Whether you’ve recorded audio track(s) together with the video or using an entirely separate system, it’s impossible to account for every error you’ll encounter. Things such as white noise produced by fans or the air rushing through ventilation ducts can go unnoticed while you’re in the middle of a set, only to show up in your production audio later on. Interference from electronic devices can often be inaudible, but may somehow disturb your camera’s operation. Wind noise from an outdoor shoot can make its way to even protected microphones, causing drop-outs and annoying crackles and pops.

Thus, you may need to resort to a process called overdubbing, which involves inserting sounds during post-production to replace the corrupted or unintentionally altered sounds captured on set. When you overdub an actor’s dialogue, the recorded result is called a voice-over. The term is also sometimes used to describe narration from someone ‘outside’ the scene, but in this case we’re speaking specifically about voice overdubbing of an actor who appears physically within the scene.

Techniques For Recording Voice-overs

I approach recording vocal overdubs for a film or video in almost the same way I would go about grabbing vocals from a singer. The main difference is in the pacing and sensory input you’re providing to your actor; after all, the most favorable conditions for overdubs would involve the actor being in the same mood or ‘state’ that he/she was in when the original scene was shot. My recording setup for overdubbing is described below.

Recording Studio

I have two separate rooms – a control room and a ‘sound booth.’ The sound booth is really just any space that can be closed off with a door. In my old apartment, it was a walk-in closet. Now I use a spare bedroom. The control room is where my DAW is located, and thus where I am located during the recording.

Microphones

I place my studio vocal mic in the sound booth on a stand to match the actor’s height as closely as possible. Use whatever microphone you have available to you – even a cheap lavalier mic from radio shack can work. I then have another vocal mic in the control room with me; this is called a ‘talk-back’ mic, and it allows me to communicate with my actor without having to yell through two closed doors and a hallway and interrupt the flow of the session (or the quality of the recording, for that matter).

Other Equipment

The actor and I both wear “earmuff-style” headphones, the type with full bass response that covers and makes a seal around your ears. These headphones are both connected to the same audio source, and I use a splitter to send signal to both at the same time.

Placement

Actors should be standing at all times, even if they are overdubbing a scene in which they were sitting, slouching, or even lying in bed. This promotes anatomically correct use of the diaphragm and allows the actor to employ a larger range of movements to enhance their performance.

A windscreen placed between the mic and the actor can help cut down on unwanted pops and clicks from some of the sharper hits, such as “p”, “t”, and “s” sounds. Whether using a windscreen or not, it may sometimes help to place the actor at an off-angle to the microphone to prevent direct airflow onto the mic while speaking. As a quick test, have the actor start talking and place your hand in front of their mouth, cupped slightly but not touching their face. Over a few seconds you will start to feel whether they tend to project air in certain directions more than others in their normal way of speaking. Use this to determine their angle and placement in relation to the microphone.

Sensory Input

In order to insure the most accurate performance, the actor should at least be able to hear him or herself during the scene, if not also having the added benefit of seeing the edited footage. I find that it’s easy enough to just let the actor listen to each line one at a time, without providing a video feed from a secondary monitor and a long cable connected to my workstation at the other end. As long as you can let the actor hear what they’re saying and use your talk-back mic to coach them into state, you should be able to get a decent performance that is similar in pitch, speed, and tone to their original.

Pacing

This varies from actor to actor. Some actors prefer to have repeated playback in their headphones so they can hear the line over and over and practice speaking it again directly over top of it. This way they are sure to get a result that rhythmically matches the original. Other actors just like hearing the line a few times and then repeating it on their own, without any background noise to distract them from their current performance. Work with your actor to figure out what makes them most comfortable.

Example

Coming sometime hopefully soon is a video example of a scene’s original recording, followed by the same scene using vocal overdubs recorded in-studio. You’ll be able to hear that the dialogue stands out much more and gives you greater control over your background noise and sound effects.

The reason Hollywood films are often pushed toward cliché storylines is that it’s a big risk for a production house to release something that’s never been done before. That’s how screenplays end up being so formulaic; since millions of dollars go into producing these films, and the majority of actors are paid regardless of how well or poorly a film does at the box office, no producer wants to put something out that he doesn’t think has at least a small chance of being successful.

Why It’s Good To Be Indie

Some indie filmmakers shoot movies because it’s something fun to do with friends; I know I do. As an independent, realize that while you don’t have a big budget to spend on jaw-dropping CGI effects or big name talent, you have something that’s much more valuable: creative control.

This is the point at which you and Hollywood diverge. With a low-budget or no-budget film, the majority of your investment is your time. You can use weird camera angles and experiment with different effects, so long as you have the means to do so, and you don’t have to worry about whether 8 million people will be willing to spend $12 apiece to go out to a theatre and watch it.

