Home Made Movies

How to Create a Great Video - a Simple Guide on How to Shoot Home Movies with a Camcorder
By Carlile Crutcher

So you have bought a camcorder and have shot some footage, but truthfully you don't much like the results. Maybe I can help. My advice is based on ten years of looking over people's shoulders at my business, the Video Kitchen in Louisville Kentucky, where people transfer old home movies, duplicate video tapes they've shot, and edit their raw footage. My staff and I see a lot of mistakes being made. Other times we see exciting footage shot by an amateur who claims to have no education in the art of videography. What makes the difference? Lots of things. I'll cover a few of the biggest issues here.

Let's start with a test: What's the easiest thing to teach a kid to do? Is it to feed itself, to go to the bathroom in the toilet, to walk, to talk? . . . No, none of those answers are the one I am looking for. Here's a clue: What do most kids do for more than 20-hours each week? Sleeping doesn't count. OK, here's the answer I'm looking for: The easiest thing to teach a kid to do is watch TV. As the kid grows up, how much time to we spend teaching him or her to create TV? How much time was spent teaching you how to create TV? Not much.

Many years ago, when I first started taking home movies, the firms, such as Kodak, that sold film came with instructions how to make good movies. Then, when you got your film back from the processing lab, you might find the dreaded "It's not my fault" note telling you how you screwed up with advice how to do better next time. Not so with today's video equipment -- you're on your own. Maybe a family member will suggest your video is lacking, but most likely everyone will watch in stunned silence and politely thank you for the experience as they excuse themselves to get some fresh air or go get a drink.

The learning curve for shooting video is similar to learning how to cook -- rarely does a beginner produce a gourmet meal, but we all know what tastes dreadful and what is truly gourmet. This makes learning how to "cook up" great videos intellectually exciting. What looks trivial -- just push the red button -- really isn't. There is much more to it than that, just as getting a great meal out without burning half of it and serving the other half cold and undercooked can be a huge challenge for the beginner (and even some of us who have been doing it for years).

Fortunately for the rebellious souls among us, the rules for shooting great videos are not cast in stone -- you can do rude things and your audience may love it, just as a great chef may burn and over-pepper a fish and sell it as "blackened" to an appreciative audience. But you really should know the rules of the game before you start breaking them -- you need to know how to use your tools and what happens when you push things to the limit.