other films. But I only use those small funds if the film will be showing on a bigger screen or at least full screen viewing. When I'm creating and posting videos that I put on video dot com, I generally know that the audience is more interested in paying full attention to that video and perhaps watching full screen. So in those instances I might use a smaller font size to be more cinematic. Otherwise, I make it bold and big. My third tip is to make the text stand out, and there's different ways to do this. One is by using a color that stands out from the background. I usually just use white or black Tex, and I put the white text over darker parts of a screen or the black text over lighter parts . Color text can look a little bit amateur and not as professional good, in some cases, if you're being more creative. But if you want color at a text box, were color block behind your text. This is another thing that you can do to make it stand out and what we've been doing in this course all along. And if all else fails and you still can't easily read your text, try adding a stroke, a drop shadow effect or put the text on a separate title card. My last tip for better text graphics is to simplify to be short and concise. People don't watch videos to read a novel, so just include either the key words or short sentences and make sure that it's on the screen long enough for someone to read. Use these tips to make your text look more professional and your videos more engaging 40. Use Calls to Action: a lot of you will be creating your videos with a mission or with a goal in mind that could be to get people to click on your website, to buy a product or service to click on another video of yours to support a cause to do something. At the end of your video, you can increase conversions by adding calls to action. This can be done through editing with visuals, but also on screen. And actually, when you combine a visual and audio called action has the best effect. For example, if I wanted you to click on the next video in this series, what I would do is say, Hey, click on the next video. It's going to teach you how to do X, y or Z. At the same time, a graphic would pop up right here, showing a little video, maybe with little text below it, saying what the video is all about. And if you're on YouTube, you can even use annotations so that people can click directly on the video player to go to that next video. Amazing right? YouTube has other tools that you can use, like YouTube cards, which appear on mobile devices as well, because they're notations don't work on mobile devices, and they also have an end screen tool where you can place any sort of called action, whether it's another video, a website of yours at the end of your videos. Use these tools if you're on YouTube and if you're not on YouTube or at the very least, use um, graphical text along with your voice and visuals on screen for your calls to action. 41. Export the Best Quality for Online: by now, you've gone through this entire course, and hopefully you've been taking action and starting to put together your own videos. The last thing you have to do before you share online is exported from your video editor. Well, I'm not going to spend time walking through every single video editing application out there. I do want to just share with you the settings that we recommend to export at for the best quality viewing experience online. We live in a world of HD, so at a bare minimum, we hope that you're shooting at 1920 by 10 80 HD and that that's how big you can export at when you go into your export settings of your video editor. It will typically ask you, what resolution do you want to export at what Kodak do you want to export at, And what quality do you want to export at first, in terms of Kodak's think of these as just types of files, different types of file formats, and there's lots of them, and there's different types of video files out there. The one that we recommend and use a lot is called Quick Time, age 264 H 264 is a high quality but small file size Kodak so you can export a long video or a video that's 1920 by 10 80 or even a higher resolution, and it will still be a manageable file size. Great for uploading online. So if you have the age 264 setting on your video editing application, use it. If you're on a PC and don't have age to 64 you can use W M V Windows media video files these air still high quality and great for uploading online. Now I do want to mention higher resolution exports. As time goes on, everyone's going to be shooting at even higher resolution than 1920 by 10 82 k 4 k. Who knows how many thousands of pixels will be shooting at in the next 5 to 10 years, and websites are already streaming video at those higher resolutions. YouTube in particular, has a four K and a two K playback option. If you've uploaded those higher resolutions, so by all means, if you want to shoot at a higher resolution, go ahead. Just know that for the entire process from production to postproduction to even up loading it online. It will take a bit longer with the slower Internet speed and a slower computer. Once you have your resolution and your Kodak selected, you gotta set your quality. Sometimes with video editor, you'll have a slider that goes from 0 to 100. Sometimes it's just low, medium high quality. Make sure you pick the highest quality. There's no reason to lower the quality unless it's just for a quick preview if you want to share it with your friends. But when you're exporting your final product, you want to make sure it's the highest quality file. And just to recap, our favorite export settings are 1920 by 10 80 quick time H 264 Kodak and full quality. If this is still a little bit confusing for you and you have specific questions, feel free to message us 42. Tips for Posting Online: Let's talk about posting your videos online and how to promote them to get the most reach. So the first thing you have to decide is, where are you going to post it? And earlier in the class, Sam talked about different ways to approach, choosing the platform. There's two different ways I think, about the be everywhere approach and the sort of single focus approach of picking a platform and focusing on growing that audience with the be everywhere approach. This is great for businesses who are trying to grow their audience on all platforms, both video platforms and social media platforms. So posting directly to YouTube, Facebook, instagram, Twitter, even Vigna, perhaps just to get your video out in as many places as possible. And this is great if you already have some sort of brand recognition or audience and all of those different platforms. If you're just starting out, we recommend focusing on one platform. It could be instagram if you're posting shorter videos or YouTube. If you're looking to grow a channel or straight to Facebook. If you already have sort of an audience on Facebook, if you really want to become a video maker or agro business based off a video, I do encourage you to start a YouTube channel. No matter what platform you choose to publish on, there are a few key things to keep in mind. To get the most region, make sure that people can easily find your videos. One is paying attention to your metadata, so the goal is to help people find your videos. And there's a term called S C. O. R. Search engine optimization. And the way that you optimize your video to be found by people is by writing out great titles, great description and adding great tags that allow people to find your video. So take whatever video you create. Think about the topic of that video, the keywords. What will people be searching to find that video? Use those keywords in your titles, your descriptions and your tags. A good example of using keywords properly is a video I did that was actually based off of an article by Mr Money Mustache on how to retire early. It was a motion graphics piece using connect typography to explain how to retire early. So if you search for how to retire early in YouTube, it actually shows up as the third video. And then if you look at the back and you can see the title I used, it has these keywords how to retire early, the description it has, how to retire early retirement, early retirement and I also included a little bit of a longer description down here that also has some of the key words again. Retire early, but it's not just repeating the key words. One after the other. It's actually in context and in a decent description, then for the tags. You can see that I use these keywords as well, but I'm not keyword stuffing. You're using too many tags for this video. One way you can expand the reach of your video is to try to get other people