Month: March 2014

Title: 4 BACKGROUND TIPS TO MAKE YOUR ACTION CAM VIDEO LOOK PROFESSIONAL  Author: Brian Teal  Date: March 04, 2014

This article states how you can make an awesome looking background for an action scene without using a green screen and using the natural terrain. Brian teal states “It just takes a little setup before shooting your HD video.” All of which making it look cooler then some green screen background compared to the real outdoors.

1. Use the weather to you advantage. Use the natural light to light up your shot or if their is a misty background the darker colors will stand out to the audience and look better and out the focus on him. With something like having a bright sun the trick is to angle it correctly so the sun doesn’t take away from what you are trying to film and getting it to look good, but it done perfectly then it looks amazing.

2. Use backgrounds to show different angles. Like if you see something in the background you would like to include don’t just want a basic shot find something around like a log, stump, rock, or even the ground to give a different angle with what you want in the background and liven up your shots a bit.

3. Realize whats in your background. Make sure you take a trial run if you plan on panning or moving your camera in anyway ad there might be something that could come up that could block your view or be in the background that you don’t wan. What if you had a great take and you mess it up because you didn’t check your surroundings, like Brian teal says “Don’t be a victim of an unsuspecting photobomb, especially from an inanimate object!”

4. Preform a trial run. Have the actors or person that you are filming do a practice run. While you are filming the way the background interacts with the camera and the actor might need tweaking, like is the background not working well and causing you to not film what you want. All in all use it just to make sure everything looks great!

Pictures rights:

Teal, Brian. “4 Background Tips to Make Your Action Cam Video Look Professional.”Videomaker.com. Videomakers, 04 Mar. 2014. Web. 14 Mar. 2014. <http://www.videomaker.com/videonews/2014/03/4-background-tips-to-make-your-action-cam-video-look-professional>.

Title: LIGHTING VIDEO: FIVE IMPORTANT ASPECTS OF ANY LIGHTING SETUP Author:  Chuck Peters   Date Published: March 04, 2014

This article speak about how you can go and buy a new camera, a very expensive camera but all it will do is show out flaws of your video making even more especially if you don’t have good lighting quality and talking about how lighting can make a film much better then with amateur style lighting. Don’t worry as much about what your shooting with but what you are shooting at.

Things that will make your lighting better are for starters, the position of your lights just by adjusting the length, direction and angle of shadows that it creates. A light source positioned near the video camera creates what is known as flat lighting. Flat lighting is low on the creativity scale, and neutral in terms of emotion. As the light is moved farther to the side of the scene it becomes increasingly more dramatic and emotional.

The brightness is also a factor. You use a lot of light, Known as High key, and everything is brightly lit. That would be used to show a happy upbeat type of seen. Then there would be low key which is more dramatic and make it more dark by there being lower levels of light.

There are also the different qualities of lighting like Hard light bring out wrinkles and noticeable things upon their face and make a subject look strong, or scary. Hard lighting can also a subject seem intimidating if that is what you are searching for. Soft lighting is opposite of this as you can imagine by the names. Hard light pulls out the angular features of a face and draws attention to wrinkles and creases. It sort of hides wrinkles and things like that and make people seem more approachable and friendly. It really all depends on what you are trying to portray.

There is also the shape of light which is controlling and focussing the light to what you want it to show. Light shouldn’t just wash over everything. It should be put in separate places and mostly were its wanted, to show depth in your film.

Lighting color is an important factor of how you can change the lighting to like lets say yellow or amber to give the scene more of a warm feeling or of just sunset or sunrise. Many different colors can make it seem different like light blue can make the scene look like it winter and there are so many more. Shots can be tweaked by using a small amount of color and it changes the whole aspects of the scene.

So overall for this article chuck peters the author of this article who is a 3-time Emmy Award winning producer says it perfectly here with this statement “Give careful consideration to your lighting setups. The secret to shooting fantastic footage isn’t to buy a better video camera, it’s to take greater control over what happens in front of the video camera’s lens.” I couldn’t of said it any clearer and better then that.