Directors are often under a lot of pressure from their producers and film studios to stay on schedule and
within their budgetary constraints, while simultaneously making a movie that appeals to a specific target audience. The big studios need someone to sell to, because if every movie was Fun For The Whole Family™ the scope and subject matter of new films would become severely limited in scope.

So be glad, because as an indie filmmaker with no financial sponsors, you have the freedom to work at your own pace, make films about whatever topic you choose (within legal standards, of course), and spend as little or as much time and money as you want in making your ideas into a finished piece of filmmaking.

How Movie Scripts Work

Scripts, like the films that are made from them, have to have several things to be successful. In writing a script it’s the combination of useful formatting and camera/actor direction, good dialogue and description, and a captivating scenario or plot.

I can’t pretend that I know how to teach you about writing a script you can sell to a major movie studio, but for the purposes of your own indie filmmaking endeavors you can make it easier on your actors, crewmen, and even yourself, by creating a script that’s both fun to read and easy to understand.

Script Format

In order to be taken seriously by an agent or producer, movie scripts are formatted in a very specific fashion. It’s the same reason all of our traffic lights are red, yellow, and green from top to bottom – things are often easier to use when they’re organized in a standard, recognizable way.

Some basic specs for a film script: the entire script should be in 10 or 12 point Times or Courier. Your cover page should contain only your film’s title in bold, followed by several line breaks, the words “Written by”, one more line break, and then the name(s) of the author(s), each on its own separate line if there is more than one writer.

There are some minor variations in what’s acceptable, but script formatting usually goes something like this:

Script pages, starting with the cover page, are numbered in the upper right-hand corner from 1 to the end. Each scene number is surrounded by [square brackets] and bolded. The scene location is indented and also bold, all caps, and on the same line as the scene number. In the example above, it is EXT. FIELD – DAY. Use EXT. for an outdoor scene and INT. for an indoor scene.

The line that contains the scene number, location and time is followed by a description of what we see when the scene opens. This can be as general or as detailed as you want, depending on how much freedom the director is meant to have at the time of the shoot. Not all directors will go with exactly what’s scripted, anyway, but this at least should get the writer’s ideas across. The first time a character’s name is used in the description of each scene it should be in all caps. Our two “characters” in this scene are the WARRIOR and his RABBLE.

Dialogue is indented further and centered within this area; the speaking character’s name is in caps on its own line above the line or lines of dialogue. Any cues such as verbal tone or action are placed in parentheses below this line. In this case, we have added (Cheering, waving their weapons) below RABBLE because this is what they should be doing as they deliver their line. Other examples of cues could be (Sitting down in the chair) or (Smirking, shakes his head). You can also include minor camera direction and other specific instructions here if you would like.

Character Voice in Scripts

Ye Olde Character above has a medieval-ish way of speaking, because he’s supposed to be the commander of a (modest) force of soldiers. When you get around to writing your script, you might be tempted to use certain catch phrases or terms because they sound good to you. But remember that every fictional character needs to have his own voice in order to be believable.

I’ve noticed a lack of differentiation between characters even in major motion pictures; you know, when more than one character uses a word or phrase in exactly the same way. This is sometimes overlooked when the same person is writing dialogue for multiple characters.

For example, let’s suppose that you think it sounds really funny when your villain verbally abuses his minions, saying “You imbeciles!” Then later on in the screenplay, one of your minor characters is talking about somebody she knows and says “That guy is such an imbecile…”

Really. Would two characters who have nothing in common and nothing to do with each other really use that same word to describe someone they dislike? Sure, it could happen. But there are plenty of other words you could use to provide your audience with a sense that these are two different people, with two different lives and from two unrelated backgrounds.

Of course, the opposite could be true and the use of a word or phrase might work as a subtle foreshadowing where two characters are connected in a way that’s unknown to the audience for part of the film. Otherwise, giving each character their own unique voice includes not only word choice, but their phrasing, tone of voice, and sentence structure. It’s everything about the way they speak and act, and you have the ability to convey all of those things with your script. Now get writing!

In the United States, the NTSC standard has been used since the 1950′s for video broadcasts. NTSC is also used in certain parts of Asia, while PAL and SECAM are standards used in Europe. Each standard carries its own specifications – and in fact there are several variations of each standard – but the video standard you will be using is going to be mainly determined by the country in which you live.

Frame Rate

Frame rate describes the number of frames, or images, that are displayed per second of video. The human eye can detect jumps in anything below about 15 frames per second, but every video standard is well above this number. The NTSC standard frame rate, for instance, shows 29.97 frames every second.

It might seem odd that NTSC uses a fraction of a frame. This came about because the original television broadcasts in the 1950′s were at 30 frames per second in black and white. The fractional frame is missing because engineers found that when color was added to the signal the easiest way to incorporate the added
information into the signal was to slow it down very slightly. PAL and SECAM are both 25 frames per second, while film is shot at 24 fps.

