Ignore these 9 filmmaking tips

[Music] everyone here is trying to sell you something I am not yet and without corporate sponsors I can say anything that I want I can say words like so while I'm still an unattached adolescent YouTuber without any corporate influence or oversight I thought I would share the 10 filmmaker YouTube tips that I think you can ignore again this is just my personal opinion but they're just some things where people spend too much time worrying about them and they don't really matter or they can matter just be intentional maybe I would be the worst influencer I hate buying new cameras New Gear new equipment because in my mind time equals money so if I'm spending money on things willy-nilly that means that I'm just giving away my time without too much thought this is exciting and look it's my first listicle I am so excited to Bear my listicle to you this takes a lot of trust and take all of these points with a grain of salt this is just my perspective and has come from me thinking about these things probably way too much and I would love to hear your response or your counterpoints to it so please share so let's get on with my listicle before it shrivels away to nothing it seems like a gimbal is in every videographer kit except for mine and I'm doing okay if we're speaking generally it gimbal adds a lot of slickness or a lot of awesome to a shot I personally like handheld it feels like you're part of the action a human perspective gimbals I find erase this and if you're like me you've wondered in the past why your handheld doesn't feel like Hollywood handheld essentially it just comes down to our cameras are too light when I first started shooting video I was shooting with a Canon 5D it was incredible it was that camera that you could switch from photo mode to video mode but that camera had a lot of rolling shutter which gave your images a really loose jelly feel the other problem with a light camera like this I'm filming on a Sony A7 S3 is that it's really light and it can go up and down and left and right really easy but it can also rotate and this is not something you find on Hollywood cameras because they're so heavy they're usually on a shoulder Mount or locked to someone's body in the early days trying to figure this out I built my own steady cam with some bent aluminum and some RC parts and it worked great but it w I didn't find myself using it at all I just still loved handheld shots or I was always using a tripod as it turned out I didn't want a steady cam or a gimbal I wanted a heavier camera I grew up watching French New Wave films they're the films that made me fall in love with film making the French New Wave came right at a time when cameras were just portable enough that you could run around a city with them so you get scenes like the running scene from jewels and Jim it wouldn't have the same life to me if it was shot on a steady cam but you can argue the opposite as well The Shining made the first beautiful use of a steady cam it was incredibly unsettling so in all of this take it with a grain of salt but make a considered Choice a house in a real estate tour always needs to look better than it actually is a bride always wants her wedding day to look more magical than it is the gimbal is going to do that so we talked about gimbals and handheld but there's another way to do things with just locked off shots on a tripod they're the best way to build a great composition if a gimbal is your default Choice try something truly handheld turn off stabilization and just like weigh down your camera I did a job with a friend Jeff we went to Guatemala on a coffee sourcing trip and it was on the original black magic pocket camera I put it on a homemade gun stock Mount put a big vmount battery on it just trying to add as much weight as possible so try it turn off stabilization get your camera off a gimble way down your rig give it a try so I love music it's all over all of my YouTube videos I use epidemic sound and it's cool cuz I can this is not plug or anything you can download What's called stem so I can just use the drum track or just the Bass track so I can build music throughout but another really great creative choice is not having having music at all one of the First videos I put in my portfolio was for a brewery and they just wanted me to document the process of making a poster there was a letter Press Printing Press I was standing on these heavy presses I was right up there getting these really cool shots beautiful window light and by the time I got to the edit I was just listening to the clickety clack of the machines and I knew that that's what this piece needed and it makes the piece and all of the audio was just through the pinhole reference my I'll keep using music I use it in most things but I just like to keep the possibility open that I don't need to one of my favorite YouTube channels is called not just bikes I'm a little bit of an urban planning nerd it's got a really great drill sarcastic delivery but it's overlaid over the real sounds of the cities that he's talking about and I think back to watching Cast Away no matter how many times you see it 3/4 of the way through the movie it's almost over when the music first hits the Coen Brothers have made films with little to no music Hitchcock was sort of known for that music does not need to be a default Choice other times I start a project very clearly knowing the song I want I did a short film called home position and I knew I wanted a jazz drum solo in it so I talked to a friend who's a great drummer and he recorded a track for me and it was a lot of fun [Music] I shot a fun short film with a Sasquatch in it with my friends Maddie and [Music] Tyler while I was writing the script I was hearing in my head that Paul Simon song Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard and I even