It’s coming up to a year now since our video equipment appeared in a puff of smoke in the Chad office. We had no idea how to use it, but that didn’t stop us. By which I mean it didn’t stop us from producing and publishing some decidedly ropey bits of video.
Which is not to say that we’re Bafta contenders or anything these days, but if you’ve been following our video output, you’ll hopefully have noticed a gradual increase in production quality, and a gradual decrease in stupid errors.
Here are a few of our most common stupid errors:
* Not turning on the microphone.
* “Well it looked in focus at the time.”
* Shooting an entire interview in night vision mode, and somehow not noticing that everything was green.
* Bright background + no light on your subject’s face = a very dark face.
* Framing shots really, really badly. Ok, so you can resize in the editor. It never really looks right though.
* Leaving the microphone in shot.
* Leaving the microphone cable dangling in front of the screen.
* Taking the camera out on a really rainy day, without so much as a brolly.
* Interviewing completely insane people for vox pops.
Like I say, we’re still a long way from perfect, and the quality of the video you watch will depend a lot on the experience level of the person/people involved. Some of us have spent a lot of time getting to know the gear, some of us haven’t had much of a look in. But we’re getting there.
Over the last couple of week’s we’ve produced some vids I’ve been really pleased with. The Half Marathon report and preview, the Josh Mitchell appeal, the panto launch and the Southwell Minster Royal Visit are all as good as we’ve done so far. Credit goes to my colleagues Rachel Parry, James Hoy, Adam Raistrick and Dan Bailey, who were all heavily involved with those.