Timecode

Timecode measures video frames in realtime, and is set to Hours, Minutes, Seconds, and Frames. Since NTSC runs at fractions of a frame each second, it uses a type of timecode called drop-frame that adjusts itself every minute so that those 29.97 frames match exactly to the actual amount of time that has passed. By contrast, non-drop-frame timecode does not make this adjustment, so as time goes by the timecode becomes further and further offset from the actual amount of time that has passed.

Resolution

Great strides have been made in the realm of resolution, and broadcast standards in the US have shifted to HD – High-Definition video. When you pop in a standard definition DVD and sit down to watch, you’re looking at video that is 720×480, or 720 pixels wide by 480 pixels high, which is a total of 345,600 pixels. High-definition video starts at the 720p standard and goes up from there. 720p is 1280×720, or 921,600 pixels of resolution. There is also 1080p and 1080i, which are each 1920×1080. So you can see that high-definition broadcast standards have significantly increased the ways in which we experience video.

The i and the p in these formats stand for interlaced and progressive. An interlaced video is one where each frame actually contains a split image of two separate frames. When the video is played back, the frames are deinterlaced and the two images are split so that they can be viewed separately again. This method is used to save bandwidth, while progressive scan imagery uses full-frame transmissions.

Aspect Ratio

Aspect ratio is the measure of height in relation to width. A video’s resolution is measured in pixels, and its aspect ratio tells you the relationship between its vertical and horizontal pixels. The standard television aspect ratio is 4:3, meaning that for every four horizontal pixels, there are three vertical ones. Widescreen video used in widescreen televisions is 16:9, or sixteen horizontal pixels for every nine vertical ones.

There are a few other commonly used aspect ratios, for example those used in some films which are even wider than 16:9, the anamorphic formats 1.85:1 and 2.39:1. The term anamorphic refers to using a wide lens to record onto normal 35mm film, which is traditionally formatted to capture a standard 4:3 image. This is why when you watch an unedited widescreen film on a regular television you see black bars above and below the picture; these are the areas of the film’s frame where no image has been recorded due to the use of the anamorphic lens.

Resolution vs. Aspect Ratio

It’s important to understand the distinction between resolution and aspect ratio; resolution measures the total size of a video’s frame in pixels, whereas aspect ratio is a measurement of the relationship between its vertical and horizontal dimensions. Take the 4:3 aspect ratio, for example. You could have one video at 640×480 resolution and another at only 320×240. While the smaller 320×240 video has only 1/4 as many pixels of resolution as the larger one, they are nonetheless both still in the 4:3 aspect ratio.

Video Standards in Indie Filmmaking

Which of the various standards outlined above you use will be determined by where you live and what equipment you are using for indie filmmaking. Since most independent projects are done using video rather than film, you may have seen low budget movies that used a number of varying standards without even realizing it.

You can make a good film regardless of the video standards you are using, but knowing what you’re dealing with will help you to troubleshoot any situations that arise where you may be having a problem along the way. For any additional questions or concerns, feel free to contact me. I can’t always answer right away, but I will always try to respond.

Seize the Daylight

The bulbs you use in your lighting setup are more important than the lights themselves. You should get as close as possible to true daylight in your studio or set location to maximize your camera’s ability to produce accurate color and image quality.

Generally flourescent bulbs last much longer and provide more true, white light than incandescent bulbs, which tend to cast a more yellowish tone. You can find CFLs – compact flourescent lightbulbs – in most any hardware store and in several different varieties. Choose bulbs that reproduce light as close to natural sunlight as you can manage; the more expensive ones can be worth it for the value of light they provide.

Lamps

Unlike with bulbs, you don’t need to worry about getting specific, high quality lamps. Three simple shop lights from the hardware store will do the job perfectly. These are metal-rimmed and have a simple toggle switch with a clamp on the back for attaching them to any thin, flat piece of material such as a table, door, window shutter or chair.

Stands

On my page about lighting a scene, I go into detail about a fundamental lighting technique called three-point lighting. I talk about where to place each light and how to angle it so that it illuminates the subject most effectively with the least amount of shadow. Using this method, especially with shop lights, means that you will have to use objects around you to attach the lights to unless you have dedicated light stands.

You can make a simple, cheap stand called a stick in a can for very little money and with only a few materials. All you need is a 1×2 piece of lumber that is as long as you need the stand to be tall (around 6ft. is a good standard size to work with), a large metal food or paint can, and some cheap concrete.

To make a stick in a can stand, mix the concrete and fill your can nearly to the top with it. Then put the 1×2 stick in and let it come to rest all the way at the bottom and pressed against the side of the can. You may need to hold it in place with a clamp or between two chairs while it dries. When finished you’ll have a convenient, portable lightstand.

