Speaker 1: This was shot on a $5,000 camera setup. And this was shot on my iPhone. And that's going to be the focus of today's video. Maximizing the quality of the camera you always have in your pocket. So my house is getting renovated right now and everything is a complete mess. This is my office where I normally have everything set up ready to go. Very streamlined content creation process. But ever since the rehab, I've actually been living downstairs in this little in-law suite. It's just a one-bedroom apartment that I have. And for a while I kind of let it restrict my creativity. I didn't create much content. But that ends today with this YouTube video where I show you guys how to film anywhere no matter what gear you have and still get great content. I have a six-step process that anyone can follow. So take out a pen and a piece of paper because step number one is pick your scene. Now picking your scene might sound insignificant but it's really really important. And it's one of the most common things that I see amateur content creators forget to focus on. It can also be overwhelming sometimes because in a given space there's probably 100 to 200 different ways to film it. But to boil things down, I look at just two factors. Do we have an interesting background and do we have depth in our scene? When it comes to the interesting background, I usually look for just a few things. Up first, I like identifying areas with symmetry because that can kind of balance the image and make it easier for the viewer to focus on. After that, I look for interesting elements of practical light. That's why in the beginning of this video, I had the scene in the background with two practical light sources almost perfectly symmetrical with one another. And then finally when it comes to depth, it's actually really simple. You just want to increase the amount of space between the subject and the background. You want your content to be like onions. You want it to have layers. And when you have a very distinct foreground and a very distinct background, it's going to make your videos look more immersive. So when we consider the room that I'm in right now, my go-to spot for creating content is placing myself kind of in this front area of the room, filming that way because it increases the space between myself, the subject, and the background. The worst thing that you can do when it comes to picking your scene is taking your subject and putting them right up against a wall that's either completely blank and boring or just way too complex with things that make the scene look disorganized. Now step number two is really simple. It's to clean your scene. As straightforward as it is, you'd be amazed how many people have terribly disorganized scenes and it kills what could be an amazing shot. Prior to filming this video, I had tons of junk down here from all throughout my house. I tried to take as much of it as I could and just hide it in other rooms while I filmed this video simply because I knew it would improve every scene that I shot by a ton. Okay so you've picked your scene, you've cleaned your scene. Step number three is your composition. Now composition is essentially how you fill the frame of your camera. What do you include and what do you not include? Now this ties back into step one because picking your scene is all about composition. Do we have an interesting background? Have we created depth in the scene by separating our subject from the background? But it goes beyond just that and here are a couple quick tips that can really improve your content. You really want to make sure that you fill the frame as best as you can. This basically means to have your subject take up a majority of the frame. You don't want them floating out in the middle of nowhere surrounded by all this empty space. On the flip side, you also don't want them super up close to the camera and just taking up all the space. But a good rule of thumb is to divide your frame into thirds both vertically and horizontally. If you can line the eyes of your subject with that top horizontal line, you usually know they're in a good spot. After that, you want to make sure the physical lines in your scene are straight up and down and straight side to side. Now this can really throw people off but look at the lines in the scene around me. All of them are almost perfectly straight up and down or side to side and it took me a minute to really fine-tune the camera to make sure that's how the scene looked. There's one bookshelf in the back that is just naturally slanted and it drives me crazy because it just stands out in the scene to me. But other than that, it would be very distracting if the ceiling or the table were just wildly crooked. At the end of the day, it just reflects unprofessional content. Now if you already shot your content and you're like crap my lines are totally skewed, you can fix this using your editing software by punching in slightly and rotating the shot to get the lines as straight as possible. Now step four is in my eyes the single most important thing to shooting high quality content and that is your lighting. Right now this shot doesn't look that good because the lighting is behind me and there's nothing lighting the subject. If we just do a little rotation now you can start to see just how much lighting can improve your content. But Anthony, I don't have thousands of dollars to invest in professional lighting equipment. It's