to share your video. And one way to do this is by tagging people who have collaborated on the video. Whether they're in the video or they've helped out with the video, they might want to share it to their own audience. Maybe you've use a particular camera or shot in a specific location, tagged those places, use Hashtags, especially on social media, use hashtags so that people can easily find your videos. You might want to do a little bit of ground work yourself. You can post your video and relevant groups on Facebook or other social media, even on forums and blog's on other websites. You can share your videos with them. Blog's authors are always looking for new content to share, so they might want to use your video in an upcoming Blawg article. An example of this was when I was the lead videographer at UC Berkeley. We put together a lot of news videos for the school, and we had a list of people who might be interested in sharing our videos. These were people who had their own websites, their own newspapers and other media outlets. And so whenever we had a video about politics or science, we would reach out to those people and see if they wanted to share it. Our last tip for getting more views is to create videos that coincide with current events, trending topics, holidays, things that are happening right now, when a topic is trending online, it's trending across all of the websites and platforms, from video platforms to social media, two news outlets. Everything is interconnected and everyone wants toe. Create a story on whatever is trending. You can use the tools that we mentioned earlier, like Google trends, where you can literally search topics and see what's trending in that area. You can also just hop onto YouTube and see the trending videos from the past 24 hours. Use these videos and these trending topics as inspiration not to replicate someone's videos , but to give your own take on the topic. The last thing I want you to do is after you've been creating videos for a while and you're posting to places like Facebook or YouTube, use the analytics that they provide to see which videos of yours have the most views and engagement. A lot of people don't pay attention to the analytics, but when I look at my YouTube channel, I can see which types and which topics of videos are the most viral, get the most views. The best way to grow my channel and get more views is to create videos about that topic, and sometimes I fail at that. Sometimes I just want to make videos on random topics, but if you want to grow your channel the fastest possible. Use the analytics and see what people actually want from you. I hope you enjoyed our tips. If you have any other tips for getting more views and growing your own video audience, send them to us and we'll share them with the class. 43. Grow Your YouTube Channel: Let's cover the best ways to grow your YouTube channel. A lot of you might be using YouTube just to post your videos to share with family or friends. Or perhaps you have a business and you're using your videos to generate leads and even income. It's one of the ways that I grow my business and generate revenue. So here are my top tips for growing your channel. The first is to stop striving for viral viral hits or getting views doesn't convert to subscribers on YouTube. You will notice this if, and it's not always the case, but you'll notice there's a lot of videos that have a lot of views. But then you go to their channel, and there's not that many subscribers. The reason people subscribed to channels is consistency. People subscribe so that they can get notified of your latest up loads. Now there's no perfect rule for how many videos Yushin posts per week or per month. But the idea is to be consistent, so whether it's once a month, once a week or every day, be consistent at it because your audience is going to expect videos at that schedule. Personally, I aim at putting out one video per week to my videos Go Online channel, and this seems to have worked for me. So starting at one video per week is a good idea because you don't want to burn yourself out trying to create a daily vlog or something like that. Our next tip is too niche down. It's actually faster to grow channel If you pick a more focused topic, there's enough people in the world watching videos on YouTube or really whatever channel you're using that will like your videos and share your videos and be searching for your videos. Toe. Have a successful channel. I've learned from personal experience that creating a channel where I talk about finance and video production and photography and motion graphics and doing my own flogs and everything else. It doesn't grow as fast as picking one topics such as doing photo and video gear reviews. It just doesn't grow as fast. I'm not saying it's impossible to create a popular channel on various topics. It's just going to be harder to find an audience that subscribes. Arthur Tip is about connection at the core of everything and in particular, video, social media YouTube. People want to have connections. People are watching your videos to connect with you. If you can show off your personality and truly connect with the viewer by being yourself, then you will find people wanting to subscribe to your channel. Another aspect of connection is the actual commenting and interacting with people online. So dive into the YouTube universe. Comment of other videos. Message other creators. Potentially, you could even collaborate on videos with other creators. This is a great way to grow your own audience, because if you collaborate with another channel that already has their own audience, that audience can be introduced to you. And don't worry about collaborating with YouTubers, who have a lot more subscribers than you or even less subscribers than you. It's all about collaborating and helping each other out. Our fourth tip is what we talked about in the last lesson about tags and description and keywords using keywords throughout all of the metadata of your YouTube video. So your title tags and description you don't want to go overboard. You want to keep it focused on whatever your video is truly about. You'll actually be penalized if you are using words in your description or title and tags that actually don't match with the video content. YouTube can see if people are clicking on your video because they think it's about something and then they click off or they stop watching it too early. They'll penalize you for that, and a key metric to pay attention to is washed. Time. You can see this in your YouTube analytics is actually Mawr important than view count. YouTube sees how long people are watching your videos, and they'll promote videos that are watched longer, will promote it in the suggested video section and also on the search results page. And speaking of watch time, we have our tip number five, which is used calls to action throughout and at the end of your videos to encourage people to watch more of your content. You can use calls the actions to promote other things, like a website, but using calls to action at the end of the video to get people to watch more of your video's. Another video in the series, or even pushing them to a playlist of your videos will help grow your channel even more. YouTube has some tools to help. They have cards, annotation and end screens. Using these tools, you can push people to more of your content, putting into practice all these tips. You can more rapidly grow your channel. 