Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Welcome to part two. In part one, we talked about some of the ways you can get
better smartphone videos.
Here're a few more tips for you. When you interview somebody or you talk to somebody
on camera
get really close. They're interesting,
their face, not the background, so get as close as you can. I mean like three, 4 feet
away.
And the benefit of that is you're going to get much better audio. The microphones
on smartphones -
not really great, but if you get really close you're going to hear that person
and you're also going to hear a lot less background noise. So get
really close. I almost never use the flash
on the camera. You can shoot video with the light on your smartphone. It
looks harsh, looks really terrible.
If you feel like there's not enough light, move to a better location.
Don't try to use the light onboard your camera, it looks just
really awful. Also don't use the zoom. If you zoom into somebody to get your shot
all you're doing, generally, is blowing out the image, you degrade the quality of the
image.
If you need to get close - get close. Next you need to frame the shot. By the way,
remember I mentioned
landscape mode? You're going to frame the shot using the rule of thirds.
I place the eyes at strategic locations in the frame
at 1/3, 1/3, 1/3, 1/3.
It's a very professional, very nice looking composition, so use that.
When you're ready to interview somebody first do a roll test. And what that
means is you're going to turn your camera on and you're going to record your person
stating their name,
spelling it slowly and carefully,
getting their title, and the name of the company they work for. Then watch it.
Make sure it's working - you can see it and you can hear it. Plus, if you want to do lower
thirds,
now you have the correct spelling of that person's name, the title, and the company
they work for.
The last tip is, I like smartphone videos,
I think they're really great but they're mostly good for internal. Because no
matter what you do they are always going to have a little bit of a cheap,
ad hoc look to them. So, that's great for internal, for the Sales organization,
but it's really not something you want to do externally. You don't want to
communicate to the public
that you're doing something that's cheap or ad hoc.
So for something external you probably still want to hire a professional.
So that's part two of smartphone tips. If you need more,
give me a call or send me an email.