Video

- Video and photography have a lot in common. With video, adding the dimensions of time, movement, and editing to the story-telling process. These elements help make up the language of film making, and it's a language used for everything from selling products to selling ideas to teaching and telling stories, both fictional and true. Video has been a huge beneficiary of the digital revolution. Digital SLR cameras can shoot video with a quality that used to require insanely expensive dedicated motion picture cameras. Even the phone in your pocket has shooting and editing features that used to require rooms full of equipment and specialists. Yes, big budget content is still produced with big budget gear, but small budget gear has opened up high quality film making for everyone. And least as important, the internet and the web have given film makers of all kinds a whole new universe of distribution options, everything from internal company websites to video platforms like YouTube and Vimeo, to social networking platforms like Facebook and Linkedin. Creating video can be as simple as taking out your smartphone and shooting a short clip for upload to YouTube or Facebook. But at the professional level, creating high quality video involves three important phases of development; pre-production, production, and post-production. The pre-production phase is where you write, plan, and prepare for your overall project goals. It's really about answering questions. What is your video trying to say? Who's it talking to? Who or what is going to be on camera? What will the finished product look like? What gear will you need to shoot it? How much is it going to cost? It isn't glamorous, but this phase is the most important part of any project. Your goal is to answer as many of those questions as you can before you can begin shooting. Our courses on video pre-production will teach you what questions to ask and show you strategies for answering those questions as you create a plan to move on to the next stage of development, the production phase. This is the lights, camera, action phase. It's where you capture the video footage that will ultimately become your finished piece. Creating an effective video is about having a clear vision of the end product, employing your skills to achieve that goal, and always being ready to adapt to last minute changes. Those skills include understanding how video cameras work, how to use creative lighting to communicate and enhance the mood of your story, how to employ movement and composition that will help your viewer connect with your story, and how to capture good audio so that your subjects and your story can be heard. Where all of this hard work comes together is post-production. Whether you're shooting a documentary or a narrative film, video is about story telling. This stage of video production is all about software tools like Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro X from Apple, and Avid Media Composer. These applications are built for telling stories with video, complete with motion graphics, still images, sound effects, and music. Their broad range of features can seem intimidating at first, but our courses will get you up to speed quickly and take you deep into the tools for editing, effects, color correction, and the assembly of your finished video project. Finally, something that should be on your radar is virtual reality. Not the kind where you hold paddles and slay dragons with virtual swords, but immersive video, 360 degree video that enables your viewers to look around and explore each scene, either on their computer screens or using low cost smart phone goggles, like Google Cardboard. VR video is a young field and the hardware is evolving all the time. Some VR shooters are using inexpensive cameras like the Ricoh Theta. The quality isn't fantastic, but the price makes them great tools for learning and experimenting. For bigger budget projects, film makers are using specialized rigs that hold multiple cameras, often GoPro cameras in a cluster that enables them to capture a full 360 degree sphere. As you might expect, VR adds an entirely new set of issues to the production and creative process, stitching together the video from multiple cameras, making sure you and your crew members don't show up in your shots, and story telling. How do you edit video in a way that tells your story and a world where your viewers can be looking anywhere they want. VR film makers are writing and rewriting these rules on a constant basis, but whether you're working in standard video or 360 video, it's important to have a clear vision of your finished product and your audience in the pre-production phase. That'll allow you to move into production and post-production with the confidence that your project will connect with your audience and deliver your message.