Today’s Plan:
- Rule of Thirds
- Share
- Syllabus
- Intro Video Assignment
- Stockman
- Homework
First Day Assignment: Rule of Thirds
I wanted to start class giving you a sense of what we’ll be doing. So, let me spend a few minutes introducing a basic photographic/cinematographic concept: the rule of thirds.
You can use a Google Drive account to upload photos from your phone and then download/link to them in Canvas.
I have a quick task for you: go outside and take two pictures of the same person or object, one that exemplifies the rule of thirds and one that defies it. You have 10 minutes to take two pictures and upload them to Canvas.
Syllabus
Let’s spend a few minutes reviewing the syllabus.
Homework: Intro Video Assignment
For your first night’s homework, I want you to shoot and edit a very short video of yourself. Introduce us to something you can do, or something you like, something that you feel makes you unique. This is meant as a low-stakes, diagnostic assignment. Teaching writing is always tricky, because you never know someone’s previous history with/relationship to writing. People come into a class with widely divergent experiences. I find this is even more so with video. My guess is at least a few people in the class are aspiring or experienced filmmakers and a few people in the class have never shot more than a few seconds of video (we can talk about the differences between film and video later). Some of you probably have experience multi-track editing in Audacity. That sentence probably makes some of you feel a bit panicked. Don’t panic. As I said in the syllabus, this course assumes no previous experience with video. I’ll walk us through every step of the process. But, before I do that, I want a sense of where to start. That’s what this mini-assignment if for.
Steve Stockman
Before you shoot your project, let’s spend a little time with Steve Stockman, author of How to Shoot Video that Doesn’t Suck. Stockman provides us with five basic principles for shooting video:
- shots should be 10 seconds or less
- Whites of their eyes (faces)
- Light behind the camera, not behind the subject
- Keep the camera still, don’t shoot and move
- Keep your video short
If you are unsure what Stockman means by shots, maybe this will help.
Homework
Everyone will shoot and upload a video.
Expectations:
- Your video should be 20-30 seconds long
- You should trim your video clip(s)
- If possible, your video should be more than one shot. Each shot should be 10 seconds or less. Don’t worry if this isn’t possible. If you want to go for it, then you might want to use one of these apps.
- You should publish your video to YouTube (create a Google/YouTube account if you don’t already have one–make sure you will be comfortable sharing your username with the class). Here’s some instructions for getting a video from a smartphone onto Youtube.
Tips:
- If you have an iphone, then you can edit clips using the free Clips app
- If you have an android phone, then you can edit clips using either FilmoraGo or Adobe Premiere Rush
