By: Jay Staudt
The video you capture when you press record is only as good as the sum of its parts - what's happening on camera, and what's happening behind it. There are certain ways to handle a camera that will take a little while to get used to, but if you master them you can go from shooting shaky, amateurish home videos to smooth and polished, professional-looking products.
Get a Grip!
Let's discuss the best way to hold a camera in your hands, free from support of any kind. Unless you have a shoulder-mounted TV camera, it's going to take more than one hand to stabilize. Most people simply slip their fingers through the hand strap and wave it around.
Let me explain something to you: your camera is not a magic wand.
People don't make great videos by whipping their cameras around haphazardly and getting an epileptic's-eye view of their scene.
Standard Camcorder Grip
If you're shooting at eye level, the hand strap will allow you to keep a firm hold on the camera, but your off hand needs to be there too in order to keep it level. Put your hand through the strap and make sure it feels right. If you need to make it tighter or looser, put the camera down onto a flat surface and re-adjust the velcro, clasp or buckle.
Next, place your non-dominant hand on the bottom of the camera, using your thumb and fingers to support it. Your dominant, "grip" hand should be used to operate all the functions of the camera. Your thumb operates the record button and the on-off switch while your forefinger changes the zoom to frame your shots.
Loose Handle Grip
Certain shots may require you to be more flexible with the camera than the standard grip will allow. For instance, you might start with a low-angle shot and tilt or pedestal the camera into position. In a shot like this you can't have your hand through the strap and your elbow extending out underneath - there's simply not enough room between the camera and the ground!
A loose grip is maintained by again using your off-hand to support and cradle the camera, but this time the fingers on your dominant hand go down through the strap and wrap around it instead of coming up through the strap and wrapping around the camera.
When using a loose grip you may find that flipping out your camera's LCD screen is not useful because the angle between you and the camera changes as you adjust your shot. Use the thumb and forefinger of your supportive off hand to adjust the tilt of the screen periodically, while keeping your other fingers beneath to support the camera.
Be One, My Son
Practice these two grips and pay close attention to your viewfinder or LCD screen and how the framed area moves as you hold the camera. Get used to balancing the weight of the camera in your hands so that even if you're one of those fidgety people like me, you maintain a natural and composed grip.
Also be aware of your posture; you may even need to get on the ground and lie prone depending on the situation, but otherwise your steps and the arch in your back should allow the rest of your body movements to stay fluid and smooth.
Move It!
There are some specific terms that are used to describe the different camera movements, and we'll go over them here. Each of these terms relates to moving the camera along the horizontal, vertical, or depth axis (x, y, or z) in relation to your subject. Descriptions of other terminology can be found in our handy and helpful glossary.
The Pan is when the camera pivots horizontally while it stays otherwise stationary. Imagine an invisible, vertical line going down through the top of your camera, allowing it to spin left or right around this axis. Panning is used to slide a shot from one person to another, to add action to a tense scene, or to introduce a new element that was previously outside the frame.
Tilt is an up-down movement where the frame changes vertically as the camera stays in place. It can be thought of just the same as a pan, except that the camera pivots along its horizontal x axis and the framed area moves from the "ground" to the "sky," or vice versa. A tilt can show the base of a tree trunk all the way up to its tallest branches, or the foot of a giant, and extend up until you can see the top of the giant's head.
A Dolly is physical movement of the camera toward or away from its subject. For example, there are scenes in movies that begin in outer space. The camera begins to dolly in and you see the galaxy, the solar system, the earth, the continent, the country, the city, the building, the person, etc. This would be an example of an extreme (and at least partially computer-generated) dolly. A normal dolly is just movement along the ground in relation to whatever is being filmed.
The Truck is the movement past or alongside an object. You might see a train moving at a high rate of speed with the camera trucking along beside it. A truck does not necessarily keep anything within a certain distance, but is simply the camera moving along a path while facing sideways. When you're in the car and you look out the window, if your eyes were the camera they'd essentially be "trucking" along the scenery beside the road you're on.
Pedestal shots are another movement of the camera in space, this time along the y axis. The same situations mentioned with the tilt movements above could be applied to the pedestal shot, except that instead of pivoting up and down to view the range of areas in the shot, the camera actually moves (rather than rotating) up and down from the bottom point to the top, or the opposite.
An Arc is a fairly difficult shot to pull off free-hand. This is when the camera rotates around its subject, keeping the same distance but changing the angle at which it views that subject. The slow-motion arcs in the Matrix movies are perhaps the best and most widely recognized example of this technique (although those were done with multiple cameras instead of just one).
Steady Now...
For a still shot you can always use a tripod or other flat surface to rest the camera on. Too many action shots in a row can get kind of overwhelming, so for quieter or more relaxed moments in your video you'll want to throw in plenty of good old "picture frame" moments. The camera - along with your viewer - can just rest there, in place, and soak in what's going on.
A good, sturdy tripod will let you get a smooth pan or tilt, but for any other movements you could benefit from a home-made steadicam or another type of weight. I like to use the pendulum metaphor, because it's always true that adding weight to the bottom of an object stabilizes it and lowers its center of gravity.
The simplest way to do this with a camera is to fold up or retract the legs of your tripod and keep the camera mounted on it. This gives you a good amount of weight beneath it and will prevent it from wobbling around to as great a degree as it would otherwise. Using your grips we learned earlier, your support hand goes around the legs of the tripod instead of resting underneath the camera.
Practicing Is Awesome
Without an electronically operated crane or a professional train track dolly, you're never going to get an absolutely flawless shot, but with practice and planning you can get pretty close. The key to good camera operation is to extend yourself into the camera and let it become an extension of your movements. Keep things fluid and smooth and you'll be heading in the right direction, no matter where your camera is going!
For lots more on creating your own videos, how to improve on your filming and editing, tutorials, articles, and informational videos, visit http://www.indie-film-making.com
Jay Staudt has been producing, directing and editing videos and short films for a little over a decade. He's a graduate of George Mason University with a degree in Multimedia Studies, and currently works full-time as a professional Multimedia Developer for a nationally recognized architectural engineering firm.
In his spare time he produces short films with his video crew, the F4C. They produce a comedy series called Bachelor Pad that you can check out here.
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