Steve Stockman's Blog, page 19

Making a Great iPhone Video

Steve Krafft, a veteran Phoenix TV reporter and good friend, submits this guest post on shooting great iPhone video — then puts his reputation where his mouth is by showing you one!  

If you have an iPhone 4 or the new 4s, and you're using the techniques in How to Shoot Video That Doesn't Suck you will find it easy to fill your phone with lots of great video clips. You'll have a rich assortment of angles and perspectives. You will have natural sound on your video. The raw material is there to produce something truly memorable.

So what do you do next on your iPhone? The first thing to do is download the iMovie app. For under 5 bucks it turns your phone into a editing suite. The app is so user-friendly you can learn how to work it without reading instructions, but there are great free tutorials if you need them.

Here are a few tips and tricks I've learned editing my movie (below) with iMovie:

Change Perspective! You want to keep the point of view fresh for the viewer. Mix long establishing shots with medium shots and closeups. For example, I might begin a clip with a closeup of a smile, or perhaps a tear, then cut to a wider shot showing where that person is and what he or she is doing.

Transitions are important! iMovie has pre-designed transition graphics that range from playful themes to news wipes. Used sparingly, they give your video a nice finished look.

Pay attention to sound! You can record your own narration to run under the video clips by pressing the little microphone on the screen. iMovie also lets you add in music beds that come with the app, or music from iTunes. Make sure to keep natural sound and music beds in the background so they don't overwhelm any narration you record.

Once you finish your iMovie, you can send it to iTunes or load it directly onto your iPhone Camera Roll, YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo and CNN iReport. It's easy!  iMovie is a palette and you are the artist.

Thanks Steve!  Read more about shooting great iPhone video in this article I did for iPhone Life magazine.

Steve Stockman

Lessons from a Great Book Video

When I spoke to a gr0up of publishing marketers this past fall in New York, there was a lot of discussion about book videos. Bottom line:  we know we need them, but they're difficult to do well and oh by the way, expensive.

And is this not the same way much of business feels about video (he asked Shakespearically)? Wouldst we all not prefer everything in our lives to be cheaper and easier?  Verily.  Who has the time– just crank something out and post it!

Bad idea.  Cheap, badly done video doesn't just turn off viewers (who will run like readers of lame Shakespearean English)– it also leaves a lingering bad taste about your product in the potential customer's mouth.

Which is why it made me really happy to see this new, very well acted and funny trailer for a book on public speaking.  Professionally done, but as there are no car crashes, nothing blows up and it's all shot in one room, I'm guessing it didn't break the bank. The time and effort are all, as we say, "on the screen."  As a result:

1)  Its professional look and good writing make us feel like the book will be professional and well written.

2) It gives viewers real information– suggesting to potential buyers that the book may be of real value.

3) It's funny and entertaining, suggesting that the book will not be dry and boring.

For all these same reasons we want to pass it around.  For the book trailer category, it's already a viral home run (over 70k views as I write this.)

Worth the effort and money?  We'll see.  But the creators can be proud of their work.  And the hard truth is that a lame book video has no chance at all.

Steve Stockman

5 Questions to Focus on Your Video's Story

I'm attaching a link to my bike video. I had fun shooting it, but feel like something is missing in the final version.  Your thoughts?

Richard

 

It looks like you had fun, Richard. The shots look great. But to make them more interesting, try linking them to some kind of story.

Without a story, the biking images are just that– images.  They start to feel repetitive after a bit.  We're watching nice eye candy, but the brain attached to our eyes starts to wonder what it all means.  We want to know what's going on. Who's involved. What the stakes are.

You can help intrigue us by focusing your video on some questions that, if answered, lead to story. Any kind of story helps us pay attention. Choose one of these questions and think about how your shooting and editing decisions would be different if you answered it in the video.

1. Who is the hero? Picking a hero– any hero– helps focus your video. Is there a contestant you really like? A relative, perhaps, or an underdog? Giving us a hero to watch makes us to want to see what happens.

2. What's the challenge?  Suppose you made an entire video about bikers trying to make it over a log bridge without wiping out. Now your video is focused on that one stunt, and we want to see what happens. Will anyone do it?

3. What's the conflict? Another way to look at challenge is character vs. character.  How do you win this event?  Who's in contention?  Who's the good guy, who's the bad, who's the underdog?

4. What are the consequences? What's looming out there for the winner or loser?  How does that play into the competition?