used it as The Cutting track for the earlier Cuts but reality set in we couldn't use the song so do you need music no will it help usually can it be great without it for sure even all of these stupid YouTube videos I don't add music until I fully cut my talking head portion I just want to know that what I'm saying is Meaningful that it's working that it's flowing and then I'll start to think about music I mentioned my Canon 5D earlier and it was great got to turn on that video mode and we told the world about it we ran through the streets and screamed about our shallow depth of the field but in hindsight I feel like there was something else that made a bigger difference than photo lenses and their creamy bokeh there are words that my mouth just doesn't like saying and bokeh is one of them especially if you put the word creamy before it sort of like the word moist in bokeh bokeh is the quality of the outof focus areas of an image and and don't get me wrong I love love like the swirly background blur that I get from my yesika tlr or my old Soviet lenses I love it but when it comes to the 5D there was one change that I feel made an even bigger difference I remember a firmware update that they released that let you shoot 24 frames a second to me that was the true feeling that oh this is starting to feel like a movie this doesn't feel like video anymore so being able to control your depth of field is a great tool but if you're just hiding messes and background blur it's going to start to give itself away there's lots of great films that were shot in 16 mm if you think about sensor sizes 16 mm is Tiny compared to this fullframe sensor I'm shooting this stupid Vlog on which means you need wider lenses which brings the background into focus a lot more so films like Carol or Black Swan there's lots of shots in them with deep focus shallow depth of field is not what's going to make your movie a movie you don't need an95 lens that's not going to change things for you what you need is better composition one of the most persistent thing that bothers me about our content world is cutting to the beat the idea of cutting visuals and music to the same timing kind of makes like a bit of logical sense but in practice it gets really old really fast our brains love finding patterns so cutting to the beat is a pattern that makes sense but just as much as we love patterns we get really sick of them your brain knows what's coming and gets bored if there's anyone that's going to get replaced by an AI it's an editor who cuts to the beat editing is its own music that follows its own course and shouldn't be tied to an arbitrary rhythm of a song each shot needs its own perfect time I've sat with editors who've labored over should we cut on this Frame or this Frame and they wish they could cut in between those two frames this is where editing transcends when it's something special when you can feel so deeply inside yourself of where an edit needs to be that you're arguing with a computer about it now this doesn't mean you can't edit to the beat I still do sometimes but if the sequence is a sentence cutting to the beat is a form of punctuation if you use it too much it's going to be too sweet people are going to get sick of it you need to be willing to find the flow and cut with your gut not your brain this T wears off so fast in the human brain which is why you see so much of it on Tik Tok and a lot of those folks are going to get away with it let them let them have it us over here we want to build stories that are interesting for more than 10 seconds and we can do better so I'm talking about this and I just bought a new camera but you don't need to buy a new camera let someone else my sort of Point here is that a lot of people feel like oh oh if I just get this camera then I can make my film then I can shoot my film if I just get a better computer if I get a this or I get a that if I spend money if I throw money at something that's promising it'll help me that's all I need when really if you want to be a director if you want to be a filmmaker you just need to spend more time writing just be wary of this thought of when I get a camera when I get this thing this thing is going to be the thing that helps me do my thing buy equipment on a need not a possibility do you have that film ready to go and is that camera truly the last piece or should you spend time working on your script or packaging your production that you want to create if you have a vision that people are excited about helping you with if you have a creative that you want to ask favors for as long as you're not taking advantage of people a cinematographer who has a camera is going to say hey I'll help you with that actors will come out and say I want to be a part of this people will be excited to contribute it's not going to hinge on a camera it's going to hinge on you and your ideas when I go to a commercial shoot I walk into the room with nothing well I don't I actually have a clipboard for all of my shoots that I have my boards on so I can cross out what we've shot and what I can take notes on I come from a DIY background and I I I love the equipment I know a lot of directors who come from a writing background who never really touch a camera ever and they lean on other departments to fill those gaps the limit is not GE while I was writing this I was thinking about what is the light that Peaks out in February and your cat is always looking for and that light is the sun and the Sun is definitely not a soft light when I do commercials a lot of times we're on a location in a house or in a building and the Deep the cinematographer the first light they'll set up is a big one outside that feels like that perfect sun I did a video a few months ago about minimalism and part of it was just an exercise in playing with a new hard light I bought and how I could