Home Video Hints: Holiday Videos that Rock! (page 2)

Audio is always a problem, whether in a room full of excited kids opening gifts or at a school concert with your microphone 50 feet from the choir. For most situations, be prepared to lay a continuous music track under the edited footage, to minimize level changes and sound discontinuities between shots. Since your program is for private family showing only, feel free to use any music you fancy.

In the auditorium, you're pretty much stuck, unless you can club together with another shooter. That way, one of you can lay down a continuous wide shot with an uninterrupted sound track, while the other captures details of the concert. Since a digital copy is as good as the original, you can both have A and B rolls to edit with.

At concerts, parades and wherever else you're stuck in one place, it's tough to vary your point-of-view. Though you can't shift the camera, you can pan and zoom it. Moving in, frame one group of actors or soloists, hold on them, then go to another group. Keep pans and zooms slow and steady because you can't cut them out of the edited tape without losing audio continuity.

You can, however, get audience reaction shots by cheating them:

• During your beloved offspring's solo performance, keep the camcorder on him without a break.
• While some other kid is being a sugar plum fairy, pan around to shoot the audience's rapt attention to the performance.
• When you need a cutaway within your own child's solo, insert the other's kid's audience reaction shot. No one will be able to tell the difference.

Finally, at performances especially, plan to work on a tripod and enable lens stabilization if you have it. It's amazing how tired and shaky your arms can get, holding up a two-pound camcorder for just ten minutes.

Notice that many of these tips will help you add variety to your coverage. That's called "shooting to edit." Shooting to edit is the crucial technique for taping footage that will cut together into a coherent program. In a nutshell, this means recording establishing shots, capturing inserts, obtaining plausible cutaways and varying camera angles.

Always get an establishing shot of every location, to orient the audience and establish a context for details. A wide shot is also useful when you have problems matching action, because it shows fewer details than closer angles. You'll often start by taping an establishing shot, though you needn't always begin the edited sequence with it. For added drama, start with a close shot, then pull back for the wide angle that explains it.

Don't forget to update your wide shot as events progress. The tree area looks very different before and after present opening and the wreck of a holiday dining table speaks volumes about the feast that was consumed upon it, especially after a slow dissolve between identical before and after shots.

The small screen needs big close-ups to tell its story dramatically. Insert shots of details deliver the goods while fulfilling a vital editing function: they buffer continuity gaps in the overall action. If a present threatens to take forever to unwrap, change your POV and punch in to a big close-up, just as the box is being opened. By inserting this shot, you can omit most of the unwrapping process.

Cutaways do the same job by using shots of different action. Typical cutaways include people's reactions to the main action or else other actions unfolding in parallel. For instance, you could cut back and forth between two family members as each unwraps a present. When all else fails, try using atmosphere shots (tree lights twinkling, snow falling into the light pool of a street lamp). Though they have nothing to do with the action, they help communicate the environment in which it happens.

Finally, when not stuck in one position, vary camera angles from shot to shot. Remember: a setup consists of horizontal angle, vertical angle and subject size. In moving from one shot to another, try to change two out of three of these.

• Digg This!
• del.icio.us
• Technorati
• StumbleUpon
• Reddit