5. What's your journey?  What's the story of the person shooting the video?  Why are you there? What do you want to see or find out?  Narrate, or interview yourself on camera.  You can even have others talk about or to you.

Steve Stockman

The Recital: Short Shots vs. Parental Love

Recently I was asked to shoot the piano recital of my friend's seven-year-old. Her total performance time (including walking on stage, playing, and bowing and exiting) was just about 2 minutes.

I get your advice about short shots, but how can you tell parents that you're only going to give them 10-second clips of their daughter's performance? Is this a case where you have to bend the rules … what good is capturing a musical performance if you don't get the entire song? Unfortunately I only had one camera (and one me) so I couldn't get multiple shots from different angles to edit together later.

–Deb

Photo by Jeff Blucher via Flikr.com

In art, there are no rules. "Shoot short shots" is absolutely a skill you should understand and master. But that's so you can use it whenever you want to, not because you have to do it 100% of the time.

And because there are no rules, you do not have to choose between making a nice looking video and keeping your parentally-focused friends happy.

Yes, Deb, you can have your arty cake and eat it too.  Doing that requires some editing after you shoot, but the result should be pretty watchable (on the plus side if it's not: you won't have to go to more piano recitals.)

Let's start by re-imagining the piano recital video.  Instead of shooting a tripod-bound, boring record of the musical performance, let's open up the story and create an interesting video.  Here's how:

1)  Shoot before, during and after the recital.  Interview the pianist, her parents, her teacher.  Show her arriving.  Show her being nervous.  Catch the applause after, and the triumphant artist eating cookies with her friends.

2)  Shoot the performance with the camera running continuously.   But don't lock the camera in one place.  Instead, look for great shots as you normally would– and DON'T cut the camera in between.  Start rolling just as your little friend is about to walk on stage.  Find a great shot, hold for a bit, find another shot and move there.  Don't worry about seeing the moves– we're going to edit around them later.  Make your shots great– get close, change angles. Just don't stop the camera in between.

You now have (1) a bunch of before and after shots, and (2) a complete record of the performance with great shots and some sloppy camera moves in between. Load everything into your editing program and:

3)  Start with the performance video.  You'll use the continuous performance soundtrack throughout your video, along with most of the performance shots.  Cut the sloppy camera moves and replace them with nice shots you did before and after the show (You won't use their audio because we're listening to the recital sound instead, remember?)

4)  Add your best interview footage to the head and tail of your video.

The result?  A nicely assembled video that captures all of the recital performance with enough story told in cutaway shots to keep the whole thing interesting.  Rules ignored, art and friendship preserved.

If at First You Don't Succeed, Chuck It and Try Something Else

Along with my partners at Redtail Media, I just completed a series of videos for the new Anchor Brewing website.  They're the folks who brew Anchor Steam Beer.  To tell the story of their Bock Beer, we decided to bring a goat to the brewery (Why a goat?  See the video.)

A "film goat" would  would probably actually be three or more identical goats– one to "baaah" on command, one to go up stairs, one to stop on the right mark, etc.  That kind of training costs thousands and takes weeks.  To save time and a few bucks (okay, a lot of bucks) our producer found Hazel, a petting zoo goat and a dead ringer for the goat on the bottle of Anchor Bock.

Since all we wanted Hazel to do was walk around the brewery all by herself and check stuff out, it seemed reasonable. Goats are naturally very curious.And Hazel was curious.  She was curious about the bottling machines.  Or a chair.  Or what paper tasted like…or…. pretty much anything except whatever it was we were pointing the camera at when we rolled.  Take after take we never knew where the goat was going next.

We could have kept trying, burning hours we didn't have following her around, hoping to luck into our goat shots.  Instead, we stopped and brainstormed.  Was there another way?   We originally wanted Hazel to appear to be by herself, but that clearly wasn't working.  What if we gave Hazel a human friend?  And what if that friend owned a leash? We introduced Hazel to one of the brewers and made their relationship part of the story.  And got the shots.

The moral:  If at first you don't succeed, chuck it and try something else.

See more of our beer videos at Anchorbrewing.com

10 Tips for Great Holiday Video

Ah, Holiday memories.

Like the time you think your dad told a hilarious story– but you can't hear him on the video.  Or the time young Sarah– or was it Matthew?– kept talking about "Santa Paws".  Hard to tell which, because whoever's face is too dark to see. And let's not even talk about the video you shot of the lights and place settings and decorations and presents and…um…hardly any people at all.