44. Case Study Ghirardelli Chocolate Promotion: All right, guys will Here. I'm gonna go ahead and show you a video that my company produced for Ghirardelli chocolates . So let's go and watch it first, and then we can talk through it. We'll talk. There are decisions and stuff like that. We go, you have to be passionate about your job, something that you spend almost as much time is due in your social life. If you're gonna be looking at something working with something 40 hours a week, you've gotta love it. Chocolate is a reward. That's a little pick me up. It's a different food fight where you have to do a lot of processing or manipulation. But that gives you a lot of creativity, you know. And Gary Kelly has such a great reputation. It has this really emotional feel to it. I'm so proud of our chocolate. We go leaps imbalance to make it absolutely as perfect as we can. Chocolate alone speaks for itself, and I think that's what makes us special way work in an environment where we have these premium values and we really try to extol the virtues of the product. But today it's the people who are behind that that make it fun, exciting and interesting. Rashed Quite a small to mid sized company. You kind of have your identity here versus in a bigger company, you can feel really lost. This is the best group of people that I've ever worked with, and it really makes it like a family quality operations. People work well together. Everybody believes in the product. They believe in the brand. You're all kind of pushing towards the same goal way. All want Gary Daily to perform well asked back for others. And you know, it's nice to have someone asked for your opinion. You feel valued, Do you feel that someone wants your input? Everything that we developed goes to internal sensory way really die. You that because you're helping develop this product, you get to taste them in the office. You see them from birth toe launch and then actually seeing them in the store, A whole another level of satisfaction. It starts with just a little glimmer in your eye, and then there is on the shelf waiting for someone to pick it up. People are able to take what you provided and make it something special to them. that just gives me a feeling how your Adela operate. These are the things that are important to the company and about being human. Everything that wear Forget Italy because I believe in the product we make and people that make it. I worked for Gary Deli because I'm passionate about chocolate work for Ghirardelli because the premium brand and the people matter here. I won't forget Italy because they support me. I work for Dear Adelie because when I walk into this building, there is something new exciting, and I like working here in L. A. Because I love the people here and it's fun to make chocolate balm. I love that song. All right, cool. So let's just let's rewind only back and here I'm gonna go ahead and muted and I'll just play. So generally, let me just talk about why we made this video. Basically, we were asked to produce a video that the Human Resources Department could use for their website for new recruitment for new people that came in to actually work there. And they wanted it to be more than just a talking head, uh, commercial, basically like they wanted it to be a sort of like, you know, something, something with heart, something that, like, kind of really came across to their new hires. Got them excited about working there. Originally, there was just these really plain interviews about people talking about the their work there and what they like doing there. So our concept was to hear office fast forward was to take these several people, and you can see here we have, um, Kim and operations and several others. And basically, what we did was we decided we do these living portraits that you can see here and take those living portrait's and, um, put them across a T end here and interview them. But all we interviewed them was just audio. We did the audio way. Kind of made sure to hit on special points, basically, and make sure that, uh, you know, we got some heartfelt messages. So then we ended up just shooting their faces in that sort of look in that sort of interviewee. Ah, like portrait e. Look not not necessary. Sorry. Not interview. Just more portrait. Look, um, so it just kind of you living portrait, I guess, is what it is like. There's photos of Portrait of People. But it's kind of nice to see them smiling like this guy here. And then at the beginning, you know, you start to hear them actually speak, and then we also got to spend time with them and their co workers. So you can see here's Kim and someone from HR. We got to follow with them around for the day and kind of see what they were each doing after we had interviewed them and talk to him so we could make sure we got those specific shots on the big thing with this project was really just knowing that we were going to go in. We're gonna find specific subjects. We interviewed them, and then we listened to what they talked about in their interviews to make sure that our shots coincided with what they were speaking about. So in addition to that, we also got all this wonderful, beautiful footage of of chocolate and in the factory and stuff like that, like this is this shot of you got the shot of the chocolate here has been used, like for everything that they're doing at this point. So yeah, so I think The big thing here is to kind of take away the fact that, like it meant more to new recruits and getting more people there to hear from people that actually love working there in love, working with chocolate and the story here and the emotion is much more important. And that is what kind of informed how we shot it. Um, we ended up deciding to go with the 240 aspect to make it more cinematic, which, you know, in my mind, cinematics movies. It's just more magical, really, so that to 40 frame helped with the magic. And ah, we just did a live relative Lakoff shots. So everything's very well composed. It's just very like pacing wise has a nice pace to it and has a nice, really clean, calming, kind of calming perspective. So you can see there's a lot of people here that the people that designed the boxes and the people that are working in the factory, it's really just a good collection of everyone that's working here and ah, and that really spoke to our clients. Our client ended up really liking this, and we actually got to do more videos for them. This was really are big pilot video that they really enjoyed and liked and were able to build off it. Um, one other thing to think about this this really was done with just three of us. I ended up producing this video for our production company. We had someone else help me direct and shoot it. Um, and we did audio ourselves. So we took a camera up there with some prime lenses. We had very minimal lighting, mostly used natural light. And, uh, we did audio ourselves by just doing an interview with a zoom H four n. And, um, this is actually done on a bigger camera. We rented a bigger red camera for this job. Just Teoh help out with low light situations and just general dynamic nous. And I think the color kind of came out really well. And other videos, we'll talk more about technical stuff, but this video really, really got the message across that we wanted to get. And it really impressed the client. Um, we went through a lot for this. We did a lot of pre production. We pitched an idea. We had a budget. We got it approved. You know, I paid a couple of vendors guys to come out and help me. I had to get permits. We had to get license agreements like it was a big job. But the story and the quality and the love is really all there, and I think that's really what they were going for. Um, my favorite thing about this piece amongst all our other pieces that we don't for a company is just the compositions and the cinematography as faras framing as far as leading lines trials, rule of thirds as's faras making your shots look interesting, it really does yet all of that across. And that can really be a big, big thing that makes your video better. Is just making sure you're shots are just beautiful, like they're just gorgeous. Have foreground. You see this shot? There's a lot of foreground moving parts. Cemetery composition, a little bit of movement faces a lot of the way you compose. Your shot can go a long, long way, and then when you add in the quality interviews and talking points with people, it really just it gets pulled all together, and it's just a beautiful video super proud of it. And, uh, yeah, thanks for checking this one out. I think in future segments, I'm gonna go ahead and break down some other videos where we'll talk more about technical stuff. Thanks. 