The Misadventures of a Self Taught Videographer | Ep. 1

Videography is something I have been interested it for many years. The passion was sparked by a desire to capture my friends and I as we did various death defying stunts on our rollerblades. Or, as we blew up various things with our homemade explosives (sorry to all our parents...). Lately, I've had a desire to make videos that have an impact on the viewer also.

So, with some extra money I started to buy some necessary equipment, like a camera. I started to search the vast expanses of the interwebs to find tutorials and lessons on videography. I even started DIYing some accessories (which I will post separately). With all this knowledge poring in to my brain, I felt ready for my first shoot.

My First Video Shoot. Which Turned Into My Second...

I met with my good friend Chris (@CDZthemessenger) to shoot his first spoken word video. I felt confident for the most part that I could come away with some awesome footage. Like I expected, I loved the footage we captured! We shot in downtown Provo later in the evening at the "Golden Hour" (right before the sun goes down).

There was a problem though. After I got home and put the footage in my editor, I noticed that the audio was absolute garbage. There wasn't a lot of wind that day, more of a slight breeze. I did not have a windscreen for my recorder (Tascam DR-40). My first "misadventure" was not monitoring the audio as we shot the video. Big mistake. We tried to salvage the footage by dubbing over the original, but there were to many factors that made that too time consuming. If you follow me on Facebook then you saw this photo.

This was the original footage. I loved it. However, I had to make the decision to re-shoot the video.

This time we shot indoors and, had a lav mic. There was an important lesson I learned on this second first shoot. Lighting is key! On the first shoot lighting was not an issue due to the great golden hour sun light. So, the footage came out a little darker for some angles but usable. More important to me, the audio was awesome!

There is a lot that goes into filming editing and producing a video, even if it is only 2 min long. I definitely learned a lot on this project and can only improve from here. The final product can be seen at this link: Contentment | Spoken Word by CDZ