Light Modification – Filters and Reflectors

Indirect and diffused light can make a huge difference in your scenes. Not only can you spread light out over a wider area, you can also soften the light by bouncing or filtering it. This is preferable to using only the sharp, raw beam coming from your lamps and creates more of a warm glow than a harsh, acute light source.

Filters

Even in a movie that has been shot in the “dark,” there has to be some light. Without at least one good source of illumination, there isn’t a camera in the world that can capture a good picture. That is, unless it uses nightvision (I actually shot an entire music video in nightvision).

A light filter can be created using a bed sheet, an old shower curtain, some tissue paper, a white under shirt, a synthetic stocking, or any other semi-translucent material. These filters can be draped or stretched over your lights, but sometimes this isn’t a very good idea because your lights may become very hot when they’ve been on for awhile.

Rather than draping them across your lights, you can build frames for your filters that will keep them taught and rigid so that you can easily apply them with little hassle. Frames also allow you to maintain a certain amount of control over how far your filter is offset from your light source. Some tips on building a filter frame can be found at the bottom of this article.

Reflectors

Any material that returns a fair amount of the light shone upon it – poster board, foamcore, a white wall, a windshield cover, or even a mirror – can be used as a reflector. To instantly soften or reduce a light source that is trained on your subject, turn the source to face the opposite direction and place the reflector directly in front of it.

You’ll most likely find that the light bouncing off of a reflector creates a more uniform, clean look on camera.

Building a Frame for Your Filters

Simple frames can be constructed using cardboard, wood, metal or PVC piping. Here are a couple of ways to use these simple materials to construct a quick filter:

None of the items described on this page below this point are necessary to make a video. See How To Make A Video if you have absolutely no way of purchasing or acquiring anything besides a camera. These are simply additional tools that will make things easier for you and help you achieve better results.

Digital Editing Workstation

This sounds like the name of some fancy technological device. A Digital Editing Workstation, however, is nothing more than a normal desktop or laptop computer. All editing workstations are computers, but not all computers are editing workstations.

If you’re looking at this website right now… ahem… which you are… you have a computer, or at least access to one. Actually, if you don’t have a computer by now, I need to talk with you about some changes that need to take place in your life.

Even the most rudimentary, basic computer models they make now can be had for a couple hundred bucks, and will be sufficient to be used as your workstation. Failing that, you can obtain a computer that’s a couple of years old for a pittance, and that should suit you just fine.

What makes an average, run-of-the-mill computer into an editing workstation is the inclusion of the necessary hardware and software to perform multimedia editing.

The good news about this is that it used to cost an arm and a leg to get the right hardware onto your machine so you could edit video. In college I put my first video capture card into my computer at the time, and it cost nearly $200. Now you can get a firewire card that fits in one of your computer’s PCI slots for around $20-30.

Firewire is the best and most affordable technology for video capturing that exists on the consumer market today. It’s fast and easy to use, it is compatible with just about every camera manufactured, and it provides consistent results. You can capture HD footage with a firewire card in most cases, and although HDMI is making advances it’s still fairly cost-prohibitive at this point.

A note on consistency: with that old video capture card I put into my computer way back when, the interface was analog. It used a cable that connected to the computer through RCA jacks, and had separate inputs for audio and video. The video card itself had to be connected to my computer’s audio card, which meant that the two card needed to be sync’d up exactly.

This was not often the case, so I’d find that whenever I captured long segments of footage the audio and the video lost sync with one another. Sounds would start happening several seconds after the matching video, and editing became an absolute nightmare.

With firewire technology, both video and audio signals are carried through a single digital cable, so you never have to worry about syncing issues like that. Put a firewire card into your computer, if it doesn’t already have one, and you’ve got yourself the beginnings of a Digital Editing Workstation. The other component of a DEW is the software used for editing.

Editing Software

Both digital audio and digital video will benefit from manipulation after you capture them from their original source. There are tons of options for software, many of which I provide reviews and commentary for on my audio and video software pages.

Portable Audio Recorder

You can always use the onboard microphone on your camera to record all your sound. That is, if you want your videos to have tunnel-itis. I’m sure you’ve heard that distant, echoey effect on YouTube videos before. It happens when a person sets up a camera, hits record and stands against a wall or sits at a desk across the room.

Tunnel-itis is a dead giveaway that a novice has been playing with cameras, and you don’t want that happening to your videos. Rather than the sound being captured by a directed microphone, it bounces off every wall in the room before it hits the on-camera mic. The farther away the sound (ie., the person talking) gets, the greater the effect and thus the more hollow and ringy the sound becomes.