45. Case Study Inside a Short Documentary: my abilities air slowly diminishing. So I'm like, able to, like, adapt to each one. Some days I'm like I woke up like a few couple months ago and I realized I couldn't let this finger anymore, Just like up that one's gone. And that's weird at that finger would never go back. Every day is the strongest I will ever be again, but also the weakest I've ever met. That's weird. It's really weird. Hey, this is Phil here. And that was the intro to my short film, a short documentary about Anthony Carbajal, a stolen in the film that I've talked about and used as an example throughout this course, and in this lesson, I really want to just go through what I did for this film, how it came about and walk you through some of the creative process while showing you some of the shots. So I'm just gonna go ahead and play this and then talk you through coming up with the idea and how we actually got it going. So I knew Anthony from college, and he is a good friend. He was diagnosed with a less, which is mom and grandmother hod and he was only 26 when he was diagnosed, and I just knew that I could use my talent as a filmmaker to help share his story because, as someone who has a less, he's not going to be ableto have a job anymore because he basically loses all the muscles in his hands and throughout his entire body. And a pause here I titled this film strongest I'll ever be, because that's from a quote that he was talking about in the beginning. In that clip saying how each day, every moment is the strongest he'll ever be. And he just continues to get weaker and weaker, which is it's inevitable and so devastating. And the reason why I wanted to make this film, though, is not because it's such a devastating story, which can make a compelling film, but because he's so positive about it. And he's an artist himself, and he does photography. He was an award winning photographer in the beginning of this film. He talks about being a photographer, so I'm just gonna zoom ahead just a little bit toe, see some of his work as a wedding photographer, and he was doing 40 50 weddings a year, charging a lot for these weddings, winning awards for his wedding photography. And he wasn't able to do it anymore after he was diagnosed. He couldn't use his hands to change the settings on his camera anymore, But over time he was able to figure out ways to take photos with his camera. So here in this documentary, again going back to the film, you can see that in the beginning I use a lot of photos because in the beginning of the film he's talking about his background, his story, how he got to where he is today, and so that lends itself to using photos as B roll. There were photos of his parents, his mom, his sisters and his siblings. And this is when he's talking about his mom being diagnosed. And you used these things. That's kind of B roll to demonstrate and toe ad A A life and visuals toe what he's talking about. I could have just stayed on the interview clip right here. We're using the rule of thirds were replaced him on the the right side of the frame, and he's looking right past frame at me, answering questions which is a typical type of set up four interviews. They're not looking straight at camera, but looking right off side of the camera at the person and asking the questions. And so in the beginning, I was using a lot of a lot of photos. So anyways, let's just play through just a little bit more, and you can see this scene one of my favorite scenes, where we really got in there and got to be in an intimate moment with him and his wife, who takes care of him and helps him shower. So let's go just play through a little bit more. And it's just music right now. Composed by my friend Nick. There's no voiceover, nothing really describing what's going on because the visuals speak for themselves, a combination of close ups with different cameras and also wider, more stabilized Steadicam shots. It never crossed my mind that I would get this disease. And so this ah moment of him and his wife is just so sweet. And you can also see his to this camera move tilts down to his dogs, taking care of him. You know, his whole family around him. So you can see the different types of shots. We combine wide shots, close ups, you know, interesting compositions. Here's a shot I really like where Anthony was sitting on the edge of the bed, just looking, you know, not at camera, but facing towards camera. And then his wife comes around and helps him starts doing his hair. And we had two cameras rolling at the same time. The close up camera with a nice telephoto lens and then the wide camera that was that wide shot. So we didn't have toe. Have him do this multiple takes. We just had two cameras rolling at the same time, getting these different angles, and that allowed us to cut together these different shots. And that's something. As a filmmaker, you have to, you know, pay attention to while you are filming. This is a film that we had a rough outline of what it was going to be. We knew sort of what was going to take place that day. Anthony was going to get ready in the morning. We were going to go out and do some photography. We wanted some scenes around the house, and Anthony and his wife were just very comfortable with us, I think mostly because we knew them from from before I had gone there and met with them beforehand. Of course, I knew Anthony from college, so he's very comfortable letting us in his house. But that's something that you might not get right at the beginning of making a film. You know, this is a very personal story. This isn't like a corporate documentary or corporate promotional or commercial film or video, so it does lend itself to being personal and they them just letting us in a little bit more . But because of that, it turned out a lot better than if we didn't get these scenes thes personal, intimate moments of him and his wife. So the structure of this film talks about his background, and then he goes through his everyday life, and he or his current situation, where he's being helped by his wife. He's still able to do a lot of things, but it's really hard for him, and he talks about his wife really being there for him, no matter what, which is one of the most personal and sad but also beautiful things about his story is that his wife was there for him. So let's just skip ahead to some drone shots and I'll let that play out. She'll make a silly face and make me laugh and make me forget about all my troubles. You know, so long is a special woman, and I'm so blessed toe have her in my life super fortunate and blessed and you weren't I'm just gonna pause here. The drone shots. Not only are they just cool toe have and they really up the production value of this documentary, but it helps set the scene, and it makes the documentary feel a little bit bigger than if it was just in his house the whole time. The backdrop of this documentary and his life is the town of Redlands in Southern California. You can see the Redlands, the mountains that look red here in the sunset and being able to capture these scenes, these wide shots again. That's what we learned from the composition section. The wide shots tell us where we are, and then it's the close ups that talk toss about the action, one of my favorite shots and I'll just pause here again. Is this next one coming up, and I love the transition of these shots going from the pan up of Anthony and Larne e his wife in the hammock to these wide shots of the city. And then this fades out, and it's almost like a new scene a new day on. Then we have Anthony in his wheelchair. After I was driving up this street, the music changes. The shot change is the tempo changes of the music, and then Anthony starts talking about his photography, and so this is the third act of the film. The first was his background. The second was his current life, and the third is sort of the future or what he is planning to do with his life. And it's focus on photography. So he's talking about how he put together his camera on his wheelchair, and he was able to figure out how to do it so that he can still take photos using a an external shutter release and basically the basic settings of a camera without and using a lot of automatic settings. And then we go and we actually film him as he goes out into the streets and does his street photography. He's an amazing street photographer in It's It's amazing being able to show some of his his photos in this documentary. You can see some of them now, and I'm actually going to be updating this with some of his newer ones because it has some even more amazing photos. So again, combining was both video with photos is something we did for this piece, and it's It just works well for this one a lot because he's a photographer, You know, you don't always necessarily have to have photos and your films, and actually, sometimes photos take away from the film because they can feel a little too static. But for here, it's perfect. You can see all of these shots different angles, looking up Anthony with sun with the flares coming directly at the lens. Not something you always want to do but something that you can dio. Here's a shot from his wheelchair. We strapped a GoPro to his wheelchair and he just shot facing forward, and I used them stabilization to make this a little bit smoother, but we see his silhouette or his shadow on his silhouette coming from the sun because the sun is coming from behind him. Another really interesting perspective. Close ups getting right in there in his face in his eyes to see, see how focused he is and you can hear in his voice right now that he's so focused. You know you're not listening to the documentary, but, ah, when you get a chance to watch it. Once I put it up on online, you'll see and hear how focused he is on trying to do his photography. And