not the end of the world. You can do what I'm doing right now which is sitting on a box of hardwood floors positioned next to a window. Windows are incredible sources of natural diffused soft lighting and whenever I don't have my professional gear I always try to make sure that I position a subject myself whoever it may be near a soft diffused light source like a window and it's going to improve your content like crazy. Now you may have just heard me say soft or diffused lighting. You might not know what that is and it's totally fine. When it comes to light we have two major categories. We have soft light and hard light. Naturally most light sources are hard light which isn't really what we want. It's not that flattering. It's going to show off imperfections on a person's face. What we want is soft light and we can convert hard light to soft light by passing that light source through another medium. Think about the window example that we just talked about. That was natural sunlight from outdoors but it was being passed through the glass window which acts as that medium. It makes the light more flattering on a person's face and usually hides imperfections and softens that skin tone. Now if you live in a box with no windows or you're trying to shoot content at night when there is no natural light this is where professional lights come into play. Now there are professional lights that aren't that expensive and I have two to recommend to you right now. The first light is the Yongnuo YN300 Mark III. This costs under $100. You do need to buy the battery separate but it is a super affordable and high quality light. Now straight out of the box the Yongnuo is going to be a hard light. We need to pass it through a medium and the good news is you can buy a five-in-one reflector kit from Amazon which has this handy dandy diffuser functionality. All you have to do is position that in between the light source and your subject and it's going to diffuse all that light and make it look beautiful. The last thing you're going to need to make that setup truly functional is two Amazon basic stands. One to mount the light on and another one to actually hold that diffusion panel up. All in all between the light, the stands, the diffusion panel, and the little clip to hold the diffusion panel you're looking at a little over $100 for a light source that can give you absolutely professional results. And by the way all the gear that I talk about in this video is linked below in our kit.co pages. Now if you want to go one step higher my favorite light that I use for practically all of my shoots is the Godox SL60 paired with a softbox. Now everything in this setup is going to run you a little over $200 but it is extremely professional. It's very versatile. The only downside of this compared to the Yongnuo is it doesn't quite as easily have battery-adapted power. Now this is usually the point in the video where people ask, Anthony what about ring lights? I thought those were specifically made for smartphone content creators. Now there's nothing wrong with ring lights but they were made for makeup tutorials. They're perfect for that style of content because you can put the light directly in front of you, you mount your phone in the center of that ring, you look into it, and you get these really cool looking circles in your eyes. That's what we call flat lighting where the light is in front of the subject and it lights up the entire subject so everything looks even. As nice as that may sound it's really not what we do when it comes to cinematic filmmaking. Instead of putting the light directly in front of the subject you actually place it in front off to the side and slightly above the subject. By doing this you create a very distinct bright side of the face and then a slightly darker shadow side. Going back to the beginning of the video when we talked about depth having this contrast in the two sides of our face creates a more three-dimensional and immersive video which naturally is going to feel a little bit more cinematic. Start focusing on any of your favorite Hollywood movies or TV shows and you're going to notice that almost all the time all of the subjects have a bright and a dark side of their face. Now you can obviously use a ring light in this fashion you can just not mount your phone in it put it off to the side make sure you add some diffusion and you'll be good to go. All right now that we've got lighting out of the way step number five is audio. Having good high quality audio in your videos is extremely important no one will watch your content if your audio sounds bad. But the good news is having high quality audio does not need to be expensive. Your first option that costs zero dollars is to use the microphone built into your camera. Now this isn't what I'd recommend most of the time because it's usually not the highest quality mic but it is free and if you're holding your camera close to the audio source like within an arm's length away the audio is not going to sound that bad. Right now in this setup as soon as we get over an arm's length away the audio is not going to sound good. You're going to get a ton of echo it's just not professional and it can really be improved with a very affordable upgrade. All you need to do is go on Amazon and purchase the $13 Pop Voice Pro lav microphone. As far as bang for your buck goes this is about as good as it gets. What you're listening to right now is