Shouldn't your Holiday video bring back memories… of the Holiday?   Of course it should.  And from now on it will.  Just follow these 10 tips for great holiday video:

1. Don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes: Memories live in faces.  It's your daughter's 4-year-old face you want to remember because it will be different next year. And, sadly, you'll never again look as young as you will this Christmas either.  Depressing, right?  Also a good reason to make sure you see everyone's faces.  A good rule of thumb: don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes.

2.  Spare us the scenery: In ten years, nobody's going to beg you to haul out "that great video—you know, the one with the fireplace and logs and stuff!"  But the one where Eric got Gretchen that sexy underwear and she poured eggnog over his head?  You'll play that one a lot.  Lovely place settings, the tree, The outside of the house decked with menorah's—each good for a maximum of 3 seconds of screen time.  It's the people you want to shoot.

3.  Zoom with your feet. Don't shoot from across the room . Zoom lenses make your picture shaky, and the more zoomed your lens is the less light it sees. Instead, turn off the zoom and walk closer.  You'll also get better sound—there's no such thing as zoom MIC.

4.  Change your angle: We tend to hold the camera at chest height all the time so we can see the monitor screen.  But that's not always the best way to tell the story. Will you get a better view of the table full of relatives if you raise the camera over your head?  What if you get on the floor with the kids when they open presents?  Different angles make more interesting video.

5.  Ask questions:  Ask open ended questions of everyone.  Not "Do you like the tree" (answer: "Yes, Mom" then silence) but "Susie– tell me about where the tree came from" or "Grandpa, what was Hanukah like in your house when you were little?" Don't forget the interviews!

6.  Shoot first, yell later:  Which story are you more likely to tell—the time everyone had a lovely Christmas and everyone was very nice and polite, or the time your son "helped" the cat climb the tree and the whole thing fell over?  Misbehavior makes great video.  Unless someone needs immediate help, make sure you shoot it

7.  Represent your kids: Your three-year old can't tell you what to shoot.  But you're a big part of his life—don't forget to include yourself and your spouse in the video.  What else do you wish you had video of from your childhood?  Shoot that.  In 20 years he'll be grateful for the memories you've preserved.

8.  Careful of tricky holiday lighting. Candlelight tree light, fire light—all very lovely, but frequently insufficient for shooting. It's fine to try the romantic firelight shot, but if it looks dark in the monitor it won't get magically less dark later. Turn on the overheads, pull over a floor lamp—whatever it takes for you to see a sharp, clear picture on your viewfinder

9.  Use Ritual to your advantage:  What are the things your family always does?  Shoot at least a little of the annual trip to the tree farm, the out-of-control-latke party or family ice-skating debacle every year to make it easy to see how your family changes and grows over time.  It also makes a touching sequence for the all-important wedding video later.

10.  Don't try to hide the camera: Kids (and many adults) may be camera-shy, but they'll be much worse if they think you're trying to trick them into being filmed.  Be obvious about shooting and they'll get bored with you and start acting natural.

more holiday thoughts

Intent in Action

For this lesson on "intent in action", let's do thing backward.  Before you watch this great video from singer/songwriter Kina Grannis watch the "making of" video below (I promise you'll still like the video when we get to it)

Notice that over the two years it took to make, Kina and her team don't spend time talking about "sales" or "downloads" or "viral"– all things that distract from the creation of a video.

Instead, they focus on their intent– their vision and its desired impact on the audience.

Now that you know what they were trying to do, here's the video. Great video, great song, and even more fun to watch now that you know the art that went into it.

Next time you pick up a video camera, what's your intent?

Read more about "intent"

Can You have Video without Story?

This is james in the Bay Area. I recently bought your book. I appreciate your approach of putting many filmmaking concepts in smaller 'chunks' to understand. I consider myself a serious amatuer/semi-pro videographer/filmmaker and enjoy the technical side of dSLR technology. My interest seems to be more around Nature/Landscape filming. Questions:

1) Do you have any extra advice when it comes to creating videos in this genre?

2) I'm always questioning whether my sequence of my shots will flow and be seamless. Should a Nature/Landscape movie sequence always have a beginning-middle-end as the story should as a whole?

Some interesting questions, James. Thanks for writing.

Let's begin with a key principal: You are the artist. That means that there is no wrong answer to how you make your films if they satisfy you.

