5 Mistakes Amateur Filmmakers Make

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Hey, what's up? I'm Peter from Media65. You know that money doesn't really make the big difference anymore between a bad film and a good film. With a budget less than 1k, you can already achieve really professional results today.

So what is the main difference? Let me show you the five main mistakes that I have spotted when amateurs are filming. Today's smartphones easily rival the quality of good video cameras. And even affordable video cameras come with a quality that would not have been imaginable 20 or 25 years ago. And when it comes to video editing, video editing software today is affordable and sometimes even free of charge. So the real difference is you. Because it's your skill set, your creativity and your imagination that will make the difference between a good film or a bad film.

And here are the five mistakes that you should absolutely avoid if you don't want to completely ruin your films. Creating a video is not only putting together a couple of images, it's about telling a story and conveying a clear message.

And the story has to transport the message in the best way possible. Even short videos, they need to have some kind of a structure because otherwise they will never be perceived as what they should be.

The best way to inform or to entertain your audience. Ok, I agree. Filming is an art and it requires a lot of skills. There is no wonder actually why most of the people pass through film school. But nevertheless, even if you have never come close to any film school, there is no reason why you shouldn't respect also some basic rules. One of the most important rules is the rules of thirds. You have to respect this rule, especially if you have people in the frame. And then also work on your diagonals. And in general I can say get inspired by professional video productions and look how they compose the images. It's very interesting if you have a clear look at these video productions and you see how the image is composed that will open your eyes and will inspire you quite a lot for your own video productions. And then camera movements. That's quite an interesting topic because I see a lot of people there making camera movements left and right. They pan over an audience but without any clear target, any clear goal. And every camera movement that you have should clearly deliver also a message. Give every single camera movement really a purpose. That's something which is very important. And last but not least, please don't zoom in. Even if you have a video camera where you can zoom in and out. Have you ever seen any professional video production where the cameraman or the camerawoman has zoomed in or out? Obviously this is not the case. What professional camera people are doing, they're moving the camera towards or away from the subject itself. Be it on a dolly, be it on a gimbal or be it sometimes also handheld. So you should never try to zoom because right away it will make your film make really amateur like. So never zoom please. Let's speak about white balance and color temperature. It's very important that you get a deeper understanding of what color temperature means and how you set the white balance on your camera in best case manually. Of course, most of the cameras today come with a quite good automatic white balance. But nevertheless, this automatic white balance isn't flawless and it might not guarantee that not the different shots that you are taking will look different also in the post production and especially when you are panning it might be very well that the automatic white balance is during the shot itself changing the color temperature and that will definitely not look very good. So dive into this topic, make sure that at least when you are filming the white balance is locked while you are recording because otherwise you will find yourself with very very crappy results in worst case and you will spend a lot of time color grading these shots just to fix this problem that could be quite easily just avoided during the shooting. Bad sound.

Oh yeah, I made a whole vlog about the fact that today there is no excuse anymore for bad sound. First of all, good microphones, even good microphones, are today pretty much affordable. And even if your recording is not perfect, then today AI can help you to improve even poor recordings. But nevertheless, as good as AI is, just make sure that during the recording your sound is the best possible because what you don't have to fix in the mix will save you a lot of time afterwards.

And on the other side, I know it's maybe trendy to have the microphone in the hand and to run around with the microphone to record yourself. Maybe I'm a little bit old-fashioned, but I want to have the microphones as invisible as possible and especially I don't like it if you have any cable dangling around here.

So make sure that the microphone is invisible, that the cable is not showing and the sound quality is good. And that will definitely make you professional. Filming is only one part of the business. Equally important is the post-production, the editing.

And here I recommend that you definitely get inspired again by professional video productions. Look at them. Look how they structure the editing, how they structure the different scenes, what cuts are they using, what reason they are bringing into the film that they are editing.

That's very revealing and you can inspire yourself quite a lot on that. And then there's one word about transitions. If you inspire yourself by professional video productions, you will discover one thing that I have learned quite early on in my career.

They usually don't use any fancy transitions. There is not even sometimes dissolves in there but just hard cuts. If your film doesn't work with hard cuts, then you made some fundamental mistakes during the filming. If you want to use transitions, then please use them on a purpose and very clearly to convey a certain message or to structure your film in the best way possible.

And then another word about music. You will use music of course to underline certain aspects of your video. And it's a good idea also to edit the video, to make the cuts in accordance with the sound itself. Be it on the rhythm, be it on the mood, you need to feel the music and then you edit and cut your video also according to the music. That will make a huge difference between a film which is poorly edited on the music or a film which is well done edited on the right music. Producing videos is not rocket science. It requires skills that can be acquired. All the gear you might partly have already or you can acquire it also for very little money anymore.

So there is no excuse anymore for producing videos in a high quality. The only thing that you need to have is the willingness to do it, to learn new things, get inspired by professional video productions and then do it and do it again and again rinse, repeat, learn, rinse, repeat, learn and so on until you feel, "Oh now I'm becoming better." That's how you should do it and I know that you can do it.

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