A portable audio recorder is anything from a device made specifically for that purpose (decent ones cost a few hundred dollars) to a microphone hooked up to your laptop, or even

Microphones

Since actual movie film is a series of photographs taken at high speeds, film cameras don’t usually have the capability to record audio. So the way major filmmakers record sounds during filming is by using a shotgun microphone on a boom pole.

A shotgun is a long, slender, highly sensitive directional microphone. It records sounds in stereo and tends to pick up the greatest volume of sound from the direction it is pointing. While filming a scene in which two people are talking, for example, the shotgun mic is suspended above and between them, pointing downward so that it picks up their dialogue.

Muffs / Windscreens

Shotgun mics are sometimes fitted with a muff or windscreen. The windscreen/muff covers the mic entirely and keeps breezes from blowing directly into the filaments (this tends to cause an annoying, scratchy sound and muffles other audio before it reaches the mic).

Boom Pole

A boom pole is an extendable rod that holds the shotgun mic at the far end and allows it to be hung over the action in a scene, close to where the bulk of the sound is taking place. In this way a louder, more clear sound signal can be recorded from afar without any interference, even if the shot is framed widely.

Boom poles tend to be expensive, but there are a few ways you can make a cheap one yourself using a lightbulb changing kit and a shockmount.

Steadicam

Another expensive piece of filming equipment, a professional steadicam can cost tens of thousands of dollars. It is made up of a padded metal harness that fits snugly around the cameraperson’s shoulders and abdomen, and a balancing arm that holds the camera.

Without going into depth to explain how the actual physics work, the steadicam holds the camera up so that every motion it makes is smooth and fluid. The camera operator can literally jump up and down while wearing the harness and the arm that supports the camera will hold it almost completely still.

In simpler terms, and to provide a more basic description that will benefit you in your indie filmmaking endeavors, a steadicam is any apparatus that adds weight to the bottom of the camera. Think about a grandfather or pendulum clock. The weight at the bottom causes a smooth, fluid movement of the pendulum that keeps time so precisely that it can measure exact seconds for months at a time.

Now imagine trying to crank a grandfather clock by hand, moving it back and forth in rhythm. It would be a little bit more difficult to keep it smooth and fluid, wouldn’t it?

Likewise, if you grab a small consumer video camera and slip your hand through the strap, you now have a compact, light-weight object in your grasp. How simple would it be to fling your arm about wildly in any direction? How difficult is it for you to keep your hand completely still and level while you hold onto it?

The answer to both of those questions is very. So the only way to get a still, level picture is to use a tripod and mount the camera on the ground, right? But what if you need to move the camera as you shoot? Panning, tracking, and dollying all become easier by adding a pendulum-like device beneath the camera.

Quick Tip: In a pinch you can just draw up the legs on your tripod, group them together, and hold your camera by the legs themselves. This makes it more difficult to turn the camera off-kilter and adds some weight to your setup.

You can use some piping and a free weight below the camera to provide this extra stability very cheaply. As a matter of fact, I’m going to do something rare and link to the website that shows you how to do it.

Lighting

While your sound design and camera work set the tone of your video, lighting sets the mood. Setting up to shoot a person is a relatively simple process, which I talk about on my lighting page.

Lighting a scene with multiple subjects and/or people requires a little bit more creativity if you don’t have several three-point lighting setups available to you. You may find that while the normal amount of light in one of the rooms in your house appears sufficient to the naked eye, it only barely does the job when you start dealing with cameras and you have other miscellaneous video equipment to contend with.

Professional light kits can cost from several hundred to several thousand dollars, so a good cheap option for lighting equipment is to purchase some metal shop lights from your local hardware store.

Three of these lights with bulbs will cost you under $20, and they’ll give you a huge increase in the amount of control you have while you film. You can bounce lights off of walls, mirrors, or any other flat, lightly colored surface to provide more ambient “fill” light.

Other Equipment

There are tons of other small items and accessories you could buy to make your films more appealing, such as video and audio plug-ins for your software, light covers, reflector panels, and color filters. Figure out what works best for you and use the guides throughout the rest of this site to help you on your way.

Video Equipment Checklist

The list of video equipment below is meant to give you some guidelines on what to think about when planning your next video project. Use it to take inventory of your things and remember all the items you’ll need when filming in various locations.

Antiquated Video Formats

Back in the days when consumer cameras were first coming onto the market, most devices available to the general public were bulky shoulder-mounted monstrosities that shot in either VHS or Beta. That’s right, these cameras were big enough to hold full-size video tapes in their guts. They’d plug into an external output via RCA jacks and you could watch your home videos on television.

Following these large format cameras came slightly more compact models and tape formats including VHS-C. This was a miniature VHS tape that could be put inside a larger, VHS-sized adapter and played in any standard VCR. This format was still somewhat bulky, although the cameras themselves had become significantly smaller.