so getting those close up shots to show that focus is what we were intending to do. There you can start to see his facial expressions getting a little bit happier and happier and excited. So it's also good to cut back to that interview dish. See him talking, especially when he goes through some, says Salim. Or emotional or powerful. You cut back to the shots to really show what he's thinking some more photos of his, and at the very end, you can see him start to tear up. Always great for documentaries, if you know it gets a little emotional. He's talking about how photography has really changed his life, and he's looking forward to continuing to take photos, and this is another good timeto have that iconic shot of them riding off into the distance into the sunset. You know, if you watch Old Western movies, that's an iconic scene that is used time and time again to show people, you know at the end of the day riding off into the sunset and here they are, continuing their journey together. And then I'll just show you one more shot. One thing that it kind of happened on accident, but it was a happy accident that I know just came about during editing the shot of Anthony , the pullback of him. He's standing there in the middle of a street, no wheelchair just by himself, and this shot matches with the first shot of him going in, seeing him in his chair and really at the end of the day, his chair doesn't define him. And so that's why I wanted to use that shot at the end. It wasn't really what I was thinking when we filmed it. I was just thinking, Oh, this would be a cool shot to have him standing in the middle of the street and is just like a creative shot looking at camera. But it ended up being a great book end to this short film to show that his chair isn't what defines him. So using symbolism in the shots and the way we set up these scenes is something we were thinking about, as as I added it. So this whole project was a really, really great one. We're submitting it to film festivals now. The places that I've used to submit to film festivals are without a box dot com without a box dot com and film freeway dot com. Film freeway dot com Both of those are really cool places, and some have more film festivals and others some, um, times there on without a box and not on film freeway. Sometimes they're on both, so you just have to figure out which one is cheaper, Um, or if you just want to stick to one platform. So thank you so much for watching. If you have any questions about this film, or you know anything else that you would want to know about the process of making a documentary, please feel free to ask questions. I would love to just answer any questions you have. And I really hope that this lesson help just kind of put into perspective what making a film looks like at the end of the day and sort of my thought process throughout the improper entire process. So thank you so much and we'll see you in another lesson. 46. Case Study Shooting By Yourself: Hey, guys will here again, and I'm gonna kind of take you through to smaller videos and both of these videos. I did 98% just by myself. So let's watch the 1st 1 It's from Pink Dahlia photography. I want to be a mirror that shows good things to that. I want to be, uh, person that can show them proof that they're beautiful. Hi, My name's Kerstin Flaunt Check. My company is pink Dia photography and we shoot weddings specializing. They always do this thing where they opened their photos and they look at their photos and then they look at me and then they looked out of their photos. They go, that's me. And I see Yeah, you're beautiful assed women. We have things that people have put on us and make us phone comfortable about our bodies. The way we see ourselves as much different than someone else looking at us when I'm talking to them and they're feeling nervous trying to explain that to them that you're gonna look how I see you, you're gonna look how the person who loves you sees you first. We have a consultation, and so we meet for coffee and we have a conversation. I found out why they're doing it on. Then we set up a time and a date where I show up at their house with a make a team. We do their hair and makeup so very glamorous and then we shoot in their bedroom and I usually like. I'll hang some curtains to get the room ready for, you know, a place that I want to shoot in and find the best light stuff, but generally just seen a big window. I want them to feel empowered about what they look like. I went the way they look at themselves to be changed, not necessarily their bodies themselves, I think is you go through life. You definitely start to see your body in a particular way and be able to break that. No matter how old you are, what you look like, it's really cool and I'm just really passionate about raising self esteem and instilling confidence. I feel like women get beat down a lot about what they look like, and it's just not about that. It's about feeling good. You don't need to lose £10 to come and see me you know, you just come is yourself and and I can show you what you get. Women from all different ages and different walks of life. It's really cool that it's something that's lasting, and it captures a good time in their lives. And they had a fun time doing it. The's are really women doing a nice thing for, you know, whoever they're gonna give the book to, whether it's even themselves if they're just doing your shoot for them, which I think it's so cool, I would say, Come in the clothes that make you feel the sexist, um, you know, and don't worry about the rest, because we're going to take care of it. All right? So real quick. This video was done with two DSL, ours. And, um, I did it mostly myself. I did have a friend come and help me at the end to shoot the B roll, but the interview itself you can see here was done with ah to DSL ours. And one was on a wide right here. You can see in this shot me. Move this on the way here. So you guys see better. Um, so one was done in a wide shot, and then the other was composed in a close shot here, you can see. So I rolled those two cameras at the same time while I was asking her questions. She was actually a very good interview, e mostly because she just knew what she was going to say. She was positive about what she was doing, and she really knew her company herself. Pink Dahlia Photography itself is really just a very, uh, the small company. And so my idea here was to basically combine, um, interview footage with B roll and the other bureaux would be her photographer, Your her photos themselves. So the idea for Buehrle was to shoot her, like, you see here, shooting a subject. But then also, I wanted to add in what I've started doing with some of these smaller companies was just shooting the interview. You like this in a very nice kind of portrait. He shot them checking their camera because they're photographer. See, it's nice. It's like a one point e. Think I use a really, um, prime on this and also like her laughing just kind of like stuff around her interview to kind of help bring in who she was as a person. I stuck these on tripods and for the light you can see in some of these shots. She's just by a window, just like her photography. We also use a big window that's just to her right side here on the left of screen. Right here. This is where it is. So you can see in this very shot. Basically, this chair was turned around the other way and we were set up right here, and she was looking at us, and the light was on her left. You see, it works great for her photography, and then it works great for her, uh, photo here for her interview. Set up light is nice and soft right here on the right side. There's some fill because room is really light. This is adding some depth, this backlight, and it really works. So you can see no lights were used in the in this protection and were able to get a nice, clean looking soft interview. What's really great is being able to see the space that she's in, Um, that she's actually taking the photos and see we cut to her photo here, and we just I'm just doing a subtle zoom and push. It's kind of called the Ken Burns Effect, and it's, ah, really cool way of doing that. And you're editing where you can kind of spice up actual still images and add in. So we've got interview. We've got the photos as be wrong with the push in. And then we have the normal B roll where she's in action, talking about what she's doing. Um and really, it's just getting her and the subject in at the same time. This is all done by myself, pretty much other than my buddy helping at the end with the bureau. The interview itself. Um, I used a zoom and a boom, so there's a boom hanging right