Production

As a videographer, you have the power to videotape people, places and things, but you will need permission to do so unless the subjects are public figures or, at least temporarily, newsworthy. You can use a simple agreement to protect yourself from invasion-of-privacy lawsuits brought by your actors (or even bystanders) in your video productions. The agreement is called a release (see sidebar). By signing the release, the person waives the right of privacy and cannot sue you at a later date for copying or exhibiting the tape.

Shooting a movie over a period of days, weeks or even months can be a very difficult task - especially when it comes to maintaining continuity. When everything in the shot, scene and movie is consistent, then you've succeeded in maintaining continuity. If an actor picks up a cup with her right hand, the cup has to be in her right hand in the next shot, to stay consistent and maintain fluidness and continuity.

There are many ways to make your video dull. We speak derisively of "talking heads" on television because they're not exciting. It's one thing to be in a room with someone who is talking for an hour, but it's something entirely different to watch that as a single, unbroken video image. Unfortunately, natural selection doesn't always decide who gets to make the video. As a videographer, you have an obligation not to bore your viewers and hopefully, you have the desire to make their viewing experience pleasurable. There are plenty of ways you can make your video more interesting with just camera placement, angles, and movement.

The Basic Camera Moves

Let's look at the basic moves that are used in every video and film production, from those used by your wedding videographers to those used by Spielberg himself. Our pictorial examples show a videographer using these moves with a hand-held technique, but they apply best to tripod and dolly use.

Tilt: Moving the cameras lens up or down while keeping its horizontal axis constant. Nod your head up and down - this is tilting.

Pan: Moving the camera lens to one side or another. Look to your left, then look to your right - that's panning.

Zoom: Zooming is one camera move that most people are probably familiar with. It involves changing the focal length of the lens to make the subject appear closer or further away in the frame. Most video cameras today have built-in zoom features. Some have manual zooms as well, and many have several zoom speeds. Zooming is one of the most frequently-used camera moves and one of the most overused. Use it carefully.

Pedestal: Moving the camera up or down without changing its vertical or horizontal axis. A camera operator can do two types of pedestals: pedestal up means "move the camera up;" pedestal down means "move the camera down." You are not tilting the lens up, rather you are moving the entire camera up. Imagine your camera is on a tripod and you're raising or lowering the tripod head (this is exactly where the term comes from).

Dolly: Motion towards or motion from. The name comes from the old "dolly tracks" that used to be laid down for the heavy camera to move along - very much like railroad tracks - in the days before Steadicams got so popular. The phrase dolly-in means step towards the subject with the camera, while dolly-out means to step backwards with the camera, keeping the zoom the same. Zooming the camera changes the focal length of the lens, which can introduce wide-angle distortion or changes in the apparent depth of field. For this reason, it's sometimes preferable to dolly than zoom.

Truck: Trucking is like dollying, but it involves motion left or right. Truck left means "move the camera physically to the left while maintaining its perpendicular relationship." This is not to be confused with a pan, where the camera remains firmly on its axis while the lens turns to one direction or the other. You might truck left to stay with a pedestrian as she walks down a street.

Learning how to use lights will bring your productions to a new, more professional-looking level, and basic three-pointing contains the building blocks of nearly all lighting. Three-point lighting consists of, as you might imagine, three lights: the key, the fill and the back. Together these serve to wrap your subject in light, creating shadows that define the subject like a person's face, but do not overpower it. Three-point lighting is a start - it's a basic form from which many other types of lighting develop, and you shouldn't be afraid to experiment with it.

Light can either be natural or man-made. Today's video cameras are so sensitive to light that videographers can shoot in light that would have made the great directors of yesteryear weep, moonlight or candlelight are both viable options. Look at every object that produces light as a potential source for your video. With artificial lighting you can achieve the same, constant, unchanging light regardless of the time of day or how overcast it might be. With artificial lighting you can make a scene brighter or dimmer by adding or subtracting lights or changing their position.

With visuals, we can mentally pick out the important parts and separate them from the background; but with audio tracks we normally don't do that. While we ignore small inconsistencies from one image to the next, shot-to-shot sound shifts are both noticeable and irritating. To accommodate the way we perceive recorded audio, you need to present tracks that are clean, clear, and consistent, even when taped in the ambient racket of the great outdoors. People seem to forget that capturing events requires capturing video and audio. You need to balance the best way to capture video versus the best way to collect sound.