Eventually the VHS-C tape gave way to 8mm and Hi-8 formats, which used an even smaller tape. The Digital-8 tape was the next incarnation in 8mm technology, and these cameras started to be produced with digital USB and Firewire output jacks as computer capture became more common.

Eventually most 8mm formats went completely out of style, and while you might still be able to find 8mm tapes in some places, they don’t manufacture cameras that use them anymore.

Today’s Formats

The 8mm format has since been replaced by an even smaller digital medium called the MiniDV tape. The MiniDV was the first true digital medium, and it was characterized by sharper image quality with better color reproduction, generally speaking.

Almost simultaneously with the MiniDV camera came a wave of DVD cameras that record to – you guessed it – a miniature DVD. These are popular because of their ease of recording and re-write capabilities. They are compatible with some DVD players as well.

Increasingly, trends are moving toward High Definition cameras with onboard memory or Hard Disk recording functionality. Flash and SD memory cards eliminate the need for tapes and provide extremely compact means of capturing and storing video footage.

As computer hardware and graphics processing catches up to HD, and broadcasting standards are brought to this format as well, I believe we’ll begin to see a complete shift toward the HD format in video camera technology. There are already a limited supply of standard definition cameras on the market, and these will most likely phase out completely in the coming years.

This shift will allow digital indie filmmaking to come closer than ever before to achieving viable results in the filmmaking world. Consumer camcorder manufacturers are now producing HD cameras that are literally just as small and lightweight as MiniDV and DVD cameras that shoot standard definition, and with BluRay and HDDVD media it is now possible to view and record feature film-length video to a single disc in High Definition.

The Future’s Looking Bright

Digital video still hasn’t reached the resolution of true film, but with the advent of high-definition video we’re getting closer. Fiber optic transfer speeds and internet technologies approaching “the grid” combined with new algorithms for compressing and streaming high quality video online are bringing the days of pixelated, blurry video to a close.

Read up to find out more about how these new options in digital video camera technology will open up new pathways for how you make films. If you dedicate yourself to the craft, you’ll find tat your future as a filmmaker will keep getting better and better!

The Pan is when the camera pivots horizontally while it stays otherwise stationary. Imagine an invisible, vertical line going down through the top of your camera, allowing it to spin left or right around this axis. Panning is used to slide a shot from one person to another, to add action to a tense scene, or to introduce a new element that was previously outside the frame.

Tilt is an up-down type of camera movement where the frame changes vertically as the camera stays in place. It can be thought of just the same as a pan, except that the camera moves along its horizontal x axis and the framed area moves from the “ground” to the “sky,” or vice versa. A tilt can show the base of a tree trunk all the way up to its tallest branches, or the foot of a giant, and extend up until you can see the top of the giant’s head.

A Dolly is physical camera movement toward or away from its subject. For example, there are scenes in movies that begin in outer space. The camera begins to dolly in and you see the galaxy, the solar system, the earth, the continent, the country, the city, the building, the person, etc. This would be an example of an extreme (and at least partially computer-generated) dolly. A normal dolly is just movement along the ground in relation to whatever is being filmed.

The Truck is the movement past or alongside an object. You might see a train moving at a high rate of speed with the camera trucking along beside it. A truck does not necessarily keep anything within a certain distance, but is simply the camera moving along a path while facing sideways. When you’re in the car and you look out the window, if your eyes were the camera they’d essentially be “trucking” along the scenery beside the road you’re on.

Pedestal shots are another movement of the camera in space, this time along the y axis. The same situations mentioned with the tilt movements above could be applied to the pedestal shot, except that instead of pivoting up and down to view the range of areas in the shot, the camera actually moves (rather than rotating) up and down from the bottom point to the top, or the opposite.

An Arc is a fairly difficult shot to pull off free-hand. This is when the camera rotates around its subject, keeping the same distance but changing the angle at which it views that subject. The slow-motion arcs in the Matrix movies are perhaps the best and most widely recognized example of this technique (although those were done with multiple cameras instead of just one).

Knowing Your Camera Movements

Knowing these terms is important, especially if you are not always behind the camera or if you’re working with multiple cameras on a shoot and thus multiple camerapersons. Incorporating a variety of different types of camera movement, or just choosing a few specific movements for your camera will allow you to make a stylized film that guides your viewers through the visual space you’ve created. For further reading on creating an effective visual space in indie filmmaking, take a look at film composition.

Following is a list of rules to remember when setting up your camera and selecting the viewable area in each of your indie filmmaking shots. These suggestions can be applied to any situation, whether you are filming an action movie or a documentary, a still frame or a motion shot.

1. Put Your Subject Where It Belongs

Know where your subject should go from left to right. If you are filming an informational video, “talking head” piece, interview or documentary, centering your subject on camera can work. But putting a person dead-center in a dramatic piece can take away from the dynamic of the scene and will make things look plain and uninteresting.

