I once found an article with the 7 deadly sins of videographers.  Here they are, and following is our comments on each of the “sins”.  If you are a visiting guest and have any questions on our usage of videography lingo, feel free to ask us!

1. Headhunting–placing every subject in the center of your frame.
2. Motorzooming–overuse of on-screen zooms.
3. Rooting–staying in one spot instead of looking for interesting angles.
4. Firehosing–panning all over the scene.
5. Upstanding–shooting everything from standing eye-level.
6. Snapshooting–taping only two or three seconds per shot.
7. Backlighting–too much light falling on the background instead of on the subject.

Headhunting-  Placing your subject in the center of your frame shows for lack of composition- which is not only essential, but is an absolute basic videography 101 concept.  You must compose your shot to look great on camera, which usually means following the rule of thirds.   The subject’s eye usually falls along the cross points on the grid.  All professional interviews segments use this rule, and just because you’re event filming doesn’t mean you should forget about composition.  When event filming, horizontal and vertical subjects should fall on one of the lines, they shouldn’t ever be in the center.

Motorzooming-  Whenever I see footage from someone who just bought a camera for the first time, all I ever see is overuse of the zoom button!  And to top it off, you can hear each click from when they push and release the button.  We rarely use zooms in our final footage.  We feel it is acceptable when the camera is on a tripod, but when it’s not, it’s best to edit out the zoom, but keep the shots before and after for a cleaner result.

Rooting-  When you are event filming, you can’t just stay in one spot!  To show your creativity you must look around your shooting location for different angles.  I don’t believe this applies to filming of the ceremony where it’s critical to stay in your position.

Firehosing-  Panning all over the place is an eyesore to watch!  By using composition, you can film different shots of each scene, and shouldn’t need to be panning all over.  If you want to get everything in the frame, step as far back as possible, put a wide angle converter lens, and film the entire location until you’re ready to change up for your next shot.

Upstanding- Some wedding production companies reply on their tripods, stabilizing system, or huge shoulder-mounted cameras for clean shots.  While those things do provide beautiful footage, it isn’t necessarily the most creative footage.  Relying on them will be upstanding the footage by keeping things at an eye level.  Our cameras and equipment are still professional, but will never inhibit us from getting creative shots!

Snapshooting-  Our rule of thumb for getting a shot is at LEAST 10 second shots of each scene.  And that’s 10 seconds before the zoom or pan, and 10 seconds after.  This allows us slack for when we are editing the piece, and just is a videography 101 basic concept.

Backlighting-  Sometimes this is unavoidable, and sometimes backlighting is a planned shot!  How nice to see a backlight shot of a dark couple’s silhouette in the front with the sun brightly shinning in the back.  But one creative shot, and shooting the entire event are two separate things all-together. To avoid backlighting, add more light to the subject, remove the backlight, film with your back against the light, or adjust your camera’s iris/shutter/gain to compensate for the backlight- which usually will either just make the foreground darker, or the background brighter.  We will try to let you know in advanced when we are filming if the location will yield this problem, and give you some shooting options to eliminate it. 

We hope this article and our comments were informative to you!  Please use this article as a reference point when viewing other videography samples.

Posted on June 16th, 2008 by Capstone Media Productions
Filed under: Videography