The first thing to remember is that shooting home video and shooting home video for editing require different mindsets.
When people shoot home video for viewing, they're attempting to capture actions. Their child walking for the first time, blowing out their birthday candles or playing with the dog are all action sequences. So when you show your home video to family and friends, it's an action film. It's one action shot after another inorder to keep the viewers interested.
Shooting home video for unedited viewing tends to be the "exciting" parts. It's footage of people singing happy birthday, not footage of the kids arriving at the door. To fill any awkward jumps in the footage, the person who shot the video narrates to the audience as they're watching the video, ie. "This is where such and such happened. And coming up is where we did this or that."
Unfortunately the limitation to shooting without editing means that the video tends to lose much of it's context between one scene and the next. Also, you can record for several minutes to capture the "exciting" moment which leads to lots of rather unwanted footage.
Shooting for Editing
Shooting for editing requires that you remember that your video is created during the editing process not during the shooting process. Shooting video then becomes less about keeping it interesting and more about establishing context.
Of course, you still want to get the exciting parts. However, you need to also shoot the context of those exciting parts. If it's a birthday party, where is the party? What do the decorations look like? How many kids are there? What games are they playing? Who else is there?
The object is to let the video speak for itself. And the only way to do that is to get footage that establishes what, when, where and why? It doesn't have to be long continuous shots. It could just be 3 seconds of you panning over all the children. Or 10 seconds of your child peeking at the gifts.
Remember that you're not going to be showing unedited video, so it's not like your viewer is going to see a string of 10 second shots. You're shooting pieces to make a whole, like you would grocery shop for ingredients to later bake into a cake. You're not going to be giving them a plate of flour and eggs and sugar. You are shooting ingredients in order to make a movie that's visually delicious.
Footage that answers questions
If your movie is to speak for itself, it needs to answer questions.
For example, you are planning a trip and want put together a vacation video. The time to start shooting is before you actually travel. Some questions that might come up that your video should answer are:
- What was the hotel like?
- How did I feel when I arrived at my destination?
- What did the hotel room look like?
- What was the flight like?
- What did I know I wanted to do even before I left?
Take the question: what was the hotel like? Show us the answer. Take video of the outside, your rooms and the hotel lobby. Give the viewers who weren't there a perspective of what it was like to be there.
Ask yourself questions about the experience and answer them with the video footage you take.