over here, just above frame right here in the wide shot. Ah, and I believe I also put a lab on here and I was running that to a zoom recorder and we used a slate, and she really it really worked out great. I mean, it's it's funny how helpful will just being in the right location, having the right amount of light and just having the knowledge of what you're actually doing helps a lot. The between the close and the wide shot. It was nice. We'll cut back and forth, and then when I needed them to edit in a mistake or edit to a different part of our interview that we talked about, I would cover that with B roll. Um, and I could jump back into the white jump back into the cut, the close, um, and then it was really great, I think, for editing purposes, Phil, we'll talk more about how you can kind of mix those two together. But this is really a one man production, and it's works great for a very low budget corporate video that could be used for a small business. Corporate, I say small business meaning corporate, Um, and she's put this on the front of her website, and she's gotten tons of likes and comments on it, and it really gives a window into who she is, um, as a person and how she can help you as a photographer. Now I want to show you guys another sort of photography video here. Ryan J. Chambers Photography is a much harder interviewee, but kind of a similar concept. But look, let's watch it. And then I'll talk to you about what the differences are and what we changed because he was not the best interviewee and one of the microphones cut out. See if you can tell on one of the subjects. Ryan Chambers. My name is Catherine. This is my husband. Wear primarily. Weddings also share a fair one. A family portrait. I've been shooting weddings with Catherine or about three years. I think what makes a photograph special is when you look at it and you can feel you can remember and feel what that experience was like. I think that's our goal is to make beautiful pictures that also mean a lot. I think I feel really drawn. Teoh call anything Towns being will try to describe people specifically in trying. Teoh capture. They're starting on that day way that makes you feel like that's a friend talking about another friend. Had a background will find our I feel like my life. If this isn't what a photographer is trying to make photographs that are honest, there's something that's important about remembering that was losing your day and not just everybody smiled. Yeah, there there is a way in a significance, and I think I'm value and and the breath of the wedding. I don't think people realize that when they're looking for their wedding photographer, your photographer's gonna be there with you the entire day. So it's important that you connect with them. We're with running room Dorial today. Definitely. It's a little significant parts of the day for me. It's a lot about trying to observe relationships, their body language helpful, really. And I think, especially whenever taking pictures, trying to create the space for the couple toe, interact together and see where they're going and try the well of that session in a way that allows them Teoh, I feel much more again, kind of like a magical whenever it's more collaborative because we don't really know we're gonna enough with making pictures that will last generations beautiful that we'll continue Teoh cause people pause where they look at that and that you makes everything beautiful and I make everything a little bit more beautiful. All right. Ryan J. Chambers Photography coming in here. Let me turn the volume down here. So again, Same same thing We did ah, lot of interviewee stuff and then tried to cover it with B roll. Um, also, he used his logo at the beginning. Here you can see I didn't interview. I did a little different because I only had one camera. So in this case, I did a dual interview and they were very uncomfortable in front of cameras. So you can see I did this kind of, like trick thing with Thea with the beeps sort of thought it might be kind of fun. And then the second interview I did with just Ryan on his own. Um and then I got the role with some interesting compositions. Basically, we went, and in his living room we rearranged everything for this B roll shot. We put him next to a window, so we have a very nice again very nice soft light, which is wonderful light up the background and lit up his face in the two shot. It works and it covers both of them. I kind of had to put it out at an angle. You can see the background looks great. Composition is fine. I also just had them include their little puppy Roosevelt, because it really added some personality to them. And so the audio I cut together is between this interview, um, and the single interview. Now you never see Cat really on her own other than here, Um, it's because she also got a single. It's because her microphone cut out in the the two shot. So at the end, you can kind of hear you kind of hear over over b roll of them hugging their puppy. The microphone kind of cuts as long as the one that's placed under Ryan is really not very placed. Well, it's really not place very well. I did a bad job, but it's under his tie. Um, and he's moving, and he also mumbles like crazy. So I had a really hard time getting that, and he had a hard time just being in front of camera in general. So it was hard to kind of make him, you know, come out and relax in addition to having kind of, ah, a bad voice for him. So, basically, to get around that I did a lot of bureau. I had tried to cover a lot of little shots like this, just like the Pink Dahlia shot where she was kind of smiling and looking at a camera. Um, cats get a nice shot, and then we didn't know what to shoot, because he's a wedding photographer. So we luckily found someone that we went to high school with. That was okay with me coming along and shooting Ryan shoot her wedding. Um, it's kind of a real luck of the draw, but I also took some of the images and gave them to her. You can see here in this in the shot that Ryan has. He was taking pictures of me while I was videoing him. Um, and you can see I'm, uh Let's see right here. If we can see it in this close up, your all you can see right here. I'm by myself. Just one camera on the back of his camera. But look how beautiful this nice in close shot. It really shows how small of a camera he's using. How intimate. Um, you know, the images that he's able to create our, um and really the type of photographer he is. He has a really hard time talking to people in person. But you can see this. This bureau I love like look it looking him, laughing and smiling, The Bryans laughing. It's fine. She's taking photos like he's able to get her in a natural state because that's his style. Um, he has a really hard time speaking to clients. Sometimes it gets a little nervous. He's not very kind of open and and, you know, outgoing. So this video has really helped him with his sales. He put it on the front of his website, and people have really responded to it, Um, as a way for them to really know what he's thinking without him actually telling them. And I use that as a tool to tell people when I'm selling. Let me do a video for you because I can tell him how much it can really help showcase their talents and who they are. But then you, as a videographer, really need to go in and and talk to them and find the philosophy of why they shoot or what what their business is. Why they do what they do in story wise and then go out and shoot it. Now all the shots Ah, that you see at the wedding in the B roll, I am using our stabilizer, our movie, and it was kind of before I got really used to it. This is almost five years ago a shot, This video, Um, there's a DSLR on the movie, and you can see it has that subtle pushing. But it's kind of stable, not really, but it adds a lot to the production value. And then also, I use a, um, wide open glass with some short primes to kind of add that depth of focus in some of these shots like this one. You can see it falls off very quickly. Gives it that more cinematic feel. Um, and then let's see what else. So here's another movie shot you can see kind of moves around and then again with soft light. So really, all in all this is again one man team. Mike did this video completely on my own. You could go back and watch it again as you refer to it, but it's just me shooting Interview, interview, interview Be Robbie Robbie role. I got the song off a website that allows you buy songs for $10. And now here Ryan has a beautiful production, a nice production valued video that he can put on the front of his website, where his clients could really come in and see who he is and what he's about. Um, the