Shooting Better Video

June 14, 2011

Interview with Steve Stockman, author of the book How to Shoot Video That Doesn't Suck: Advice to Make Any Amateur Look Like a Pro

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Mike Carruthers:
Everyone is shooting video and with so much video floating around it’s important to realize…

Steve Stockman:
That nobody watches bad video. Even your mother will lie to you and say she watched that video of your kids but really if it was bad after 10 seconds she flipped to Family Guy.
 

Steve Stockman, author of the book How to Shoot Video That Doesn't Suck, says the big rule in shooting video is that less is more.

Shoot in short shots and if you think in short shots you’ll be pointing the camera deliberately shooting for about 5 seconds, stopping moving to the next thing, shooting for 5 seconds and stopping. And the video you end up with will be very, very watchable and will look much more like the television movies that you watch on a daily basis.

Sure you can edit all of your video later but you probably won’t, so shooting it deliberately will really help. And each shot should tell a story.

It needs to have a hero; it needs to be about someone or something and it needs to have an action verb. So the dog is not really a shot, the dog sits is a shot. And it has a beginning, middle and end, first there’s the dog, then the dog sits, then the dog looks at you and wags its tail.

And that’s 1 shot and it might only take 5 seconds.

But if all of your shots have a beginning, middle and end like that, then the video as a whole will be very interesting to watch.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here