How 2... Film at Home

As with all successful projects, the planning, preparation and practice stages are 3 essential elements to making a good video.

Here are a few suggestions for the 3 P’s, you may have a few of your own.

Planning:

• What your video is about.
• Your target audience.
• The content.
• The length of your video.
• Filming location: consider lighting, if filming outdoors, do you have an alternative if weather conditions are not suitable?
• Who is being filmed.
• What equipment to use for filming.
• Where will it be hosted.
• Audio – external audio or use built in microphone audio?
• Any music to play on top of video.

Preparing:

• The script – write down what you intend to say in front of the camera.
• A storyboard if filming a scenario. A storyboard is a pictorial script of what is happening in a scene, who is in it, camera angle and movement and type of shots (wide, medium or close up).
• Any supporting shots to cover up jump cuts.
• All equipment is charged up and ready to go with extra batteries and SD cards.

Practice:

• Feel comfortable with the script, written words are not the same as spoken words.
• Try not to read from a script, use a sticky note stuck under the camera with bullet points as a reminder.
• Practice in front of relatives or a mirror.
• Practice filming yourself so you can playback to see the results, it doesn’t have to be perfect.




Planning is a really important stage. Get this stage sorted and you're half way there.

Prepare all you content, write your script, decide how you will deliver the script and all the supporting material.

Don't just blag it on the day, practice many times to an audience or in front of the mirror. Consider the delivery style. 

Unless you have access to a studio, finding a suitable location that is clutter and noise free can be a challenge. Filming outside is a good option, but is weather dependent (too wet, windy, sunny, etc), if it's too windy, the microphone will pick up the wind noise. To reduce this, use a lapel mic and tuck it inside your collar and/or stand with the wind behind you. 

The easiest option is to film at home or in the office, but before you do this, consider you background.

Lighting is a component that is often forgotten about and is often quite difficult to get perfect.

When filming it is important to make sure that the subject is well lit. A good way of achieving this is with three little tricks (Key light, Back light, Fill Light).

Back Light: The second thing you can add to make your subject better lit is a Back Light. If you have a light behind the subject this will help separate them from the background and add depth to your shot. This can be achieved by having a desk lamp out of frame angled onto the subjects back, or by having a light behind the subject in the back of the shot.

Fill Light: Thirdly to enhance your lighting even more, you can add a side light. This can be another desk lamp or a torch which you have angled at the subject. This light source should be opposite to where the main light source is coming from (ie. opposite the window). This will help to fill in any shadows coming from the main light source.

The norm is to have the camera lens at eye level with your subject matter. However, some film makers use different camera angles as effects and/or to portray character. Select each photo below to find out more. 

Filming from below, a low angle shot, will make your subject look more powerful.

Some built in cameras may have wide angle lens, be aware that if you are too close to the camera with these lens as it may be exaggerate your features. 

Rule of thirds is a film and photography terminology and is basically a guide to position the subject in the most aesthetic position within the frame. 

To apply the rule of thirds, divide your frame into 9 equal parts; 2 horizontal lines crossed by 2 vertical lines and position the subject so that their eyes are a third of the way down the frame and are a third from the left or right of the frame. This will help balance the shot.

If you are filming several interviews, alternate each person to the left or right of the frame so that there are a variation of shots when the video is put together. Remember to ask the person asking the question to also move to the left or right side of the camera. 

The rule of thirds applies if you are looking away or at a camera.

Connection to your students is important – doubly so when everyone is working or studying remotely. To help with this it’s important to look into the lens of the device you’re using to record yourself. This will make it look (to your viewer) that you are engaging directly with them.

An exception to make for not looking into the lens is when filming interview styles, i.e. similar to news interviews where the subject is talking to an interviewer. In these incidents, ask your subject to sit at a slight angle and face the person (sat beside to left or right of the camera) asking the question. 

On these occasions, the person asking the question is often cut out during editing stage so ask the person you are filming to reply with the context in mind by reiterating the question asked. 

If you’re filming with a smartphone or tablet be careful not to cover the mic and try to angle the phone so the mic on the bottom of the phone is pointing roughly towards you.

Be aware of noise around you. If there are loud noises it might be worth re-recording the section it interrupts.

The start is what is known as an establishing shot where you introduce the viewer to the scene, this will probably be a wide angle shot. The middle is the actual content and this will include many medium and close up. The ending will be a 'call to action'; what you would like your viewers to do after watching, this can be an email address to contact. This will be a wide shot, but can be a medium if preferred. 

Rather than re-filming the whole thing when mistakes are made, just re-record the paragraph and use a mixture of medium and close ups to hide errors. If you have any supporting videos (cutaways), they can also be used to hide jump cuts. 

If you struggle to remember your lines, or you have a lot of content to deliver, an autocue may be the answer. There are a few autocue apps available on both mobile phones and iPads. Many free ones may just provide you with an autocue and will not record at the same time, whilst others may limit the amount of words you can use unless you purchase the app. 

One such app is Video Teleprompter light . It's an iPad app that is free to use and will record at the same time. A small watermark appears on the bottom right hand side but it's quite insignificant, but can be removed if you purchase the app. 

Another for Android phones is Lite Teleprompter but why not search for one that works best for you. 

