Anyone can point and shoot, and there are plenty of times when that will be all you need. But for tougher shots there are physical skills for handling the camcorders that will help you capture good shot even when you haven’t got your tripod with you, while mastering a few basic cam functions will add a huge amount of polish to your finished footage.
Body language
Use your spine as a shock-absorber for smoother shooting
Forget everything you’ve been told about standing up straight when it come using HD camcorder and filming , with your shoulders back. A rigorous posture will encourage you to twitch and to wobble your HD camcorder, this will be transferred to finished project . That’s fine if you’re aiming for a cinema verite style shoot, but in general you want your shots to be as smooth as possible. To accomplish the stopping of wobbling and twitch of the camcorder, you need to tuck yours elbows in at your side and curling your posture forwards slightly , using your bent back as a sort of shock absorber, Overtime you will notice your footage often seems to rise and fall or loom in and out in very small but noticeable movements when it comes to a lot of handheld camcorder shooting . This is the effect of your breathing lifting your chest and shoulders, and no amount of tucked elbows will neutralise it. To help to correct this problem, you will have to learn circular breathing .
Techniques used by wind musicians to hold lengthy notes without interrupting , and for videomakers it’s ideal, as it minimises the rising and falling motion of the chest that is picked up by the camcorder, It’s not an easy skill to learn, hut you can practice by blowing bubbles in a glass of water through a straw, using your cheeks as bellows to keep the flow of air going when your lungs run low, inhaling quickly and deeply through your nose.
Walk the Walk
Can you walk and shoot and get a good finished video, No YOU CAN’T , walking encourages unwanted camera movement . The best way to neutralise the movement is rather embarrassing, but those are the sacrifices you make for good shots . You can avoid the swaying motion simply by adjusting your gait slightly and placing your feet one in front of the other, as if you’re walking along a balance beam or tightrope, The bobbing motion can be relieved by walking by, bending your hips and knees, It’s not a good look. The desire to see who’s laughing at them is probably what motivates pro cameramen to learn their other great skill: shooting with both eyes open. Professionals know that shooting through the viewfinder makes it easier to get the contrast and focus dead-on, but also that shooting with one eye closed and the other seeing only what’s in the lens is a recipe for unspeakable falls. Learning to shoot with one eye and walk with the other is one of those professional tricks that everyone can benefit from.
Twist and rise
Smooth pans and tilts don’t always demand a tripod
Shooting moves the nest stage . When you’ve got your fluid beaded tripod, panning and tilting is easy, but when you’re shooting handheld footage, you need to be a bit more considered in your movements. Working backwards helps with Panning and tilting when holding the camera .
Position yourself facing away from your subject and Lento twist yourself towards the subject starting from the hips and ending with your shoulders, then, when the action starts, pan alongside it by untwisting yourself from the hips, aiming ideally to finish the pan in a comfortable standing position. By starting from a position of tension and moving towards a relaxed shooting position you reduce the strain on your muscles and the possibility of camera shake, whilst allowing yourself to move smoothly from the pan to the next shot if you’re adjacent the action.
Bad Habits
The frightful four: shots that can ruin your video
Handling skills are key to good camera work , however it’s no excuse to bad composition or framing . There will be a time when some shots will derail final video , regardless of whether it’s a serious documentary or a knockabout holiday video . Some shots look so wrong that your audience will notice them and nothing else, like the video similar of having your thumb on the lens, The main ones to direct clear of:
1 .The Dutch Tilt
A well known cinematic technique, the Dutch Tilt is one of those shots that is sometimes exactly right, but more often terribly wrong. Dutch Tilt is a camera shot in which the camera angle is by design slanted to one side A Dutch Tilt is one of those shots where the camera is canted on its axis, so that in extreme examples, This can be used for prominent effect and helps portray unease, disorientation, crazy or desperate action, intoxication, madness, etc
the landscape runs across the corner of the frame and tall straight buildings or trees appear to grow diagonally towards the centre of the frame. Even softer examples of the shot without an extreme cant, should be avoided.
earlier a tool of German expressionist cinema, the Dutch Tilt is used to create an atmosphere of unease or paranoia, which is great when you’re shooting a film noir. but will make a pig’s ear of the school play.
