The worlds of traditional authors and those of low-budget filmmakers are colliding at a rate that's truly mind-boggling.
Filmmakers are using the short film genre to market themselves on YouTube and build a fan base, while writers are increasingly being asked to provide short videos with their articles and books. Books themselves may be changing from stacks of printed pages into a hybrid of text, hypertext, photographs and videos.
For writers, these changes are the biggest thing to happen since Gutenberg invented movable type and the printing press and for filmmakers they are the fruition of the democratization of filmmaking that started with the Avant-garde film movement of the early 20th century.
This month MicroFilmmaker magazine begins a series of articles that tell you how to get good video with any camera—from a $150 iPod Nano to a $5,000 prosumer camera. The articles are based on excerpts from Tony Levelle's book Digital Video Secrets.
The first step to getting good images is to learn to shoot “fluently and confidently.” As I wrote in my book, the “secrets” to learning how to shoot fluently and confidently are simple:
Secret 1 -- Don’t be afraid of the camera
Secret 2 -- Learn to “see” with the camera
Secret 3 -- Learn to shoot intuitively
Secret 4 -- Learn to operate your camera by touch
One of the biggest secrets about shooting well is simply to be comfortable with your camera.
The best way to become comfortable with any camera is to take the camera out, turn it on and play with it.
Shoot some footage and see what happens. For now, do not worry about what the image looks like. As veteran independent filmmaker, Jon Jost likes to tell his students in his digital video workshops, “Just make a mess!”
What you need for this exercise:
- Camcorder with a fully charged battery
- Blank media (Depending on your camera, the media may be a DV tape, memory chip, DVD, or hard disk.)
- Camcorder operating manual, (optional)
- Video editing software
Tip: You might try an online video editing service like Animoto.com, or Motionbox as a simple, easy alternative to setting up your own video editing system.
- Find a comfortable spot where you will not be disturbed. You can do this in your kitchen, your front yard, or a local park.
- Start recording.
- Push all the buttons. Try every control on the camera. If you are an organized type, use the operator’s manual to make sure you go through each function. If you are really organized, write each function in your notebook as you use it.
- Keep going until you have about 15 minutes of footage.
- Transfer the footage to your video editing program and make a 3-minute movie of the most visually interesting shots.
- Save your movie on a DVD or CD.
- Post your movie online.
About posting your movies online
After each exercise, it is a good idea to post your films online at one of the many online video services. There are several reasons for this, one of which is that it is an excellent way to develop the habit of finishing every project that you shoot.
