Use whatever camera you have

I have always been a fan of using less expensive, but decent quality gear to make good pictures and footage. A knowledge of the limitations of the gear and a good sense of composition and brevity go a long way to communicating well. It's really satisfying to make a great image with a modest tool, and it beats taking out a big loan for a fancy camera.
I have a lot of video cameras at hand, and it's not the best camera that get's the most use in my personal life. It's my four year old Canon Elph. I can move around with it like my body is a human camera crane. It's fun. You can put it at all kinds of wild angles and push it thru fences and trees to get cool points of view. You can hold it way up it on a monopod and shoot from 12 feet in the air.
At the top of the heap of what I could use is the Sony Z7U hdv camera. Then there's the Sony FX-1. It's an older hdv camera that is also pretty great. Then there's the trusty old Panasonic DVX-100 , which was the first prosumer dv camera that had 24 frames per second capability. Or I could use one of my pawnshop CrapCams.
The thing is, I really like shoting with the old Elph. It shoots 640x480 video at 30 fps. It has a microphone. It's small and I can take it anywhere and it happens to take good stills too. I take all of the kid movies, childbirth, pets, whatever. The first time I saw the video from it on a big hdtv, I was blown away. Maybe it's a little soft and the color could be more saturated but I don't really care. It works and it doesn't suck. Just remember to wipe off the lens once in a while.
My wife Simone does PR for the University of Memphis and needs me to shoot video interviews from time to time and sometimes I'm glad to do it. But I figured that she should be able to do it herself with an Elph (or something similar) and a simple technique. I found her a Canon G8 or 9 on ebay with four batteries for about $350. This is a sweet brick of a still camera with video too. It shoots HD also (of a sort). I told her to find a nice setting to shoot where there is some light on the subject's face and some depth behind them. Then keep close, we're talking camera mic here. Don't zoom in. Keep it wide and move in close. I repeat: this is critical for good sound with an on-camera mic. It will also improve your stability-especially if you dont have a tripod.

Simone did her shoot. She took the footage into iMovie, edited it and added some text. Then she spit out an mpeg4 for the web and uploaded it to the University's youtube and facebook sites. It looks great and sounds fine. And most importantly, I didn't have to do it myself! Here's one of her projects.

Nothing fancy but it's fine, no?

This spring, I find myself helping out with instructing a journalism class that will be using Minio Flip cams to do reporting. They can make remarkable pictures if handled well. The challenge will be to work around the limitations of those little cameras and especially the microphone, . The object is to help teach the class how to get the video thru the shooting, editing, compression and posting process and hopefully come out with a well-illuminated and audible story with a beginning , middle and an end. I think it will be fun. That's why I got into this business in the first place, right?

CCFA Welcome Back Fall 2009

My wife Simone does PR for the College of Communication and Fine Arts here at the University of Memphis. She asks me for little video favors for the college now and then. How could I refuse? Here's one I had some fun with last week.

I Won a Zune! (tooting my own horn)

I never have given much thought to entering contests. Too much like tooting my own horn, you know? Actually it is something I probably should have done more often over the years considering that I am in (a sideshow of) showbiz after all.
Last year Bob Bradley, Tennessee State University's director of technology integration came by the Center for Multimedia Arts - where I work - and checked out our studio and design setup. He was researching the possibility of establishing a multimedia center at Tennessee State. He told us about a statewide pod-casting tournament for educational media that was happening through the Digital Media Sandbox Consortium (DSMC). I had to wait a year until they setup a faculty/pro division before I could get in. So this year I entered a video podcast called AutoTutor Lite, a video overview of a web-based e-learning software that was developed here at the FedEx Institue of Technology in the Institute for Intelligent Systems. AutoTutor Lite uses AI technology and avatars to respond to the student in natural (text) language. The CMA was contracted by the Office of Tech Transfer to produce the project. So...I won a Zune and a Targus backpack and maybe even a certificate. I am actually nerdily proud and mom and dad are thrilled!
Here is the writeup.

Francis Ford Coppola and The Dawn of DV

By 1996 I was seriously sick of working on features, but I took a job on the The Rainmaker just to have the chance to work for Coppola. I was probably broke anyway. I was not disappointed. He was a great guy who brought wine for the crew twice a week and was always glad to tell war stories about making Apocalypse Now and other films. One day he called everyone on the crew over to see his wife Eleanor's Sony VX-1000 dv camera. An Emmy Award winner herself for the film Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse , she was shooting behind-the-scenes documentary footage with the new Sony. Francis said "I want everyone to see this camera, because this is where the movie business is going. You can get one of these for a few thousand dollars and shoot great looking footage and edit it yourself on a personal computer. Someday this is going to replace film and I think you should think about getting something like this and doing your own productions." Good advice.

The best boy electric - a lifelong union guy - had admonished us that we all would end up working at Home Depot if we didn't get the town's production companies to go union. I figured he was probably right on some level. I told him if that was the case I was getting out as soon as possible. It's not a good idea to be at the mercy of someone else's ability to bring in work. Within 6 months David and I had our first dvcam. I figured the union racket was a bad path for a Birkenstock-wearing artsy type like me. I just didn't fit in with the bikers.

We are not Videographers

A Mediographer is a person who - not in any particular order - writes, shoots, edits, directs, produces, scouts, schmoozes, masters (whatever that means) records audio, teleprompts, compresses video, makes dvds, tosses in a little design, takes decents stills, steals some music - I mean learns how to use Soundtrack, interviews, redecorates, landscapes, troubleshoots the computer, sets lights and mics, powders the talent, does her own v.o. when there's no budget or it's 3 in the morning, maybe makes a gimpy website and then, hopefully, pulls in a 'median income' for himself. And that's just to start. "Videographer?" Give me a break. As if all we have to do is show and and push the button. ha.

From the time i was a grip/electric working on feature films, (The Rainmaker to be more specific) I wanted to be in charge of my own self. Yes. I would make my own videos - miserably small the budgets would be - but I would not have to hump electric cable and lights 20 hours a day for wretched Hollywood types. My friend David Leonard and I bought a Casablanca - the first self-contained and affordable non-linear edit system, and a Sony V5000 DVCam (hey maybe that one was Hi-8) in Memphis and set ourselves up in business. That was 1996 and the BetaCam guys thought we were crazy - but we didn't have $2000-a-month camera notes. That's my definition of crazy. Our first job was for "Woodhaven Funeral Home", conveniently located in in the rolling hills of rural northwest Shelby County." Hey I wrote that. The budget was $300. Don't ask about "Babyland." Maybe I can find that video somewhere....anybody got a 3/4 deck?