That having been said, storytelling is a key component of almost all film. It's been developed over 115 or so years into something people expect. And I am willing to state with some certainty that films with a strong narrative drive will be more interesting to more people than one without. Which is why I in the book I spend as much time on story as photography.

But what if you want to make video without story? What if you are driven by the artistic desire to get the images you see in your head out into the world?

If that's the case, as you've done here, you can take static landscape video and cut it to music that fits your mood. And you'll find a lot of support for this approach in the film world. Check out the cult movie Koyaanisqatsi (totally non-narrative, just scenery!) or the films of Jim Jarmusch or Nicolas Roeg– both high mood/low narrative filmmakers. Theirs is not action storytelling– which means many fewer people will want to watch it. But that doesn't mean it's not important to the people who love it.

For what you're doing, my answer to both questions is the same: follow your heart and mind and do what truly feels good to you. It's your art.

Cut shots off when they're not interesting to you. Sequence them in a way that feels right to you. Practice shooting and cutting until you're so good that what you see in your head is pretty darn close to what comes out on video. Or better.

 

Miraculous Video Cure! Man's Video Stops Sucking!

This is only the second video I've ever produced, and the first video after reading your book.

The video was shot entirely on a GoPro Hero. I think its apparent, especially to a trained eye, that I'm not using expensive equipment. But I was really influenced by your mantra that a great video can be shot on a cell phone. A compelling story beats technology any day!

I must confess, I bent a few rules making this video. Some by choice (generic graphic, I couldn't resist), others by impulse (I had to pan to keep the sharks in frame); though, quite honestly, I've learned that keeping the camera still while the shark swims in and out of the frame can be even more powerful than endlessly following it.

What do you think?

Dan

You write a book and hope somebody gets something out of it, and then along comes Dan to knock it out of the park.

My contention was, and is, that anybody can get better at video by following a few key principles.  Well, Dan– obviously one of us is a genius.  For only your second video, this is pretty awesome!

To show just how awesome, here is Dan's FIRST video– before the book.  Watch about 20 seconds and you'll see a lot of common video errors– Dan's too far from the action, the shots go on forever, the camera moves too much, there's no real story.  If you watch the whole thing, you'll realize it's also way too long.

Fast forward to Dan's post-book video, and he's experienced a miraculous video cure!  He's close to all the action, keeps his shots short, focuses on a hero in every shot (mostly sharks!) and he's cut out all the bad shots– leaving a much more professional-looking video with lots of hot shark-on-cage action.  Nice work, Dan!

The only thing I have to add to this living testimonial to our mutual genius, Dan, is to remind you that there are no rules!  When you're learning any new activity, it helps to drill the basics.  I talk about them a lot because they're news to most people.  But once you've got the basics down, your video is yours to shoot.  You're the artist.  If there's a reason to "break the rules," break them!  All I ask is that you look at your work afterward and figure out whether or not what you did worked well for you.

In this case, Dan– it did.

Read 12 Tips to make your video great.

The True Meaning of Holiday Video

As the holidays approach, it's time for us again to consider the age-old question we ask every Holiday Season:  Why do we shoot Holiday Video?

My answer?  We shoot Holiday Video to remember.

We want to remember our kids as they are now, because they will never be that way again.  We want to remember our parents and grandparents, because they don't last forever.  We want to remember ourselves too—because whatever age we are now, it's a hell of a lot younger than we'll be in a decade.

To really make your memories count this Holiday Season, focus your video on your family and friends.  Stay close to their faces so your camera can see them the way you do in real life.  Interview them about the dinner, or the season, or their lives.  Catch their real interactions, for better or worse, so you can look back on what things were really like back then.  Back now.

Focus your camera on what makes your holiday special.  Shoot Uncle Larry trying not to fall asleep in front of the football game.  The Cousins' Beer and Ping Pong tournament in the basement.  Your two year-old pushing cranberry sauce off the high chair and onto the floor so the dog can enjoy the holiday too.

Don't spend too much time on the scenery. If you've seen one roasted turkey, you've seen them all.  A short shot of bird coming out of the oven will do (unless it catches fire, in which case you should definitely keep shooting.)  And sure the table looks nice, but a shot of place settings isn't video—it's a still photograph.  Shoot if you must, but 3 seconds is more than enough.

The true meaning of holiday video?  Shooting what you really want to remember: the people.

More tips for great Holiday shooting here!

Bare feet + deep frying turkey = potentially great video!