Making Better Movies

Part 2 - Shooting

You're now gathering the pictures and sounds you'll need to edit your movie. The better you do your planning (the next part), the easier this will be. It will still never go as you expect.

⭐️ As a photographer, your life revolves around light and shadow just as a sailor's does wind and sky. Before you ever pick up a camera you can use your spare moments to look for where light is coming from, asking is it harsh or soft, finding out if something you want to see is lit well, or is it in shadow. As a photographer, every moment of your life can be spent learning and seeing something new.

Use a tripod if you possibly can. It's a lot of trouble, but will make things look much better. If you don't use or have one, NEVER be zoomed in. It always makes things look more shaky (even if your camera is on a tripod, BTW). Zoomed out (wide-angle) always looks smoother. The "hand held" shots you see in the movies are done with a system called a Steadicam stabilizer. You can get them for everything from a smart phone ($50) to a Panavision cinema camera ($10,000+). Most other hand-held shots look pretty awful.

Learn how your camera works. You can always find user manuals on Google. If you're using a smart phone (I hope not), consider an app that gives you more control than the one that came with your phone. You may have to adjust your exposure to compensate for bad lighting.

⭐️ Always make sure your camera is recording when you think it is.

⭐️ Make sure you have enough film (oops, memory).

Use whatever lighting you have available because you probably don't have any lighting equipment. Even outdoors, making a shot look like it's naturally lit can take a truckload of lighting equipment. Just do your best and don't expect Hollywood-quality results.

It can help to have a big white piece of poster board (a sheet of "foam core" is better if you can find it). You can use it as a reflector to help make up light coming from the back of your subject when shooting outdoors.

If you did your planning well, you'll know what shots you'll need and maybe the order you want to shoot them in. The goal is to use the fewest "setups" (moving the camera and lights around) as possible.

It's usually easiest to shoot your "cover shot" first. This is the entire seen captured in a wide-shot. (You can do this from different angles to be safe.) This will also let your characters run through the scene relatively uninterrupted, good for them to get the timing down and work on the mood, which can be fine-tuned in the close-ups. It may be best if this is a static shot (no camera moves).

It's really helpful to have an assistant director (AD) taking careful notes during the cover shot so you can match actions and positions of characters later. This even comes down to how things are placed on the set or how full a glass of water is.

When shooting dialog, you should keep your camera at the same "focal length" (point at where it's zoomed in or out) for the entire conversation. You'll have to remember where it's set when you shoot one point of view for when you change to the other. You can change your framing, but not the focal length. For reasons too hard to explain, it's really jarring to the viewer if you don't. (People who don't get this usually flunk out of film school in the first semester.)

When you're shooting close ups of one character, have the other characters speak their lines as well. That's you get your reaction shots. Always get extra reaction shots. It's easy and may save your butt later.

Actors shouldn't look into the camera. The closest they should come is slightly above and to the left of the lens.

Learn about the rule of thirds and how to compose pictures. If you're doing a camera move (very hard), the goal is to keep the first shot, last shot and every frame in between well composed.

Pay attention to how your actors are moving across the screen. If they're going left to right in one shot, they need to be doing the same in the next. You'll need a straight on shot, a cutaway to another scene, or something else to "turn" them.

Outdoor scenes usually work best when shot early or late in the day. Hollywood calls these the "golden hours." When you scout your locations, you'll be able to figure out if it should be morning or afternoon, depending on where the sun is.

Always get more shots than you think you'll need. You'll thank yourself when it's editing time. This will be really true of your forest scenes.

Always give each shot enough "head" and "tail." Start recording. Make sure it's actually recording (or have your camera operator yell "Rolling!" Start the actors by saying/yelling, "Action!" When they're done (or hopelessly messed up) yell, "Cut!"

And now for sound. (I wasn't looking forward to this.)

This can be even harder to do well than lighting. If all you have is the mic on your camera, just do what you can to keep background noise to a minimum and hope for the best. If you have other equipment, use Google to figure out how to use it or find somebody who knows.

No matter how hard it is to record sound indoors, outdoors is far worse. In Hollywood, almost all outdoor sound is re-recorded indoors and made to sound like it was recorded outdoors. Seriously.

When you record your voice-overs, find a quiet, non-echoing place to do it. Most people discover a clothes closet works the best.

You can find free sound effects on the web if you look hard.

Always listen to your audio playback when you check a shot.