The proper way to frame a person who is interacting with their environment is to place them off-center and give them some look room. Look room describes the framed area to either side of the subject that gives them space to look at whatever it is they’re paying attention to.

This is somewhat of a stylistic choice, but the most important thing is to be consistent with how you’re shooting each close-up.

2. Use Close-ups to Capture Emotion

The basic theory here is that showing close-ups and reaction shots of your most prominent characters connects them to your audience best. You don’t need a close-up of every passenger on a subway car, but you might use close-ups to show your main character’s discomfort or fear of being on the train late at night as his dodgy glances and furrowed brow might indicate.

You’ll notice that in a less dramatic production, like the evening news, everyone is framed in a medium shot with the occasional wide angle showing the entire news desk with all the anchors and any guests on the show. The emotional condition of your local news anchor isn’t exactly the most important thing on your mind when you’re watching them report the news, is it?

3. Change Camera Angles To Change Your Viewer’s Perspective

Remember that the height and angle of your shot is just as important as what’s in the frame. A high angle still shot can emphasize a person’s small frame, whereas a low angle shot from the ground looking up can make someone seem larger or taller in relation to their surroundings.

A slightly off-axis camera is useful if, for instance, it’s a character’s-eye view. They are lying down and the camera is placed sideways on the floor. As they get up, the camera lifts off the ground and rights itself. Another sort of cliché angle shows the ceiling, with several inquisitive heads popping into the frame as they panic over someone who’s passed out or dazed, lying on their back.

When choosing your angles, think about your viewer’s perspective overall. Do you want them to be right in the action, or should they be taking stock of the action from a distance? If the main character in your scene is a spy observing a public meeting or transfer of goods between suspects, the distant shot of their furtive handshakes is the best way to depict the action from his point of view.

4. It’s the Motion of the Ocean

Ever seen a sweeping crane shot that zooms across a group of travelers from above? A shot where the camera angle starts below the subject and then rises over him? Camera motion, so long as it effectively captures your subject or transfers the viewing area from one subject to another, is a great way to add interest to your scene.

A crane shot may be difficult to do if you don’t have some way to get up high, but there are plenty of other ways to move the camera that will let you use dynamic motion to enhance a shot. Take a look at my Basic Video Camera Techniques page for tips on how to hold and move your camera.

5. Zoom, Zoom. Or Not.

The Office is one of my favorite shows on television. It’s filmed in a mockumentary style, so that both the characters and the audience are meant to be aware that the cameras are in the room. Occasionally you’ll see a quick zoom in from one person to another, or during an interview the camera will zoom out from someone to show that there’s another person in the room for comedic effect.

In this circumstance, zooming is an effective way for the creators of the show to convey the idea of action happening spontaneously. Even though each shot is planned out to some degree on the set of a network TV show, the rapid pans and zooms the camerapeople use make it seem like they’re constantly having to adjust their framing to capture these spur-of-the-moment situations.

In most other cases, though – in fact in every other case I can think of – zooming in and out is not a good idea. It’s one of those Amateur Alert moves that says “hey, I’m using a consumer-grade camcorder and I have no idea what I’m doing,” especially if your zoom is shaky and inconsistent. So try to avoid zooming in and out during your shots if at all possible. Use the zoom function on your camera only to frame your shots before you hit record.

Unless you’re able to rent one, it’s unlikely that you’ll have access to any of these items. They are made to be used specifically for filmmaking, and therefore are in fairly limited supply. You’d be surprised though, at how many different motion rigs you can build out of objects that are substantially easier to find.

Controlling Camera Motion

Timing and jitter are the two main factors affecting any camera movement in filmmaking – in other words, how the camera covers the desired area in time with the action happening on-screen, and the degree of smoothness of that movement.

Motion is difficult to achieve successfully without the aid of some foreign device that allows the lens to maintain stability while the camera itself is rotated or moved in physical space in a variety of ways. Term definitions for the various basic camera movements are covered in our filmmaking glossary.

Motion Tips

Let’s move on from the overview now and get into some specific tips and ideas for working with camera movement in indie filmmaking from a technical standpoint.

Handheld Camera Movement

Pro-grade steadicams can cost thousands of dollars. They use sophisticated mechanisms to hold and balance the camera so that a person wearing one can literally jump up and down and cause minimal jitter in the shot. Pretty amazing stuff, but unfortunately you and I don’t necessarily have several grand that would be well-spent on one of these contraptions.

The biggest problem I come across with handheld shots is that it often looks like the cameraperson was having an epileptic seizure while they were recording. Consumer camcorders are small nowadays – sometimes ridiculously so – and you can’t expect to hold one of these things steady without at least some additional support. See our page on basic video camera techniques for tips on how to properly support a camera with only your hands.

