Met with David Welz of the Four Corners Film office, http://www.4cornersfilmoffice.org/.  Please check out their website to see what the Four Corners has to offer for film resources and locations.  Come to the Four Corners for your next film or video project!

Getting ready to shoot some footage of an American Sign Language class for our documentary on deaf culture. It’s a beautiful day to shoot!

10 Tips to a Better Video

1. Slow down 

This is going to represent you and or your company, take your time in putting it together.  Spend a couple hours with invested people. This could be a client, employee, focus group, etc.  Start with the end - what are the thoughts and feelings you want to convey to the viewer?  What is your call to action?  How long are you expecting them to sit and attend to your video?  Is this a web video?  Presentation?  Infomercial?  Documentary?  Know what you expect from your viewer up front and build the piece around that.  What are your main points?  Are you going to use the standard “say what you want to say, say it, then say what you said” formula?  How many points are you going to address?  Remember KISS?  Keep It Simple Stupid?  People…viewers are easily distracted - too much information will cause their little brains to fry.  KISS

1. Plan it out

Make a checklist, keep notes and keep your head together.  Even a 3-minute piece can can take many (many…many…many) hours to look and sound great.  Create a timeline and work backwards from the end?  “This needs to be done tomorrow!”  That’s probably not going to happen unless you want your video to look like cousin Jimmy’s video of the monster-truck rally.  Video is an art…I think?  The more you put in up front, the better your outcome will be - Garbage In = Garbage Out.

1. Write a script

Not like every word (maybe if you’re really scripting something big - if so you should call Sage Film & Video, 970-946-8979, we want to be involved) but an overview.  For most stuff I take a regular sheet of paper - 8 1/2” x 11” portrait for those way concrete people reading this - and divide it into two columns.  The left column is for ‘Video’ the right is…wait for it…‘Audio’.  Each shot (within each scene) gets a description of what the viewer is seeing and what they are hearing.  Remember video might be ‘black’, ‘text’, ‘video’, ‘still’, or ‘CG’ (computer graphics).  Similarly, audio might be ‘silent’, ‘narration’, ‘soundtrack’, ‘music’, etc…………………………………..

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