only thing I feel like I'm missing from and this is the actual photography that is taking. There's no real images of his a photographer. And I think if you're shooting someone like a trade, are making a video for someone corporate, you want to see their product or kind of see what they do, really. But his argument was that it's just a click away on this website, and if anything, they can go check it out on his website. Um, so that's where that's Ah, Quick, Ah, recap on some technical side to doing these videos. Keep watching more and, uh, thanks for watching 47. Case Study Wedding Videography: Hey, guys. So we're gonna go through a wedding video that I shot. I used to do a lot of wedding videography. I thought it might be a good idea to kind of take you through this video. I'm going to go ahead and talk through it, Actually, while it's playing in the background so that we can kind of, you know, stay concise and stuff. So, being the main thing in this videos, I had two different shooters. One was me with the groom and one was with the bride. You can see that we're just getting inserts. And I knew I have kind of a formula here where we're just gonna get inserts and inserts in inserts of both the bride and the groom and then eventually we're going to come together. But for this one, I kind of didn't intro where they had a song in mind that they wanted me to put this video to. Here's a movie shot stabilizer at 60 frames per second did a lot of 60 because I think that just looks beautiful. This is all close up stuff on the groom. So here detail shots really good. I really love storytelling. with weddings because you kind of shift back and forth with this wedding. They actually got all their guests onto a bus and shuttled them from their hotel all the way up to this very nice venue, which we'll see later. So again, we got to the venue. Before that, Busted got some detail shots. I had it. A player there, which is a technical thing doing, editing back on the movie. And you can see this is 60 frames per second and there's our titles is a little bit of a longer video. It's about eight minutes because they wanted a cold coverage. I used a lot of players like that to kind of cover and hide edits and make it a little bit more magical in cinematic. They really love this video. I'm really stoked that they, like this is was one of my first wedding videos, fully had a couple of camera operators, so really, it's kind of documenting stuff. You kind of just have to make sure they're in the right amount of light. You want to make sure that you get the details of the dress and of the getting ready. We did a lot of that. You can see the operators, my myself, for doing the groom. So we're making sure to get smiling faces. Just anything you can cut to really, um, putting the dress on when they let you get in the room. My second videographer is actually a girl, and she's very good at what she does, and it kind of makes them more comfortable. When you're shooting a wedding like that, there's a girl in the room, and there's a girl putting address on something to think about, but obviously doesn't need to be. She's also very talented. So you know, the big thing about shooting winnings is just getting the whole day, getting the story that lead up, making sure that things are moving and progressing on your telling a story in a nice way here, sitting with your mom, getting details while the photographer shooting is really great and trying not to be in their way. You could see the photographer there on the right side. I've worked with her as a photographer before, and she's really great so way get to the place, telling a story again of the bus traveling. I think there's a big detail of their wedding. So you want to make sure that that was represented. You can see Allie there is on the bus and she's shooting the guests. She's shooting, arriving, she shooting from inside the bus. And I was already era the venue, shooting from outside the bus and really just kind of capitalizing on what were at back on the movie. We're getting some moving shots. This is what kind of ads production by two. It having Gimbel's is a really great way to up what looks like a very expensive shoot may not end up being puppies air always. So here's a glass chapel I like to do tilt ups and downs to establish where you're at a big wide is always great. Wherever location you're in. On Dhere, we're switching the 60. So here I like doing 60 frames per seconds. A slo mo again shooting at a higher frame rate will kill a lot of exposure. See, here's a little brighter, and you could do push ins and stuff like that. Um, you could do pans and stuff with here with your guests panning across the group's been again. I can't stress enough like all this is really just getting every single detail in every single thing and trying to be there at the right time. So again, movie shots this is booming down. Another good way to do gimbals. Um, I had someone posted up at the end of the of the walkway with a long lens. Is a 72 200 smaller DSLR And really, this is the only shot we could have because this place would not let us up onto the altar. 7200. I think a zoomed in a little bit. The audio is kind of roughage. I also tried to get a zoom recorder plugged into the P. A system didn't work out very well, but that's usually the best way to do it is just to get your get your h foreign plugged into their P a system with just a XLR cable so that you always have the audio from their speeches and whatnot. Again, there's another Gimble shot. This was really my only shot and coverage of the kiss and everything. 7200. It's beautiful. It's got foreground way nailed it. Mention recording back to the gimbals are walking out 60 frames per second unfortunately back then, those DSLR is We only shoot 60 frames per second at 7 2010 eighties of the resolutions, a little bit lower kind of tell. But I don't think the average person watching Iskan really tell the quality. Only people who really know Holly is not to do it, then them getting in the roles again. Anything you shoot, get details, get medium to get a wide do you back to the 60 frames per second. As a rule. Personally, when I'm shooting weddings and events, I tend to only shoot 60 frames per seconds unless somebody is talking or we're trying to catch the audio. That's really when they so back to the 60 frames back to the gimbal. They've arrived at their venue. Everyone's excited. This is when it started a little tricky for us because it got much dark inside this thing that you can see. We're starting Teoh right before they go into the O again. Just trying to stay very magically. I mean, that's the kind of thing to do with what he surrounded. Staying magical, staying Constand pretty here I had a camera offers go around and with the 72 200 just kind of pick off guests like it's really great to guest cottage and enjoy the evening in the middle of ships player as well. They're really great. Venue is up in the South Bay and Palace thirties was overlooking sunset, which we quickly started to lose light. After all, Cake cake details Very important on the settings. It's a good time to get before they enter the venue. To get settings in the room is really good time to do that. This is really special because it was a New Zealand wedding. The groom was actually a Q E. And in New Zealand, it's the haka is very, very dear to their indigenous culture there, and they kind of assimilated there with them. And so his groomsmen and people growing up in New Zealand learn the haka. And it's kind of a tradition that they do at weddings for the groom or the brine. New Zealand weddings in general. So this is a very big part of the wedding. It's his bro's doing it way shot most of it on the movie wanted included in their have the audio from the P. A. Again, I didn't include all the speeches in this video because that's not what they asked for. They just wanted highlights. They had a guy Skype in to give a speech, which was pretty funny. Maid of honor, really Just making sure you get each snap shot for their highlight reel. If that's what you're doing, they play games of their shoes. Parents giving Tell us just really good coverage singers. This guys, These guys had a life ban, which is straight. You start to lose light here at the end of the night, which is a little bit hard with those older cameras, I think nowadays with mere listen 87 but again, concentrating on what's going on. What's the feeling? Getting inserts getting wides. And then for this one, I did a nice little recount, which I really love. That's probably my favorite shots and ending. Shot tried to sell them at night. Uh, yeah, it's a good little wedding video. You know, if you're