The Camera

You may be thinking, I don't have some fancy-pants camera, how can I make a movie? Well, the good news is that almost all of us have high-quality cameras in our pockets, our cell phones. Many short films are shot on cell phone cameras including this one:

You can use whatever camera you want for this course but I recommend choosing the one you are most comfortable with. There are some settings, however, you will want to pay attention to, no matter what camera you use.

Frame Rate

This setting refers to how many frames of film will be displayed each second. Now, this is a bit wonky to talk about in a digital video class but here's essentially what that means. Think of a flip book, each picture slightly different from the last. As you thumb through the flip book, the image animates. The faster you flip through, the higher the frame rate. So, for example, if you are flipping at a rate of 24 pictures per second, that would be the frame rate of your animation. 

Most film projects are shot at 24 frames per second. This is a good standard because, as viewers, we are used to this frame rate. Seeing something shot at 30 or 60 frames per second just seems off somehow.

You can shoot at whatever frame rate is available to you in this class. Some phones won't allow you to change the frame rate, but if you can, it may be worth it to shoot at 24 fps.

 

Aspect Ratio

The ratio between the length and height of your image is called the aspect ratio. This is what essentially determines if you are shooting high-definition video, or standard definition video. The most common modern standard is 16:9 aspect ratio which equals 1920x1080 pixels on your screen. What that means is that you will use 1920 pixels horizontally and 1080 pixels vertically to display your image. Now, this gets a bit complicated when you realize that there are different sized screens out there with different numbers of pixels in them, which is why this is a ratio instead of a hard setting. The ratio of 16:9 means your picture will be a factor of 16 by a factor of 9 so your image won't looked squished or stretched when viewed on a different sized screen. Whew, ok, the math part is over.

Here's a great website that explains all of this better than I did: No Film School Links to an external site.

 

Focus

Have you ever seen a piece of footage that was super blurry? Someone forgot to focus the camera properly. Focus, when done right, can draw the watchers' eye to a specific part on the screen and change the importance of each object. Here's one of my favorite examples of focus being used to highlight the important elements of a scene:

Again, your phone probably doesn't have advanced focus settings but it's a good idea to become familiar with what you do have. Please make sure that everything you shoot is in focus and clear.