Speaker 1: So, about a month ago, I sent out a poll on YouTube asking what type of videos you all wanted to see more of. I genuinely want to make videos that are going to help you all grow as creatives, and 42%, 42% of you said you want to see more tutorials, so that's what we're focusing on today. All right, so this is going to be a little bit of a different video. I've never really done anything like this before, so hopefully it's helpful, but it's going to be sort of a virtual job shadow. This is a very low-stress event. I'm just doing it for a buddy, free of charge, but I'm just going to be walking you through some of the shots I like to grab when doing an event like this, so yeah, let's get to it. All right, so my first tip when shooting is get a variety of shots. This is going to sound really obvious, but if you take nothing else away from this video, really listen to this one, because getting a variety of shots is what gives you the foundation, the ingredients to make an interesting video once you're editing. So when you're shooting an event, or at least I have a tendency when I'm shooting events to try and get the perfect shot. Maybe I'll shoot the same thing seven times, or I start shooting only one type of shot. Maybe I'm shooting a bunch of close-ups with a lot of bokeh in the background because that's what looks professional. It's very easy to get caught up shooting very repetitive shots, and while a lot of people associate a tight focal length and a lot of bokeh with professional good-looking footage, it's pretty much impossible to make an interesting event video if that's all you shoot. So when I say get a variety of shots, that means, yes, shoot people, shoot objects, shoot the location, but it also means change the focal length. Shoot some tight shots, some medium shots, some wide shots. This is what's going to make your edit interesting. It's very tough to make an interesting video with only wide shots, and likewise, it's very tough to make an interesting video with only close-ups. You need that variety. Trust me, you'll thank me when you're editing. Alright, my next tip is going to be shoot with a fast lens. Now, a fast lens means a low aperture number, which means a shallow depth of field, but most importantly, a lot of light is let into the lens. Shooting events is a very different style than other types of shooting because you don't really have any control over lighting, or anything for that matter. Having a lens with a fast aperture like f1.8 or f1.4 means that even if the lighting gets bad, or you don't get to choose the best locations, you're going to be able to at least capture a shot. You're not going to be let down or unable to get a shot because your lens or camera can't keep up. Now, my personal recommendation is you want a lens that's f2.8 or faster. For me to feel comfortable, I like to have an f1.8 or 1.4 lens, but 2.8 is sort of the bare minimum. If you're looking for some recommendations, I'll link some of my favorite lenses down below for both crop sensor cameras, full frame cameras, budget options, expensive options, just stuff that I personally recommend. All right, my next tip for shooting event videos is stabilize your shots. This is a little bit of a pet peeve of mine, but to me, nothing looks unprofessional like jittery, shaky footage. Now, the best tool I've found for run and gun kind of event style video is a three axis motorized gimbal. Mine has a rubber band and a plastic bag around it because I was using it in the rain the other day. To be super quick, a three axis gimbal has three different motors on three different axes. Essentially, it means it's going to stabilize your camera no matter where you move it. You can get panning shots, tilting shots. You can even walk around with your camera. Once you sort of get a technique down, it's very stable no matter what you're doing. Now, the biggest downside to these is they are kind of expensive. If you're just starting out, you might not want to spend $500 to $1,000 on a gimbal, so using a monopod or maybe a tripod or even just stabilized lenses is going to help stabilize your shots. On that note, I have a full video on getting stable shots shooting handheld. I'll link that below if you want to check that out as well. All right, my next tip is capture emotions. This is another one that's super important and maybe not super obvious. When you're shooting an event, whether it's your first time or just one of your first times, you're just nervous, a lot of the time it's easy to get just laser focused on the camera settings. How's my exposure? Is my white balance okay? All that stuff, but at the end of the day, capturing emotion filled shots is going to be way more important than having everything just dialed in on your camera. Remember, the goal of the video is going to be to get some sort of emotion out of the viewer. If it's a wedding, you might want to make them cry. If it's an event, you might want to get them hyped for the next one. While you're shooting, make sure you get those intense moments where people are cheering or those ones where they're tearing up. Those are going to be some of the most powerful shots you can capture at an event. Another super important thing when shooting events is you always, always, always want to capture audio. Even if you don't think you need it, even if you're not capturing voices, capturing audio is going to save your butt in the edit. At the bare minimum, you want to record audio with your camera's internal microphone. It's not great, but it'll work in a pinch. A step up from that would be using something like a little shotgun mic or even lav mics, but being able to capture some sort of audio, whether it is people talking or just little sound effects here and there, is going to help you a ton in the edit. Speaking of which, let's talk editing. One of the most important things, heck no, the most important thing in your edit is you need to tell a story. Even if you wouldn't consider yourself a traditional storyteller or you don't work on short films or anything like that, editing an event video is storytelling, at least making a good one is. Editing is so much more than just picking your favorite 40 clips, throwing them in a timeline and calling it an edit. