Video Production

The story should be your last concern, just grab a camera and shoot any thing you believe would be interesting to capture on tape, then view it a few times to familiarize yourself with the differences between seeing with your eyes and seeing through the camera’s lens. Now with linear edition you can work wonders, create the most amazing special effects and transitions with programs like adobe premiere, adobe after effect, final cut pro, etc. In my case, I love making films on cars since Motorsport is my primary hobby, without a script I can imagine what my finished product could look like. Sounds overwhelming to make a short film that would express a story to the viewer? You would be amazed if you took a camera and told a story through it’s lens, of course the best suggestion is to do this about something you enjoy or love doing. It is amazing where the camera can take your mind, many times have I spent a few minutes trying to imagine a scene and how it could be shot, or debating an angle to shoot from or prespective until I looked through the viewfinder and said scratch it all, I’ve got a perfect vision now of what can look best. “Why tape” you ask? Well DV and MiniDV is becoming a standard format which you can use over and over as if it were a hard drive, well in a sense it is because unlike the conventional VHS tapes that record picture magnetically on a strip of tape, DV records or better said encodes data on tape in a similar way as a floppy would, which is the very reason why the quality is so good. t or not even though it doesn’t sound like such a huge job, I believe that the minimum budget for such a business lies somewhere around fifty thousand dollars, most of which would be spent on a six thousand dollar camera, a three to six thousand dollar editing station and that is not counting miscellaneous equipment like batteries and tape. When I shoot a scene, I can imagine exactly what I will end up watching on screen, but I don’t bound myself to my ideas or imagination.

If you are interested in doing video, and think you would enjoy using a video camera, you should begin with videotaping your own short films. Once you’ve got the concept and have some ability to visualize what will result on tape from what you see with your eyes, begin creating short scenarios or stories. Raw video even if shot by the best of professionals is useful when the editor doesn’t know what he/she is doing.

Besides “having an eye” for video and knowing what to do when looking through a viewfinder, pretty much being your own director/camera man it takes a good amount of skill and artistic qualities to edit and produce a videotape.