Home Video Hints: Holiday Videos that Rock!

Jim Stinson
December 2004

"Every Christmas, I end up with miles of footage but no video."
-- a recent Videomaker conference attendee (Phoenix, AZ)

The problem with the jolly season is there's just so much of it, whether you're celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwaanza or any other winter festival. By the time you try to edit every highlight from the last day of school to the Rose Bowl game, you've got too much of everything and not enough of anything. To shape a program, you must select and emphasize events, preferably before they happen. So this season, try following four simple guidelines: plan for success, anticipate problems, shoot to edit and work like the pros. With very little effort, you'll collect the raw footage for a program to treasure through many holidays yet to come.

Since you can't shoot everything, the first step is to select just two or three upcoming events to cover thoroughly. These might include a shopping or tree-buying expedition, a visit to well-loved relatives, a program at your school or house of worship, a family feast, outdoor games in the snow (if you've got some) or the delicious ritual of giving and opening gifts.

To thoroughly document these key events, transform yourself from Civilian to Videographer. Remember that you're not there to, say, eat a turkey dinner while grabbing some footage along the way. Your main purpose is to tape the dinner while enjoying some food when you can. Only by making video your first priority, can you focus on getting high quality footage that will edit into a coherent program.

If you did this throughout the holiday, you'd miss most of the fun, but by selecting a few key events, you can limit and concentrate your serious video making. Through the other festivities, just work as usual, casually picking up your camcorder whenever something memorable catches your eye.

When you sit down to edit your footage, you can create a program that resembles a big shopping mall, with your two or three mini-documentaries working like the department stores that anchor dozens of small shops around them. I like to spot my mini-docs at the beginning, middle and end, but you could open with a montage of briefer stuff before settling down to your first well-covered event.

In addition to planning your essential events, plan your equipment needs:

• Keep your charger out and batteries rotating through it (I like at least three). In the car, I use a cigarette lighter inverter to recharge as I roll.
• Unwrap tape cassettes and paste on blank labels. That way, when you need a new tape you can swap it fast. Again, I like at least three.
• Corral your stuff in a gadget bag and always keep it with you. When you see a potential shot upcoming, power up and go on standby, so you can start taping almost instantly.

If you haven't yet bought a camera light, consider one for these dark, indoor holidays. An external battery is a must, of course, and the unit should at least swivel for bounce light and accept diffusion to soften its glare. For family interiors, you can go a step further with a light that bounces off the ceiling and brightens the whole area without grossly changing the character of the illumination. A $30 halogen torchère lamp will disassemble to fit in your car trunk. You can clip a work light with an alligator clamp high on a curtain rod or doorframe.

And wherever you shoot, spot your camcorder in front of the biggest window so that you're aiming away from it, to minimize back lighting. Between windows, Christmas trees, fireplaces and whatnot, holiday room lighting can vary tremendously. To avoid auto exposure that's always correcting itself a second too late, use two solutions. First, pan around on STANDBY to find a level that at least reveals faces in the shadows and then lock the exposure. Second, plan to edit out the pans between different compositions. That way, you can cut to each new shot after the auto exposure (and focus too) have adjusted.

Outdoors at night, experiment with disabling your GAIN UP control. The resulting black areas punctuated by bright lights may look better than the grainy soup of electronically amplified images.

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