the Pop Voice Pro microphone. It's literally $13 and it is 10 times better than the onboard camera microphone when we have that distance issue. All you need to do with this mic is plug it into your phone and it's automatically going to start recording. Now if you are using an iPhone like I am you're going to need one of those lightning adapters which you can also get on Amazon. It's pretty frustrating that this is like almost as expensive as the microphone is but either way that's going to solve your audio problem. Now once you have the microphone plugged into your camera you can literally just clip it on your shirt usually around your collar or you can do what I do which is actually using a rycote sticky and placing the mic just behind my collar. So it's actually underneath my shirt you can't see it and as much as you'd think there'd be some scratchy noise from it hitting my body it doesn't actually happen. Now this is the setup that I would recommend to 90% of people assuming you want to save as much money as possible. If you do want slightly higher quality audio and you want to have the benefit of not being literally tethered to your camera I would suggest you buy the Rode SmartLav Plus and then plug that into a dedicated recorder like the Zoom H1n. Aside from having a slightly higher quality microphone the main difference is that you're no longer tethered to your camera and if you're walking around a ton like I was throughout this entire video you can literally plug the mic into the recorder and then put that in your pocket especially if you're further away from the camera than the mic cord can literally reach. This is perfect you just have to remember to hit record on both your camera and the actual recorder each time and then after the fact when you're editing you just have to synchronize the audio recorded to the dedicated recorder and the audio from your actual camera. It might sound complicated but most editing programs can actually do this automatically and it's really easy. And then last but not least just because I know people are going to ask you can also buy a wireless microphone kit. My favorite would be the kit sold by DJI. What's great about this is it's going to wirelessly transmit the audio from the transmitter which you usually put in your pocket to the receiver which you would plug into your phone. What this means is you just don't have to sync the audio in the actual editing software anymore because it's literally baked into the video files but it is going to cost you about $150 more than using just the microphone plugged into a dedicated recorder like the Zoom H1n. All right up next we have step six the big guy shooting your actual content. Now it's important to realize here that we've made it this far in the video and we're just now starting to talk about your actual camera. This just goes to show that it's really not about the camera you're using. Instead it's about the lighting, the composition, recording great audio. That's what makes up good content. It doesn't matter if you have an iPhone, an Android, or a $10,000 cinema camera. If you mess those fundamentals up your footage is always going to look bad. So just keep that in mind. I know it's very common when our footage doesn't look the way we want it to to just blame the camera but it's almost always the lighting and the composition that makes our images look worse. But of course if you have unlimited money you can buy those bigger cameras. It is going to help your content it's just not necessary to get started. Anyways I'll stop preaching let's dive into the best tips and tricks to shooting with your smartphone. The first problem you're likely going to run into is if you're using the cameras on the back of your phone, which you should they're higher quality, you're not going to be able to see yourself when you're filming. Now this isn't the end of the world. What I typically recommend people do is you set up your camera, you frame your shot, compose things the way that you like, you hit record, and you film a quick test clip. Usually I'll sit down or stand where I think makes sense. I'll do some sort of motion I might even talk to the camera and then I'll go back and review the footage. Usually it's just move a little to the right tilt the camera up. Once you've made those adjustments you confirm that things look the way you want with another test clip and then you're good to record. Now if you really really do want to still see yourself while you're filming there is a mirror mount that you can get for your phone that basically reflects the screen back at you. It's like $27 on Amazon. I personally don't use one and the reason behind that is because I do shoot on an iPhone and I have an Apple Watch and a MacBook Pro. And what's cool is you can actually mirror your camera to your watch. Right now I can see how my framing looks. I can hit start and stop recording which is great even though it's a small screen. All I really need it for is to make sure I'm center frame and that things look good. The same goes for my computer. I can mirror the screen of my phone to my computer, check out the framing, make sure things look good, and move from there. Now if you're on Android you can't mirror to your Apple Watch or your MacBook but you can buy an external monitor and get an HDMI to micro USB converter which allows you to project your footage onto the external monitor. All right now that we've got that out of