Blog Number One: Introduction To The Video World

Have you ever wanted to be able to save the world? To go on an adventure, stop the bad guys, and get the girl? To completely escape the reality and normalcy that we have all come to know in our daily lives? Well odds are none of those things will ever happen to you in everyday life, but there is no reason you can’t bring your own fictional adventure story to life some other way. I’m talking about the one place where anything can happen, no not Las Vegas, I’m talking about the movies. Now sure, being broke college students it is unlikely that we will have the chance to express our ideas on the big screen in Hollywood, but with internet sites like “Youtube” and “Collegehumor”, it’s easy for anyone to share their ideas and videos with the world. But you probably want what you are sharing to be good quality and something that people will want to watch, because face it if something doesn’t grab your attention online in the first few seconds, you will move on to something else, and that’s where video production skills come into play.

                When creating a video it is important to put together a team of people (a productions team) to split the work up so it’s not overwhelming—you will also want to make an awesome name for your team, preferably something random and wacky, the team I am on calls ourselves “ZombieTree Productions”. There are various positions on the team you will need to fill, each team needs a director, videographer(s), and talent. All three titles are pretty self explanatory, but to be clear, the director is the person in charge—it is imperative that someone is in charge, even if you are just with a group of friends, if someone isn’t in charge no one will know what to do,  the footage will be messy, and it will take you forever to get through production (also the team needs to acknowledge that the director is in charge, if they don’t you end up with a situation that may resemble the “Blaire Witch Project” and nobody wants that). Videographers are the cameramen, they need to be familiar with different types of shots (that I will go into more detail with in a later blog), and they also need to know the workings of the equipment they are using. The number of videographers you will need depends on your resources (how much equipment you are working with and what type of scene you will be filming). Talent is what anyone on camera is referred to as, they are the actors—though whether some of them actually have ‘talent’ is often questionable.

This is just a brief introduction into the world of video production, I will go much more in depth with techniques and terms in later blogs, but this seems to be a good start and enough for you to digest, until next time, keep the cameras rollin’.