sort of mimic sunlight I was probably only successful with about 20% of the shots there's a feeling that comes with sunlight and real hard light that is really great so while I'm shooting with a soft light here in fact it's a little cheap flimsy light disc in front of a makeup tutorial ready ring light hard light is a lot of fun you don't always have to start with a artificial big soft Source start with everyone's favorite hard light the Sun going along with the gimbal uh you don't need a drone well I have a drone I have the little mavic drone or whatever it's like a few years old and for me it's just really fun to fly I don't fly that much much and I've tried to get a few shots mainly just for this YouTube channel when it comes to my general work if a gimbal is taking them out spiritually a drone is literally getting a shot from a wildly inhuman angle which is great if you need an establishing shot and that's what you see in your head get it but I know enough people with really great drones that I don't need to buy one if I need an establishing shot for a short film I'll get my friend Chris who's got a drone who's got insurance and can make a flight plan my point is is just be intentional maybe you do real estate videos and the Drone is what really sets you apart and makes these homes look fancier than they are then yeah get a drone it'll pay for itself it's great you don't have to you can't if you want but you don't have to you don't have to do anything uh above all you don't have to listen to me maybe you love fpv drowns they look like a riot maybe you want to shoot things like Michael Bay that is totally fine it's great then do it dive in have fun people always argue about new cameras with these incredible specs or whatever and I just think about okay how would I use that and one of those things is 120 frames per second you don't need 120 frames per second maybe you do I don't need it this camera can do it can do 240 I think it's insane but I don't really need it outside of special commercials where we've needed did something to fall or food to fall at a certain rate but for like an everyday camera it's so low on my consideration list coming from like a docky Commercial background sometimes I feel like if you need a lot of slow motion to tell your story maybe the story isn't worth telling that's why I use it in a lot of my commercial docy style work because it's it's marketing you know we're trying to make things look better than they really are and slow motion is sort of that crutch you lean on but I try actively to not use it in a commercial we recently needed a slowmo shot we tried it out at 48 frames a second which you would say is not that slow motion but it felt too slow-mo from me I've sort of weaned myself off of it met in the middle at 40 frames a second but those are sort of like the nuanced places my brain is working where a lot of times you know I'll shoot slow motion at 36 frames a second and it's just just a a bit of magic I even shoot things at 30 frames a second and then slow them down it almost feels real but it just adds a little hint of magic without like beating you over the head with it and then when you start watching 120 frames per second slow motion it's just absurdly slow 30 frames per second is where all the cool kids are these days you should give it a try I have a Canon R5 that I use for Stills it'll shoot 8K video which is apparently a cool thing I've never taken a video on it except for like accidentally but when am I ever going to use an 8K video if I need to blow something up but it's just going to look weird I have this a7s 3 and it goes up to 4K that's where it maxes out and even that is too sharp for me the movie ladybird which won some Oscars a few years ago I think I don't know it was a really great film and they shot it on an Alexa they shot it at HD and not only that they underexposed everything so that when they boosted it in the color grade it added this sort of like digital grain to it so they're like trying their hardest to break down a digital image cuz it's just too sharp 12K sensors are from this world of like oh we need options we're indecisive if you need a 12K sensor for a specialized reason I'd love to hear it like I said the gear is not going to make or break what you want to say so those are my eight or six or 10 I don't know I don't count I wasn't counting whatever I edited together that's how many there were those are my points about things that you can choose to ignore or maybe aren't as important as companies and YouTubers tell you they are so if you caught one point drifting its way through all of this it's that you should just be intentional in your choices be decisive be open to learn and reflect on whether that was a good choice and be open to making a better choice next time this is a craft an art that you can only get better at by doing you can read about specs you can read about Theory you can listen to my YouTube channel or anyone else's but none of it is going to really matter until you pick up a camera to try and fail and learn from your mistakes and do it better next time and even better the time after that and pretty soon you'll look back on what you thought was important 12K sensors or 240 frames per second slow motion or whatever this new camera was and realize you had way bigger fish to fry or or just go out there and shoot weddings on a 12K camera strapped to a gimbal on a drone at f95 shooting 240 frames a second cut that to the beat of the hot synth wave track and give the bride what she wants and get paid [Music]

Channel: Jesse Senko

Views: 82,092

Keywords: Filmmaking, Gimbal, Slow motion, 120fps, 240fps, Epidemic sound, Handheld, 12k, Sensor size, 16mm, Super 16mm, Filmmaking tips, Deinfluencing

Id: 8mIWUVpv-Mk

Length: 19min 4sec (1144 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 25 2024