Our video content clients near Athens, GA enjoy being on set with us. Who wouldn’t? You don’t have to memorize scripts or pretend to be an actor, since our creative process captures authentic interviews that become powerful goal-driven storytelling pieces in the final product.
Whether it’s a one hour interview for our Expert Interview Clips for social media or a full day marathon knocking out a month’s worth of a video podcast for YouTube, you’re bound to hear the following phrases from the Director or Production Assistant.
Things You Will Hear When Filming:
“Count to five for me.”
Once we set up the microphone, we always run at least two tests to confirm that it sounds great and is working as it should. Once our client is seated in front of the microphone, we’ll need to get some speach from them to test. Just asking them to “start talking,” however is vague and unhelpful.
Instead of leaving the request for a mic-check open-ended, we ask them to say something really specific and easy: counting to five. That gives us at least five to eight seconds of speech at a moderate volume to test our microphone on and confirm that our gear is working and the environment is ready.
“We’re warm.” / “We’re cool.”
Lighting must be used well in professional video content. While the camera is important, it’s often the lighting that makes a video look either professional or amateur. When we’re setting up to film video clips for social or entire video podcast episodes, we ensure that our lighting is dialed in and looking great.
Our lights are adjustable to have warm tones (red) or have cool tones (blue) and there is a whole measurement system for exactly how warm or cool a given source of light, or lit object, is.
The Rooster High video content team spends time fine-tuning the light in the room, adjusting for windows, the sun, house lights, and anything else can create brightness or shadows that we must account for.
And to add to that: different skin tones require different lighting strategies to look great on camera, so even lighting isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. You need experienced experts with a trained eye for video content to look excellent.
“Do we have focus lines?”
The video camera in your phone has a feature called auto-focus. Whatever your phone camera is pointed it, it will attempt to determine what the most important thing it sees is, and will focus on that point. Often, it will blur (put out of focus) anything that isn’t in the same distance away as the focus point.
While this kind of technology is present in our professional Sony cameras, we don’t use it. If we relied on auto-focus when filming for an hour, the auto-focus feature would inevitably decide to attempt to focus on something other than our subject at least once before re-focusing back where it should be. If this happened during a really great phrase or story, it would be frustrating to not be able to use those visuals.
The solution is manually focusing on our subject with our cameras. The classic method is to know exactly what it looks like for something to be sharp and in-focus. However, much like trained pilots trusting instruments over their gut feelings, videographers now have tools that can objectively tell them when something is in focus.
The camera will display thing white lines over any edge that is completely in-focus, letting us know beyond the shadow of a doubt that we have exactly what we need.
Athens, GA Video Content That’s Professional, Authentic, and Easy
There are many more phrases you’ll hear on set with the Rooster High team, made up of Zach and any of our freelance production assistance and camerapeople.
It’s our goal to create an easy process that’s fun to participate in, without asking you to do things you’re not trained in like write scripts or memorize lines. The majority of our video production clients are credential professionals with independent practices, and you didn’t suffer through grad school and maybe even a terminal degree just to pretend you’re auditioning for the community theater production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
If you are a business owner or marketing director who knows just how useful powerful storytelling can be and has a need to address with video content or podcasts, get in touch with me today so we can talk about your project.
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