8 Tips for Taking Better Home Movies
Home movies are so much fun! Documenting your family life on video can provide years of entertainment. With a little bit of effort and organizational skills, you can compile videos of your world for all the rest of the world to see.
I learned to love video making at a young age because my dad took lots of home movies. I even have movies of myself as an itty-bitty baby! Proof positive, I once weighed a mere 7 pounds.
If you want to learn more about how best to make home movies and vacation videos, read these tips.
Video cameras are so tiny these days that you can follow your kids around for every cute moment and still be unobtrusive, which is the best way to be for realistic home movies. The more you can be like a fly on the wall, the more natural everybody will be on camera and personally, I think those are the most fun.
Of course, some people don’t want natural, they want everybody lined up and waving to grandma. That’s fine too. You are the director!
In my opinion, home movie production should be kept as simple as possible. The point is to have fun and capture some memories, not be Cecil B. deMille. With just a bit of know-how, you can keep it simple yet ensure top quality.
Here are my eight best tips for taking great home movies you will enjoy for a lifetime.
TIP 1
Take advantage of natural light. Open up curtains and blinds to make the room brighter. When shooting indoors, it’s best to make it as bright as possible. As the camera operator, stand with your back to the light source. You want the light falling on your subject and behind the camera, otherwise you get a silhouette. If you are outside, keep the sun at your back.
TIP 2
Your shot will look best if you keep the lens zoomed all the way out, on a wide shot. Shooting on a wide shot makes the camera appear more still and also makes it a lot easier to keep in focus. There are many advantages to using the wide angle portion of your zoom lens. Camera shake is virtually eliminated on a wide shot, and almost everything will always be in focus. If you zoom in all the way, you will need a tripod to keep the shot steady. On a wide shot, hand holding will appear steady.
TIP 3
Avoid the urge to pan, zoom and tilt the camera like crazy. Constantly moving the camera is the single biggest mistake novices make. There is something irresistible about having a video camera in your hands inspiring you to move it about. Zooming, (in and out movement) panning (horizontal movement) and tilting (up and down movement) should be kept at a minimum.
TIP 4
To pick up sound well, the camera should be about three to six, no more than ten feet away. (To pick up really well, be closer than that.) If you want to hear someone speaking distinctly, it’s best to turn all the extra sounds off. A radio blaring in the background can ruin the sound of your child talking. A music bed would best be added later during editing, not while shooting.
TIP 5
No need to videotape EVERYTHING. I had to laugh at my older brother, who videotaped twelve hours worth of his daughter by the time she was 3 months old! Our dad had about twelve hours for all four of us kids from birth to leaving the nest. A time span of about twenty-five years!
As cute as his new little girl was, twelve hours in three months is way too much. Watching all of that would get terribly monotonous, sorry Tom. Unless you are going to condense it later by editing, keep it a reasonable length. Even if you are going to edit, I promise you won’t want to wade though that much raw footage. Edit in the camera by using that pause button!
TIP 6
Have the camera handy. The best moments will happen without warning and the quicker you can get your camera rolling the more you will catch. If you are at an event like a birthday party, keep the camera turned on, but on pause, while nothing exciting is going on.
TIP 7
Get up close and personal with the action. If the kids are wrestling on the carpet, get down there with them. Consider taking things from the angle and height of the action. The viewer will get a much more interesting perspective if you get a bit creative with your angles.
TIP 8
If you want a shot where the people look large, but you can see an entire building in the background, both the subjects and the camera need to go across the street. Have the people about five feet from the camera and the building across the street much further away. If just the camera operator goes across the street, the people will be tiny and get lost in the picture.
TIP 9
Have fun! 🙂
Thanks for reading Video Production Tips
Lorraine Grula
I don’t understand the concept in Tip 2. That is “your shot will look best if you keep the lens zoomed all the way out, on a wide shot.” Zooming all the way out take the picture out of focus so how can that be true or does that concept only apply to expensive camcorders. Thanks.
Hi Belinda.
Good to see you again.
You ask a very good question. What I said is universally true, it is not just something that applies to expensive camcorders. In fact, it is more true of inexpensive camcorders that only have automatic focus.
In some instances, if you are zoomed all the way in, then you zoom out, it will appear momentarily out of focus until the automatic focus adjusts itself for the new zoomed out shot. If you use a camera with an automatic focus, and all small, inexpensive cameras are auto focus, then it takes a few seconds for the focus to respond, sometimes longer. So I bet you are getting that mixed up with what I am trying to explain.
If you do not think about the actual zooming process, but rather concentrate on point “A” and point “B,” with one being all the way zoomed in and the other being all the way zoomed out. A zoomed out lens, which is also called a wide angle, will have a huge depth of field and be in almost constant focus.
A lens that is zoomed in, on a telephoto setting, barely has any depth of field so less is in focus.
If you do not exactly understand what depth of field means, I have several posts on it. Just put the keywords depth of field in the search box in the upper right.
I hope that makes better sense for you. A wide angle shot is almost always in focus and if you leave it on the wide angle, it stays in focus no matter what kind of shot you are trying to take because of the huge depth of field. Depth of field essentially means how much of the shot is in focus from front to back. From the camera lens to the subject, how far is it? How much of that area is in focus? The answer to that question depends a lot on depth of field.
Thanks
Lorraine
I recently did a small video and became amazed to learn the behind the scene unseen work of making movies. The whole editing and post production aspect of movie making motivates me the most. That’s when I started searching left and right to find out more on recording movies. I wanted to optimize my know how on the activity to an expert level. Anyone wanting to expand in this field should agree.
Hi Edward.
Go for it! Glad to hear it. Making video can be a bit addictive if you ask me!
I think your realization about how much work goes on behind the scenes is very common for people who are used to being watchers of video and not producers of video. I have heard tons of people say that. Good luck with becoming an expert! You can do it and have fun at the same time.
Thanks
Lorraine
1)Pls. explain the association of zooming-in and manual focus of camcorders having manual controls.
2) What is the relationship between IRIS-control and night-view mode?
3) how manual white balance and soft skin mode are related?
My camcorder model: Panasonic SDR-H280
Hi Sanjib
Great questions.
The relationship between zooming in and the manual focus is actually quite complicated and has to do with the different properties of multi focal point lenses and depth of field. I have some blog posts on the subject that go into greater detail, but essentially, as you zoom in, the focus DOF gets much smaller. It is harder to focus a camera when it is zoomed in.
Night mode is usually achieved by adding “grain” or little white spots, to the picture. This is a different way of lightening your picture than opening the iris. If you open the iris, you let more light in but adding the grain to the picture brightens it without adding light.
Soft skin mode is probably more of a focus issue than a white balance issue but I am not sure and it probably depends on the camera.
I hope this helps you.
Thanks
Lorraine