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Home Video Hints: Plan for Success

Most home video involves no planning at all, except to remember to bring along the camcorder. As Tom Lehrer memorably sang, "You just stand there lookin' cute, and when something moves, you shoot." That works OK for video snapshots, but sometimes a special occasion--a party, a holiday, a trip, a performance--demands just a bit more attention. No big deal, no elaborate production, just a skosh of extra care required to create a short, simple movie that satisfies the audience better than random footage.

To plan a successful program, you need to invent a concept, wrangle equipment and then think about what you'll find at the locations. But the first step in planning a successful video shoot is to develop the right attitude toward it.

Briefly, you have to change the way you look at the events you're recording. Normally you go on a picnic, say, in order to have a picnic, which you incidentally videotape whenever you think to do so. To make a good video, however, you must reverse those priorities: you go on the picnic in order to videotape it, incidentally having a picnic when shooting permits.

Obviously, you can't do this often without becoming one of those camera bores who never truly experience life because they're too busy framing it--the kind who don't see their own vacations until they watch them on-screen. The trick is to select an occasional candidate for coverage--a videogenic place, event or activity--and then get your head straight about it: while you're there, you're not a tourist or a grandma or a teacher, you're a videographer, just like those guys from Channel 3. [To see that attitude in action during a shoot, see the sidebar, Being (Politely) Pushy.]

For example, I attend my local farmer's market maybe 10 times a year, but on just one Saturday, I picked up my Mini DV and went off to the market specifically to make a movie about it. With my videographer attitude, I cared nothing about shopping. Instead, I looked for action to cover, pictures to frame, color to capture. By pretending to make a documentary, I focused on the job of shooting a movie.

You can't do this every minute of the event ("Daddy, look at the clowns!" "Don't bother me, kid, I'm shooting.") But however often you dip into the real world around you, pull back and re-focus on the task of turning it into a program.

After you get your head straight about what you're going to do, the next planning step is to find a concept an organizer to guide your eye as you capture footage. A concept is a one-sentence working title for your show that expresses its basic idea. "Farmers' Market" isn't a concept; "The Bounty of our Farms" is. "Las Vegas" is only a label, but "The Lights on the Strip is a concept.

Why bother with a concept? To return to the first example, our local farmer's market has produce, musicians, jugglers, kids running around, colorful street people, funny hats on funnier citizens, hand-made clothing--enough variety for a half-hour show. By looking for shots that present "the bounty of our farms," I can identify the raw material for a manageable 10-minute program and not waste time on stuff that may be fun but doesn't fit.