doing wedding photography, wedding videography, it's a whole nother level of things on. There's definitely a formula to doing, so just get out there, start shooting 48. Case Study Major Lazer: haven. Ah, Sam here gonna be going through two different videos with you? One is from major leaguers. Show at Coachella. And another is the cold Water songs promo video that I did with him in New York. So here's the major Lazer Catella Weaken to recap First wave theory. All right, there you have it. Ah, that was a big show him. And you can just see from all the people that here is a crazy showed a film, Uh, definitely one. They're bigger ones. So breaking this down more or less on the drive in. I had seen this, uh, you know, this big billboard and decided that I should probably get all of that. So I got the freeway, went back, uh, eventually found it again, got the shot. And as I was out there, I sort of know so Well, it's Coachella Valley and we have the windmills and all this stuff. Eso I got a couple of shots there. I did. You shoot this all in the ace of ness? Uh, you can see this big old hair piece of dust or something on my sensor that when you're shooting on those smaller cameras, it's really easy to miss at times. And, uh, you know, it's for social media and all this, but still a little bit embarrassing. Um, And for this concert, you know, it's really easy to just focus on the show. But what I realized is that doing this other stuff, you know, leading up building it up is really important. So driving in, got some shots, had them getting other cars. You know, there's so much footage of them walking in all this. But I just did quick cuts to sort of move along that it and then it's nice because it's them walking, stopping for a second and then walking on the stage. Ah, a big part of this really is. You know, I shoot all this footage and then in the editing room just find the shots that match the pacing in the feel. One really think one thing that love here was the Sunset Show, and so is able to have the mountains back here with the sky in them, all in the same frame really help separate them from the background. It's just not you. Ah, dark night sky back there. Um and I tried as much as I could. I love having at least two people in frame. Doesn't always happen, But I just think it makes for a more dynamic shots When you when you have multiple people in the frame, Um and, yeah. So just running around constantly, getting as many different shots. They actually a second show. So I had tons more footage from that as well. And you know, this for the most part, is all a seven s. I did have my larger came up with me, but being at a big festival like this, I didn't want to really take it out too much. Um, so for the most part, all this footage was a seven s, just smaller camera, Uh, and just trying to get those great moments getting everyone, uh, you know, taking the family photo, people jumping around, you know, capturing those little little nice moments with them dancing. Um, then, you know, obviously again the big family photo, but yeah, you know, one of the hardest things with concert photography is the lighting. It's all the pound, the song that they're playing and it goes all over the place. And so I was constantly adjusting my lighting or my exposure settings trying to get it to match right, which, you know, like, right there. Obviously, I lost all the details and the fireworks, but still, it still looks like a cool shot. Had I've been ready for the fireworks, I probably would stop down a little bit, had him be more of a silhouette and really gone the details of the fireworks, but it doesn't always work like that. And again, I shot so much more fun than you see here. But for a minute long at it, that's really all you need. Or actually, this is only a 42nd at it, so All right, moving on. Uh, this was a problem. Promotional piece I did for cold water again in specifics after. But here it is rial. Then take 100% freezing cold water. Ma'am, take somebody's little girl. You guys want some water? You goes. Don't make your hair. He didn't want glamorous. Yeah, I like that. You go. I got to. She was like, That's right. Refresh. Okay. Go along with you, man. You got it. Here you go. Can you give me this? Give me this. Give me this. Give me this. Give me that. Take that. The streets heard about this product that we got. So business is booming. Yeah, So that this was obviously very different. Still working with the same band. Ah, but very different type of video that they asked me to make. Someone had the idea. Oh, well, you know, songs called water. We're gonna be on New York. It's gonna be crazy. Hot. I think this was in July middle of summer and said, Yeah, let's get them on a street corner handing out water. That's easy. Um, they only had a 30 minute time slot for this. So because they're going between radio interviews and all this stuff. And then we had to go straight to the concert, which was on the other side of the city, So get them out of their interviews, put logs on all of them you can actually see, you know, if you look close enough, so there you can see Chris's, you know, lovelier coming along his back and then Wes, you can see it right there. Just violence chest. And, you know, this is typically something I personally prefer to hide, but it was so quick that we just had to make do. Um I did have a sound guy that I found out there came on Lovell them. And then he was controlling the audio levels while I was farther back with 100 millimeter lens, just trying to keep track of where all three of them were catching these air. Funny moments of them going up to random people handing it off. Uh, and you know, there's a whole team of people behind me by basically said, you know, everyone stay back here, let them just interact with people in the streets and people. People reacted. Well, you know, people were laying them come up and give them water, and especially in a city like New York, it was just such a great group of people in this moment when he goes up and takes the guys soda and gives him water was just genius. Um, but, you know, 30 minutes, one camera, three microphones in. And now on, then just going through that and having those three channels of audio was huge because, you know, Wes is here talking to this guy. The other two guys, they're talking to other people on so if I wasn't able to separate those, I couldn't use the audio, but because, um, because he's on the different audio track, as they will do that. So, um, made a huge difference being able to separate those out. And, you know, when wall she fires giving his thing, I'm able to get that. And then, uh, you know, I could get the meech clean and separate and and still sound good and all that stuff. So, uh, yeah, that's so shows you the type of work I do. I did 100% of directing, editing, shooting of both these videos, both for the same band, but obviously very different types of work. One is covering this big epic event. The others just having them do this sort of fund promotional piece. Eso hope this was helpful, and I'll see in the next lesson. Thanks. 49. A Big Thank You: Wow, What a course! I just want to say thank you so much for enrolling and from the bottom of my heart and from I know Will's and Sam's Hearts to We hope you enjoyed it. When we created this course, we put in a lot of time and effort to make the best course that we could on video production 11 We know that this course isn't going to be perfect for everyone, and we need your help. If there's anything that you thought about while watching this course things that we might have missed things that we didn't explain clearly enough, let us know. We want to make this course the best one possible for new video creators. If you haven't done so already, please leave a review and a rating of this course. It will help us improve this course and any future courses of ours. The last thing I want to mention is that this is just a beginner courts. There's so much more to video production, the pre production aspect and the postproduction aspect of it. The good thing is that we have a ton of other courses that you might be interested in if you want to take it to the next level with production, we have courses on cinematography if you want to take it to the next level with post production. We, of course, is on video editing and premier pro power director for Windows users, adding motion graphics and special effects with after effects. If you're focused on distribution and want to grow YouTube channel, we have a full course on how to YouTube. We're going to continue making amazing courses on everything about video production. 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