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Create your best videos by learning how to plan

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Planning videos might seem quite obvious, especially for bigger productions. You need to sort your location, your script, how many people you are going to be in it and what gear you’ll use. You’ll also usually block out your shots and have your talent rehearse.

But what about when it’s not a big scripted production? What if it’s a vlog? How do you plan one of those when you’ve no idea what’s going to happen? In this video, Matti Haapoja explores this topic and talks about how he plans out his vlogs to try to create some order amongst the chaos.

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This augmented reality app lets you plan your shot in real time from your phone

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Augmented reality has mostly been a bit of a gimmick so far. To put dinosaurs on your desk, or help guide you around a city. It’s very cool, but still mostly just a gimmick. Now that the hype of augmented reality has started to die down a little, though, things are looking up. It has made some pretty great strides over the last couple of years. Particularly in fields such as healthcare.

Now, though, filmmakers are starting to see some benefit from augmented reality, too. A new app, Blocker allows you to block out your scenes based on what the camera sees, enhanced by 3D models. The app, in real time, tracks the models to the scene, allowing you to work out your angles and shots, while at a location, in advance of the shoot.

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OK Go raises the bar again with The One Moment music video shot in just 4.2 seconds

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For American rock band OK Go, boundary pushing music videos have become the standard. They’ve done the long one-shot takes with crazy optical illusions, shot with a massively co-ordinated cast of dancers, and they’ve even levitated in zero G. Now, they’ve done it again with their latest music video for new song, The One Moment.

The entire video, again, is shot as a single take. The main action in the video took only took 4.2 seconds in real time. After that, it bounces back and forth between real time for a few seconds, and then back to super slow motion with people flying through the air over fountains of paint. It’s a ridiculous video, and the amount of planning that must’ve gone into it to get it right first time just doesn’t bear thinking about.

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A primer to advanced composition (and critiquing your own work)

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A while back me and fellow DIY writer Joseph Parry were chatting over messenger. We had just started following a blog called Canon of design by Tavis Leaf Glover. Canon of design is a treasure mine of compositional information, which studies the master painters and how they designed, constructed and finished their masterpieces. These guys spent months, even years creating one image. Nothing was left to chance. Composition was perfectly drawn out, over and over again, until the image was compositionally bullet proof. I could write multiple articles about the benefits of signing up to Canon of design, but I will let you make your own mind up about that, just make sure you check it out.

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Mood board like a boss!

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When it comes to creating images that stand out, one thing is super important. Preparation! As it would take too long to go over everything I do to prep on one article, I will focus on one of the key elements, mood boards! Now without any hard evidence to back me up, I’m pretty sure that the old master painters used to mood board in their own way. They would do a moodboard with sketches of various parts, and use it as a reference when they painted the piece as a whole.

I have a friend who is a painter, and he too mood boards in his own way when creating his works of art. He cuts out reference images from magazines, or prints them out from photos he has seen online. As he is creating his final painting, he has them pinned to a board to reference as he paints. Cool eh?

Whether you like it or not, as photographers we are all artists! So why not act like artists and put the prep in beforehand. This includes sketches, writing out lists, creating background stories and building mood boards. I started creating mood boards on the advice of another photographer, the mood board king as I like to call him, Dean Samed. Dean created a Photoshop master class, and in it laid out the importance of creating mood boards, and I have been converted ever since.

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How to plan and produce your own photo shoot

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Planning and producing a photo shoot, especially when there’s crew involved, can be a demanding and stressful task. This is especially so while you’re still learning, making mistakes, and figuring out exactly what kind of things you need to plan and prepare for.

Not everybody has access to a produce to figure all this out for them, so Alexi Lubomirski is here to help with his new video, detailing everything that goes into producing a shoot.

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Organization is key – 6 tools to keep your workflow in check

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Benjamin Franklin once said “For every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned.”

And no truer words have been spoken, well apart from “its finger licking good!”….but lets not get on to the colonel and his tasty chicken fillets. 😛

As photographers, most of us tend to have creative brains, which in my own experience, tend to work in the most annoying way imaginable. Logic and coherence is thrown out of the window for a machine gun of random, inconsistent, inspiration, an attention span of a 5 year old, and the tendency to daydream for 15 minutes a time in the middle of your current task. The best way to describe a creatives brain (taken from a meme I once saw on Facebook) is like an internet browser, with  thirty tabs open all at the same time. Not very productive or time efficient, to say the least.

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