Autocues can be quite tricky and frustrating to use and getting the settings right is the key. Once you have adjusted the text to your readable size and speed, it's just a case of practising. 

If you've got this far, you are probably ready to do some filming. It's worth noting that sometimes, the fact that you or the person you are filming are confident delivering a talk in front of a room full of people, it doesn’t mean that talking in front of the camera will be easy, our suggestion would be to always practice in front of a mirror or friends and relative before the actual filming day.   

Here are a few things to consider before filming:

• Don't wear jingly jewellery - if you move your arms around, the noise of the jewellery will be picked up by the microphone
• Don't wear patterns - striped shirts create an moiré effect which is quite distracting, if filming in front of a green screen, don't wear anything green
• Don't wear or say anything that dates the video (i.e. saying "last week", poppies, etc.)
• Don't reshoot from the start if you make a mistake in the middle, resume from the paragraph where the mistake was made. This can be hidden during editing
• Do have a drink of water to hand - sometimes your mouth can get dry from talking
• Do practice before filming
• Do reshoot the first scene again when complete, this is because you are more settled in and relaxed
• Do look at the camera/interviewer for about 5 seconds when finished, this makes editing easier
• Do relax and smile and have fun!  

Having an idea of how the finished video will look will help shape your video from the production stage. 

• Do you need a close up to explain an idea? 
• Do you need some footage to link two sections? 
• How are these shots going to fit together in the edit? 
• Have you got enough angles and shot sizes to tell the story you want to tell?

Whilst you have to make sure you have enough footage to tell the story, it is also important not to overshoot, as you have to watch all this footage back and your time is valuable.

If you are quite new to video production terminology find out a few key terms to help you with the process.

Once the filming is done, try and label and note down what each of your clips is and roughly how they’re going to be used. You can then make folders within your editing application. This can either organise the footage by date or by types of shots (interviewee’s name, cutaways). The idea is to organise everything so that you know exactly where to find it during the editing stage.

• Assembly – this step involves topping and tailing each answer, getting rid of mistakes/stumbling over words;
• Rough cut – this part is all about getting the content right. Once you have all the usable footage on the timeline, you can start giving the video a structure and shape the story by having an introduction, middle and conclusion. Editing to music often helps to gauge the pace of the video (i.e. if it drags or if it’s easy to follow and engaging).
  In this stage, there will be bits of the video with jump cuts and just a black screen. It therefore helps to just “listen” to the audio in the video to make sure that the content makes sense.
• Fine cut – The next stage is to cover jump cuts with cutaways, make sure it all flows and that the cutaways add to the story, rather than use them to fill the gaps. 
• Final cut – The final step is to colour correct the footage and add sound effects if and when appropriate to finish the video.

Top tips for video editing

Here are our top tips for editing videos:

Chances are you probably want to add it to the VLE but limits on filesize and some issues with playback hamper the experience.

The best way to proceed is to add your video to a hosting platform and then embed it into its final destination.

The main platforms available for Skills & Participation are:

• Microsoft Stream (supported)
• YouTube (unsupported)

So, which is the best for you? Let’s find out.

We’ll start with MS Stream as that is the one people are probably the least familiar with. Stream is basically Microsoft’s answer to YouTube (with everything that might suggest). Stream is part of the Office 365 suite of packages. As such one of its big selling points is its integration with Teams. If you’re holding a meeting or hosting some learning it is easy to record your session from within Teams, with the final output going directly to Stream.

Advantages of Stream:

• Good integration with Teams for easy recording
• Simple to access files once processed
• Automatic generation of transcription for the video (which is fairly accurate in our experience)
• Excellent privacy controls with the ability to easily set who can see your videos (great for videos that contain sensitive content).

Disadvantages:

• Editing option limited to trimming start and end points
• Unable to set videos to ‘Public’ (meaning only people with HCC credentials can see them)
• Recording and playback quality isn’t always great (frame drops and blockiness are common) and you have limited control over how it records the various users’ video feed.
• The recording is tied to the user account of the person who sets the recording. If that person leaves that content is lost too.

YouTube is massively popular and a very robust and sophisticated streaming platform. It is not, however, without its problems. The elephant in the room is that it is not a licensed or supported platform. It is fully controlled by Google and that brings with it some potential issues of ownership (of content that is uploaded to the platform) as well as the fickle finger of Google (they have a habit of changing/scrapping services without warning).

Advantages of YouTube:

• Most widely used video hosting platform and second most widely used ‘search engine’ – so great for discoverability if you want your video to be seen by the world
• Excellent ability to deal with bandwidth issues for the user – meaning your video will be seen on pretty much any connection
• Sophisticated tools such as editing, adding stock music (from YouTube’s own library of stock) and captioning

Disadvantages:

• Issues over ownership of content on the platform
• Privacy settings are cumbersome and time-consuming (if trying to lock down specifically who can see the video)
• No control over what happens after your video stops playing (YouTube add suggested videos to the end of all uploads and some of these are not appropriate

Visit the link for more information on using YouTube

When filming using a mobile phone or an iPad ...... please, please, please do film landscape (wide) mode as this will fit better on a 16:9 aspect ration used on videos. It just makes editing easier and also makes your video look more professional.