Timestamps
00:55 – Importance of Stabilization
01:25 – Benefit of shooting in your car
01:53 – Ideal Placement of Camera
Transcript
Hey, everybody, it’s Craig Lillard, and we’ve been talking about why it can be a reasonably good idea to shoot video in your car and how you can use those principles elsewhere.
Like I said in the other videos, I don’t recommend shooting videos in your car. I think it’s a trend that happened. I think there are good reasons for it and I think there are worse things that you can do. So, we’re talking about why those reasons are good.
STABILIZATION
We already talked about lighting and why you have good, even lighting in your car. Now we’re going to talk about stabilization.
First of all, stabilization is always important. Why is it important for you to have good camera stabilization? Simple, you don’t want your video to be shaky. You know when your camera is shaking. You’re holding it yourself, your arm gets tired and it’s just no bueno, unless you can really hold it still. Most people don’t want to watch a lot of shaky camera moves.
I highly recommend stabilizing your camera most of the time or at least having a gimbal, which is going to stabilize it as well. The benefit of shooting in your car is you usually have built-in stabilization if you have a car phone holder that holds your smartphone. Now, I use this one, but I’m not using it for these videos and here’s why. When it’s attached to the window, it’s pointing up and that’s not ideal. Let me tell you why that’s not ideal.
IDEAL PLACEMENT
Okay, this is your ideal placement. You want just a little bit of headroom. You, ideally, want to be centered or kind of off to the third here. But this is not attractive, y’all okay, aiming up. You can see, I got my double chin going on, my head looks bigger. I mean, let’s just get real here. This is not ideal, but watch what happens when I move the camera up. All of the sudden, I look better. I don’t have my double chin, my face looks a little bit slimmer there. It’s just a better, more ideal, composition to shoot from the top down. So, most smartphone holders will do that, and you’ll be good to go now, obviously, it allows you to make videos while you’re driving or whatever. No comment on that. Some people will attack you or your video and yourself while driving, some people don’t care.
Stabilization is always important whether you’re in your car or someplace else. It’s going to make your video more palatable and it’s going make things easier on you because you’re not having to worry about holding your camera. And you can get yourself into a position that looks good and is comfortable for you because sometimes you’re just trying to get your camera where you want it. But, because when you’re holding it, you don’t have a lot of camera placement options.
So, that’s the third reason shooting videos in your car is not a bad idea. But again, let’s take these reasons it’s a good idea and use them elsewhere to make more interesting videos but with better backdrops. Be more creative for your audience, which ups the value of your video. If shooting video in the car is your thing, don’t feel bad about that because you’ve got some really good reasons. The fact that you’re shooting videos in your car is probably gonna make your video look better and sound better than a lot of other people’s videos if they aren’t really sure what they’re doing and they’re just shooting not using these principles that are just built-in when you’re doing car videos.
So, hopefully, this helps you out a bit. Go out there, make some videos and take these principles, make some videos elsewhere by using these principles to get really good clean video content. This is Craig Lillard. Thanks for watching. I’ll see you on another video.
