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Part Four – Practical Tips for Shooting your Video:

Operating the camera

With a rapid increase in the popularity of online video, how can you get your message heard above all others?

With the advances in mobile phones and digital cameras, video making has become widely accessible. Anyone can pick up a camera, shoot some footage, string it together using a basic video editing software, but the finished result (more likely than not) will not utilise the professionalism needed to make a marketing video stand out.

Part four of this blog series offers practical tips for shooting your video so that you can be more creative yet remain professional. When it comes to practical tips, practice is what makes tips useful. Have a read of the four points below, get out your camera and experiment – it’s the best way to learn.

Practical Tips for Shooting your Video:

Rule of thirds

• Composition: The most fundamental rule of composition is the ‘Rule of Thirds’ based on the classical interpretation of balance in a picture. If you have a background in still photography, you have probably already come across this concept and therefore you are at an advantage. The ‘Rule of Thirds’, when looking at a visual image, is set up with one horizontal line and three vertical lines (see diagram). The most obvious example of balance in a video picture is the tracking shot. If the camera follows a person walking across a scene with their nose up against the edge of the screen, this shot will be unbalanced. Track them so they always have two thirds of space in front of them.

• Pan, tilt and zoom:
  • The PAN shot is where the camera is moved from side to side or up and down (this is the TILT shot, aka Vertical Pan). In order for it to work in a creative way, it must be planned from start to finish and have a justification for its use. Let the action in the frame make the movement and only pan where necessary. 
  • There are two main rules to using the ZOOM; the purpose of zooming into an object is to draw the audience’s attention to something. If you are zooming out, zoom out to reveal something to the audience.

• Depth of field: What we mean by depth of field is when the camera lens is focused accurately on a particular subject to make it the only point of focus is the frame. Objects in front and behind the subject will be blurred to the eye. This is another technique to draw the audience’s attention to something. Depth of field can be also used creatively by experimenting with the Pull Focus shot. This is where the camera moves its focus from one subject to another. Three things to consider when establishing depth of field:
  • Focal distance of the lens: if you focus on an object near to you, you will have less depth of field than you would have when focused on a distant object.
  • Focal length: Moving the zoom control to the furthest telephoto range will reduce depth of field. Move it to the furthest wide angle and the depth of field will increase.
  • Aperture setting: Bright lighting conditions will give you a greater depth of field where the aperture lens is stopped down. The smaller the aperture the greater the depth of field.