There are two things that, if added to a camera, will immediately reduce jitter – good old fashioned weight, and a lowered center of gravity. The quickest and probably the most readily available method you can use to get both of these things is to attach your camera to a tripod, and then fold up the legs.

A tripod is great for side-to-side pans and up-down tilts. But if you pull up the legs and keep that extra couple of pounds beneath your camera, you’ve made yourself an instant pendulum. In other words, with additional weight concentrated toward the bottom of this rig, the unit is less prone to wiggling and being shaken than the camera alone. Try it sometime. Actually, your tripod should be attached nearly every time you get set up for filmmaking.

High Angle Shots

Now, with your closed-up tripod holding your camera, you can tighten up the adjusters and use this as a height extension. A ladder, stool, treehouse, or the top of your neighbor’s car (while they’re out, of course) are all great places to get high-angle shots from.

When you’re dealing with heights though, don’t be dumb. I mean that. It’s usually wise to find a way to get the shot you need without risking your life.

Low Angle Shots

This is one of those rare instances where you’ll probably need to remove your tripod. You can’t rightly have the thing sticking out the bottom and still get your camera right on the ground. With low-angle shots, the closer you can get to the ground, the better.

Dolly/Truck Shots

Ah, now this is probably the most asked-about type of camera movement there is, and it’s the main reason I’m writing this in the first place. Trying to walk, jog, run, or perform any other type of unaided bipedal movement tends to be a pretty bouncy endeavor, especially when cameras are involved.

If you want to dolly toward or away from a subject or truck along beside it, you’re going to need a smoother ride than that. The keyword here is ride, because there are so many things you can use to get smooth movement out of a camera that you may not have ever thought about.

Your use of any of the items below will depend on the surface you wish to use, the speed of movement you want to reach, and the level of noise interference you can afford to have in your shots.

A skateboard may be a good dolly, although they can be noisy unless you’re on a completely smooth surface – and you can’t really use them at all on carpet, dirt or grass.

A wheelchair will give you a smooth, relatively quiet ride. Don’t go down stairs with it though, and definitely don’t steal them from old ladies. Unless you really, really need one.

Your car can even serve as a fantastic dolly. With electric and hybrid automobiles in growing abundance, yours may have the benefit of emitting a relatively low level of noise. Hatchback and half-door vehicles are great at slow speeds because you can open the trunk and film out the back.

Any wagons, carts or rolling television stands/desks you’d find in a home office or kitchen could find limited use as a dolly or truck. Watch items with casters on them that have rotating wheels, though – they may be somewhat unwieldy to manipulate.

Sporting equipment such as bicycles or rollerblades could prove useful, although the noise level may be prohibitive for some applications.

In most of these examples, arm yourself with a can of WD-40 and you may be able to eliminate a lot of the noise from your dolly. You’ll be best off if you can film shots where you’re able to remove the production sound and replace it with a combination of other sounds to get rid of dolly noise entirely.

On network news channels, in major movie production studios, and even on reality TV shows, the segments you’ve become accustomed to seeing are shot using multiple cameras. Each camera is set in a different place to capture the action from a unique angle or perspective, providing the viewer with something new to look at.

Watch any television show, commercial, or movie, and pay attention to how quickly switches are made from one shot to another. We are so used to seeing this type of camera work that it’s one of the things that will quickly flag an Amateur Alert when we watch a video that consists of a single, shaky handheld shot that is used for more than a few seconds.

So I’m going to show you how to plan and shoot while you learn how to make a video so you end up with a final product that looks professional and consistent – and use only a single camera to do it.

Single Camera Basics

In order to get several shots of the same sequence when using a single camera, you’re going to have to do it multiple times. Otherwise, there’s no way to capture the action from a different angle. The best way to do this is to plan out a sequence and decide how many camera angles you want to use, then have your subjects or actors run through doing the same thing the same way a few times. This technique is called blocking a scene.

Continuity Matters

It can be kind of a pain, but you need to keep track of every little detail when you’re working on an indie filmmaking shoot. Usually there’s a continuity person that gets paid to do this, but if you’re the director this responsibility might end up falling on your shoulders.

Especially if you film a single scene over the course of several meetings or days, things like whether the actors are wearing the same clothes or whether their hair has grown out significantly, is styled differently, or has been cut since the last time you filmed all need to be considered.

Don’t Cross the Axis!

Imagine that you’re filming a sequence in which two people stand still and talk to each other. Say they are facing one another and standing in front of a brick wall that stretches as high as the eye can see and into infinity on the left and right. Think of this brick wall as an imaginary axis of vision that you can never cross.

Click on any of the four cameras below to see how a shot would look from each location. Notice how switching between cameras 1 and 4, or between cameras 2 and 3 have the effect of “morphing” the subject with a jump cut.