Makeup and Wardrobe

Remember watching an interview on television that featured a world famous supermodel. During the interview, she said something that surprised me. "I sure wish I looked like that."
The picture she was talking about was a major magazine cover featuring HER. She went on to explain that the picture was the result of hours of careful work by a team of professionals including both wardrobe and makeup stylists.
It reminded me that no matter how good someone looks naturally, there are "tricks of the trade," that can help make them look even better. In that spirit, let's take a close look at wardrobe and makeup - two of the most overlooked elements that can enhance the look of your videos.

Dress for Success

In movies, academy awards are given out for doing an excellent job of finding or creating precisely the right clothes for the cast of a movie. For most of us, costuming for our videos is nowhere near that difficult. In fact, in most cases we just shoot whatever our "actors" happen to show up wearing.
But if you want your videos to be as good as they can possibly be, you should never leave any important element to chance. And wardrobe is certainly no exception. After all, the clothing your actors wear can have a big effect on the technical quality of your video. Remember that your camera is a light-gathering device. Depending on the amount of light that strikes the image sensor, the iris will need to open or close to achieve the proper exposure. This technical truth means that the wardrobe you choose can literally change what your camera needs for a good exposure.
Think about it. If the actor is wearing a pure white T-shirt, that shirt is reflecting the maximum amount of light back into the camera lens. Confronted with this bright subject, the iris closes. Everything else in the scene gets correspondingly darker. The background, the foreground and, even worse, the very face of your subject. This will particularly problematic if your subject has dark skin. When the iris is adjusted to expose for the white shirt, everything else in the shot becomes darker, and dark colored items may become lost in blackness, including your subjects face. All this simply because the major element in the scene, the talents T-shirt is white.
And, of course, the opposite is true. Put a light-skinned talent in a navy blue or black shirt, adjust the exposure for the dark shirt, and white objects will be over exposed and blown out.
For these reasons, it's best to put your talent in clothing that falls in the medium range of brightness and hue. Pastel colors work particularly well in video. As do medium grays and blues since the light reflecting qualities of shades such as these help you establish a good exposure.

Check Out Checks

The relative brightness of your cast's wardrobe isn't the only factor that can help or hurt your video. Some kinds of clothing patterns look just terrible on video. Thin spaced lines or small repetitive patterns can cause a distracting moiré pattern to appear in your shots. Moiré areas are where the picture seems to crawl or vibrate with a rainbow-like pattern. If you see a moiré develop while you're shooting, you can often get rid of it by either zooming in or out. But if you need to zoom back later, the problem will re-occur.
Clothing can also have an effect on how the audience perceives your subject. If a person is supposed to be a successful businessman and he's on screen wearing a poorly-cut, ill-fitting or out-of-style suit, you'll have a hard time convincing your audience to take his business advice seriously.

Just Make it U…