2. Walking Against The Wind
Remember to leave enough room for the subject to actually move into, When you’re panning to follow movement across the screen When you’re panning to follow movement across the screen, be sure to leave enough room for the subject to actually move into.
Unpractised camera operators often struggle to keep up with movements, allowing the subject to move to the very edge of the frame before the panning motion starts. The unfortunate upshot of this framing is that it looks like the movement of your subject is ‘bumping’ up against the edge of the screen and push it along, causing the panning motion rather than being followed by it, It’s often referred to as ‘walking against the wind’, as the shots prompt you of a bad mime act.
3. Amputations
Having got to grips with the horizontal space, you also need to think about your vertical framing. When someone is walking directly towards the camera, make sure you leave some toot room at the bottom of the screen to avoid the appearance that they’re walking on air, As you close in on your subject, you will sooner or later be forced to frame them tightly, with only part of them in the shot, When you’re composing these shots, make sure the cut off point at the bottom of the frame falls across the middle of their limbs, rather than across one of their joints. A cut off at mid-forearm looks unremarkable, but if the bottom of the frame falls across the elbow, it will look perplexingly as if you’ve cut their arm off.
4. Tree Heads
Tree heads could as easily be called fountain groins, but this is a family magazine. The point is, you’ve seen an system of rules of foreground subject and background detail to create the impression of a tree growing out of someone’s head or an aeroplane flying through their ears a thousand times, and it’s rarely funny even when it’s deliberate, let alone when it’s been done by mistake. It looks obvious onscreen after you’ve done it, but the camcorder’s ability to compress the middle ground means that you might not notice it happening when you’re setting up the shot. Always take a moment before hitting record to double check that distant object
Basic Camcorder Controls
Your camcorder is packed to the rafters with the heavily patebted fruits of modern technology, with everything from face chasing modes to SMPTE timecode stamps, but while all these goodies can work wonders in the hands of a professional , beginners will find that mastering the three boring basics is what will really lead about a noticeable improvement in their footage
The first thing to get to grips with is backlight correction. It’s a one –touch tool, a button usually located in the LCD recess, invariably labelled BLC and usually as neglected .While controls with self explanatory labels such as manual focus or video light are pushed and prodded by even the most nervous beginner, no one ever seems to use backlight correction.
The problem is, your camcorder’s auto –exposure will expose for the average intensity of the light in a shot – so if you place someone in front of a window or door, it will expose for the light streaming through the door rather than the person, leaving you with an indistinct silhouette.
Backlight correction won’t mess with your aperture or shutter settings, but it will add a couple of decibels of gain specifically to the dimmest part of your image in order to bring your subject out of the shadows, correcting one of the most common mistakes in videomaking.
While we’re on the subject of your camcorder’s auto modes often causing as many problems as they figure out, keep in mind that auto-focus and exposure are handy tools for quick run and gun shoots, but that you should switch to manual modes when shooting footage that’s really important. The fact is , your auto – focus doesn’t know that the branch in the foreground is supposed to be an indistinct blur and the person in the background needs to be pin sharp. Nor does it know what sort of dramatic effect you’re going for when you ped up and over a brick wall to reveal a mythologic cityscape, or whatever other dramatic change of composition you have in mind.
When for a brief period the images goes in and out of focus this is know as hunting as the auto mode tries desperately to locate the main point of the shot and bring it into focus.
It looks direful, and ruins any chance you have of people taking your video earnestly . It takes only a few more seconds to switch into manual mode and make the adjustments yourself, and those few second guarantee you a superior video.
ultimately, learn to manually white balance your shots. We’ve seen literally hundreds of camcorders that claim to have an automatic white balance , but they all produce the same orange tinged picture when shooting in a room lit by ordinary households bulbs. This is because the light from the bulbs a reddish light, confusing your camcorder’s ability to discern ‘true’ whiteness. Since your camcorder uses white as a starting point to work out what every other colour should look like, the reddish tinge has a knock on effect that can result in all your footage coming out in fanta tones. The solutions is to hold a piece of clean white card in front of the lens, zoom until nothing else can be seen, and hit the manual white balance button, giving your camcorder a good clean reference for white. Of course, if you’re feeling crafty, you can try white balancing on slightly off-while shade to give everything a light creepy, unreal appearance when shooting unpopular politicians.
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