Dive Into Your Imagination

Creativity. As the director of photography, you need to get creative with the camera. We had to get everyone in the video and try to capture all the personalities. The rain was a little bit of a damper but none of us let it stop us from having fun. Organizing 40 people to go on a hike was challenging and then filming it can be really boring. After all, how interesting can hiking be when you are walking along a smooth trail?

We needed to make sure we created interesting angles. We also played a lot in the post production of the video slowing things down, speeding them up. Notice we used silhouettes and alternative lighting because video like picture taking is all about painting your picture with light.

You want to always have the camera around. People are shy at first but when people get used to a camera being there, they will either ignore it so you can really capture some great moments. They will even start to play to the camera. You can encourage them to do which ever you want. As the Director of Photography you get to choose what style you want to shoot. Many of our shots were taken with a tripod. That is the only way you can get truly steady shots. But when you can only hand hold your camera, you want your body positioned as a tripod, elbows in close to your body and instead of using the LCD screen, it is often better to use your eye piece.

VIDEO CHALLENGE: What kind of transitions should you use? Whenever you can cut on action you can use what we call a straight cut. When you don’t have any action, you need to sometimes use cross dissolves. The only time you should use fancy dissolves is when you are trying to have a certain effect. Don’t go crazy with your fancy dissolves. Just because your computer is capable of them, does not mean you have to do them!

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