the way let's talk about probably the most confusing aspect of filming on our phones and that is what settings we should use. Now settings are obviously something that could have hours of explanation to them and we do actually cover them in detail in our online program 14 Day Filmmaker but I'll talk about that at the end of the video. But the cold hard truth is that if you control your lighting and your scene looks good you can film in all auto mode and it will look really good. Believe it or not this entire video was shot using the native camera app on my iPhone 13 Pro and I was switching back and forth between cinematic mode and then the wide angle camera on my iPhone 13. The reason I really like cinematic mode is because for talking headshots like this it basically hyper focuses the viewer on me and digitally adds this blurred out background. It kind of mimics the look that you'll get from the more expensive cameras with larger lenses and larger apertures. Now Apple has obviously coined this setting and called it cinematic mode but almost all smartphones coming out nowadays they have the same exact feature. If that's the case for your phone great I'd use that feature from time to time but it's not required to get good looking content. But if you do want to squeeze just a little bit more quality out of your camera you can download a third party app which allows you to take control of the more advanced settings like shutter speed, ISO, picture profile and a few other things. Now that's obviously with iPhones. If you're on an Android camera a lot of Androids actually have this built in. For example all the Samsung Galaxy phones they have pro mode built in which again gives you control of those settings. A few other questions people will commonly ask me is Anthony should I invest in any lenses for my smartphone camera and for that I typically say no you definitely don't need lenses. Most modern smartphones have a couple lenses built in like this iPhone it has a 26 millimeter main camera, a 13 millimeter ultra wide camera and a 77 millimeter telephoto camera. Those three lenses are going to give you a ton of range and if you buy additional lenses it's not really going to add that much. I tend to stay away from them. And then finally they'll ask if I have a recommended resolution and frame rate. This kind of goes back to the previous conversation about third-party apps. You definitely can take control of them and squeeze a little bit more quality out of your content but for the most part if you do all those other things correct it doesn't matter what resolution and what frame rate you use. Most of the time though on my iPhone I'm filming in 4k because it gives me more resolution than the traditional 1080p and then for frame rate I'm usually at 24 frames per second which is the Hollywood standard as far as most regular speed content is concerned. Now that was the six fundamental steps of shooting great content with your smartphone. We obviously have step seven which is to edit your content but that's another video all by itself. Hopefully you found today's video extremely helpful and if you did I'd really appreciate it if you hit that subscribe button beneath this video. It helps with the algorithm and I really hope that you're inspired to go out and shoot your own content. Now I also understand some of you may be sitting there a little overwhelmed at all the information that got thrown your way today and if that's you I have good news because I run a website called contentcreator.com and we have an online program called 14 Day Filmmaker that's helped over 70,000 people just like you master every aspect of the content creation process. When you enroll you get lifetime access to everything but the curriculum is sequenced in a 14 day format taking every individual aspect of this video today and diving deep covering everything you need to know about the topic. We show you all the apps you could need to squeeze as much quality out of your camera as possible. We cover all the editing softwares you could ever need to learn. We show you why you might want this one over this one. All the tips and tricks to shoot YouTube videos, commercials, social media videos with the trendy captions. We leave absolutely no stone uncovered and that's why we have a huge satisfaction guarantee. Not to mention anyone who enrolls gets downloadable cheat sheets, bonus sound effects, you get access to our student community where I host a live weekly Q&A call meaning you can hop on with me and literally ask questions. I can review your content, give you some tips and tricks. We try to make this the biggest no-brainer deal on planet earth and I think it's working because we have over 70,000 happy students. I'd love to see you in the program and help you take your content to the next level. Anyone who enrolls right now actually gets access to two bonus programs. The second one is a pro camera edition so it covers all the same concepts but with professional cameras, professional equipment, and all the things that you might find yourself leveling up to as you dive deeper and deeper into this passion of yours. Then you also get access to One Week Director which is a seven-day crash course on storytelling and directing amazing short films. If that sounds interesting and you want to learn more, the link is in the description beneath this video. Other than that, thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video.