One of the best things I did recently was taking a vacation from working as a volunteer videographer with a local charity where I live. The video would be for a 30 minute documentary on the work of a children’s charity. We traveled as a group to various rehabilitation hospitals in various cities in Vietnam.
As a public speaker, I always try to hone my storytelling skills. But as a cameraman, my role now happens to be on the outside looking in; first to recognize a story, then to immediately capture it on video. I’ve already started putting an arsenal of videos to use by making video blogging for my website. Some videography skills that you already knew and practiced. But several events took me by surprise and helped me develop my experience.
Here was my stage. I was traveling with our team of over 11 interpreters to hospitals giving full-day workshops to parents and young children with cerebral palsy. The rooms were cramped. It was hot and humid. Near the end of the day, the children were tired and crying. Sometimes I had to jump from room to room capturing scenes of children between the ages of 9 months and 17 years. He sought to capture the emotion on the faces of mothers and their children. I also wanted to profile each of our healthcare professionals who volunteered to work with these children.
We would leave the hotel at 7 am and we would not return until 5 pm most days. Besides wanting to visit and dine with our team in the evening, I usually had no less than 2 hours of work in my room backing up, reviewing and indexing all the videos of the day that I collected. But I was in my element as there was a lot going on around me. I felt like I had a story to capture and tell. The following are some tips that I learned that I would like to share.
1) Don’t assume that you will just hold the camera and capture video. You may also have to participate and be the producer, choreographer and editor, all from the beginning to the end of the video production. Plus, being the editor will allow you to capture the video just the way you want it and save you valuable time editing later.
2) Make sure you have enough battery power, enough to power a full working day with the camera. Buy the largest battery you can. I was 2; 1 in the morning and 1 in the afternoon. We were out for 12 hours some days. Also be sure to buy an external battery charger. The camera’s built-in charger is a poor standby mode. Don’t trust him when you are filming every day on a road trip. You don’t want to risk burning out the camera’s electronics while charging the battery. One reality was that it did not have a rear camera. If it were to break, it would be inactive.
3) Have a travel backpack that you can easily carry and access during your daily videos. I was 2. The main one was my carry-on with all my video equipment. When traveling, you don’t want to search your delicate video equipment. For your daily outings, have a smaller backpack with many pockets that you can comfortably hang over your shoulder or back so you can easily access it while shooting.
4) Have a long extension cord for your hotel room when backing up your video and recharging your batteries every night. I took this advice from a work colleague who travels internationally and it saved me a lot of time. The hotels we stayed in usually only had one outlet that was easily accessible, though across the room from where all my laptop and video equipment was. If I didn’t have this long power cord with me, I’d be in dire straits.
5) Backup your videos every night to one external drive, if not two. Please review them to make sure they were copied correctly before removing them from your camera. I made 2 backups; 1 on the laptop drive and one on an external USB drive.
6) Have a laptop with a video viewer so you can review your videos and make sure you have the shots you want that are not jerky or out of focus. I had my video preview installed on my laptop so I could quickly see my video of the day, that is, lighting, panoramic, or maybe too many nervous movements. Mistakes made today can be corrected for tomorrow’s session.
7) Make sure you have enough spare SD memory cards. They can sometimes get spoiled or lost due to their small size. You may also have found some good content and decided to shoot longer to capture everything.
8) Attach a wrist strap to your camera. If the camera slips out of your hand, you have 1 more chance to prevent the camera from bouncing off the concrete. This saved me several times, especially in hot weather when work days were more than 10 hours and I was tired.
9) The wristband must have some mark such as the flag of your country. Mine was a red TEDx lanyard and it actually started several conversations with other tourists and eventually exchanging business cards.
10) Wear walking shorts with LOTS of pockets. He had SD cards, batteries, notepad, pen, water bottle, and everything else in every pocket.
11) Tripods are big and bulky. It had a telescopic carbon monopod which was great for getting into tight spots quickly. It also adjusts on the fly. The telescopic legs were very comfortable to hold and adjust. It was also great to go over people’s heads when a crowd formed around my topic. Shots from above also add dramatic effect. There is nothing like getting directly into the subject of the story.
12) You may have a story in mind, but be prepared to follow a segway story or two that unfolds before your eyes. You should always be attentive to the scenes and stories that unfold around you. Keep the camera on and the microphone working to capture that video clip in good sound. These can be blessings in disguise to give your story a twist or spin. Remember, you can also collect enough good footage for 2 or 3 additional stories, to be edited and released at a later date.
13) Always have your video camera handy during the shooting day, even at night when dining out with your crew. You never know when a video story might break out in front of you. You want to be able to capture it. During a taxi ride, I received a very insightful opinion from one of our Vietnamese interpreters on the history of the PC in Vietnam. Genuine episodes like that just can’t be repeated.
14) Always have your camera visible around your gear or subject. Your subjects will get so used to you that eventually they won’t know if you are filming them or not. This is great for capturing those candid shots. My purpose was to capture them at work with parents and children in the most candid way possible. We all know that as soon as a camera appears, people go stony-faced, watched and rehearsed. You want to capture them in the most relaxed, sincere and natural way possible.
15) Make sure you have a variety of energy bars and snacks including water in your backpack or pockets. I didn’t and there were days when we didn’t eat for a while. You want to keep your energy high. Nothing worse than a hunger or thirst ache to distract you from recording.
16) The most important thing is that you make a daily index of all your video clips while the day is still fresh in your mind. I started slipping after the first few days and started forgetting which clips were from where. I quickly corrected it by making an excel sheet on my laptop, indexing by clip number, and briefly describing the scene, location, and meaning. I did this every night in my hotel room, while charging the batteries and doing backups. If you know which storyline you want to follow, you can start marking specific clips for use in your documentary. This saves you time when you return home. It was also very helpful for me to review all the clips every night so that they would be integrated into my mind; of what he had enough and what he still needed.
17) Keep your video clips no more than 2-3 minutes long, even 1 minute long. Once I got back to Canada, I found that it is much quicker to find a video clip by searching for 5 one-minute clips, than it is to find 1 clip of 5 minutes in length. This discovery completely surprised me.
18) My key subject, Laverne and I, agreed that whenever she felt an epiphany of emotional comment about to surface, she would direct me to come as soon as possible and film her monologue. These comments would be scattered throughout the documentary to truly reflect what happened during our 3 week mission. Help the cameraman quickly get to know his subject by spending some time with him over coffee, a drink, or a meal. In this case it was easy as Laverne and I have become good friends over the years.
Returning to our hotel at the end of the day, we always had a 1 hour debrief in the dining room area, giving each team member the opportunity to share whatever they wanted, whether it be related to their workshop or their true feelings in general. . This was the time when I used to get some ideas for other video clips that I could capture the next day. It was also a great way to create teams and share your experiences as a group in a remote country.
There you go; my tips for aspiring videographers. I am already looking forward to my next video trip, where I will further strengthen my skills mentioned above. Happy Daily Video!