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that's how you make an impactful event video. I'm getting pretty generic here, but with a wedding, you would show people getting ready and then a little buildup, a buildup, a buildup, and then they're married, and then the afterparty. That's sort of like the loose story there. For the video I'm going to show you, it's kind of similar. There's an introduction where we establish where we are. It's slow paced, setting the scene, and then it ramps up to faster cuts, intense action, and then it slows back down a bit. All right, my next tip is you want to change up the pace of your edit throughout the video. Even if it's a little bit of a shorter video, this is what makes it interesting. I can't think of a more boring video than two minutes of the same pace, predictable cuts. You know when the edit's going to hit on every beat. That's boring. One of the easiest ways to kind of change up that pace is having a beat drop in the music. That's what I'm going to do in my video, or I guess I should say that's what I did in my video. But finding a song where the pace changes, the beats per minute changes a little bit, can sometimes help guide you through the edit, and it makes your video a lot more interesting. All right, next let's talk sound design, and incorporating sound design is like, imagine your edit is a cake. Sound design is like the frosting on top. Obviously the cake, the story, the shots are the most important thing. It is a video after all, but sound design just takes it all to the next level. Seeing people excited, laughing, smiling is one thing, but when you can hear them cheering, it just adds so much immersion. It's another layer to the video, and it really takes it from a 10 to an 11. And that's one of the reasons I say you should always be recording audio of some kind with your camera, because whether it's grabbing sound effects, or some cheering, or someone talking, it's going to help you in the editing process a lot. All right, and the next thing I want to talk about is spicing up your edit with transitions, and I sort of have mixed feelings with this one. Some people just want a one-click transition, and a lot of the time that just looks really tacky in your video. Other people make a terrible video with a terrible story, and they try and cover it up with fancy transitions. It doesn't work very well, but when used correctly, and strategically, and intentionally, transitions can make your video a little bit better. Now, personally, I lean towards in-camera transitions, so moving the camera in a way that transitions to the next shot. These feel a little more seamless, and they can flow really well when done correctly. Occasionally, I'll use overlays, or I will do something a little crazier, but be careful. Transitions can definitely make your edit a lot better, but they can also kind of just make it feel tacky and weird, so use them with caution, and be very intentional with them. And the last thing I want to talk about is a wow factor. I feel like every video should either have a shot, or a quick little montage that just wows the client, or whoever's watching. One unfortunate part about editing is really good editing is kind of invisible, right? The hours you spend moving clips around, rearranging them to tell a story to make it interesting kind of go unnoticed, or at least they're not super obvious. Having a wow factor or just something makes your video stand out more. It's not just clips thrown together in a timeline. There's something there that's kind of cool, maybe people will talk about. Now, for this particular video, I took just a pretty basic logo, and normally I could have just faded the logo in or something, and that would have been okay, but I really wanted to take it to the next level. I took that PNG, threw it into Illustrator, and then I traced it, because I didn't have the Illustrator file, so I traced that in Illustrator, just remaking that, and then I took it into Adobe After Effects, and made it into sort of a neon sign, animated that, and transitioned out into the next shot. I think it turned out pretty cool. I would say one of my strengths as an editor is using After Effects, doing motion graphics, logo animation, stuff like that, but that doesn't mean you have to do that in every video, right? Maybe you're going to go really ham with the color grade, or the sound design, or you've got a cool montage, you're going to mask out something and transition. There's a lot of ways to do it. I just think every video should have one part where you really, really try to make it as cool as possible. All right, so throwing that all together, here's a little edit of an event video I made for a buddy of mine. It was honestly a super small event, but I tried to make it look as big as possible. Again, this was just an unpaid, just for fun event. Half the reason I shot it and made the video was so I could make a YouTube video to show you guys how I edit and shoot event videos. Hopefully you enjoy. Sweet, so hopefully that was helpful. Hopefully these tips help you crush your next shoot, and as always, have fun, stay creative, and I'll see you all in the next one.