I'll be the first to admit that it's not easy to film yourself, sitting there in front of the camera. Not really knowing exactly how to set up the shot. So it looks professional. Well, in this episode, you will get seven tips for how to film yourself so you can create more professional videos, content creator, kickstart.
In this day and age, it seems like our really good skill to be able to handle a camera and to be able to film yourself in a good way, whether it's for conference calls or you want to record some video lessons, some tutorials, put it on YouTube, share it with a colleague. It's a really, really great skillset to have to know how to set up shots.
This applies to photos. But I'm going to talk about this in the context of video creation. So these are seven tips for how to film. The first tip is to get more light in your shot. It might seem obvious that a video is all about lighting. Light goes through the lens and the light that gets on into the sensor is the image you're going to see in the ends.
That is kind of what sound is to music. Light is to video, right? How do you get more lights? Well, you want to face a window. That's a really, really. Tip. So if you don't have huge softboxes, that will light your face or you don't have kind of a, what do I know? Some equipment lighting equipment.
Find the biggest window in your house or closest to your desk and face the window. So you point the camera array away from the window, but the window lights up your face and it makes your face and your body much brighter than the background. So you'll stand out a little bit, right? That's tip number one, face a window.
So you get more light on yourself and less light on the backgrounds. Second concrete tip for how to film yourself is to reduce the amount of space or. That is above you. I see a lot of students posting videos where they are super small in the shot. So only leave a tiny bit of air between your hair or your head and the top frame of the kind of camera for.
So the way you do that is to move closest to the camera and also adjust the camera. So you're not super small in the shot. And so you're, so you're not filling up the whole shot, but so you see your kind of a top part of your torso, for example, and enough of your head to see the whole head, but also a little bit of space above your head before the kind of top frame, that's an really standard and good way to position yourself in the shot.
Tip. I want to give you is to position the camera at eye level, whether this is your laptop that you're filming with, or it's a real camera or your phone, try to move the camera up. What's that's the primary problem or the most common problem is to just leave the laptop on the table and then look down what's.
So the camera is actually. Recording and filming up your nose. It's not the most flattering angle to be recorded from. So I'm see if you can find a shoe box or something and place the camera or the computer on the shoe box. So it gets raised a little bit, and you look at the, directly into the lens at eye level, like you would with a normal person.
That's why it feels natural. You want to imitate? Yeah. The real human interaction by moving the camera up at. The next tip is about sound quality, sound quality matters. Elton, even though it's a visual format you can actually get away with a really bad shot if you have great audio. So get a USB microphone get a clip on microphone, get something that is better than.
You know, the standard equipment that is inside the laptop or inside the phone. So they issue, if you buy the latest version of an apple MacBook or an iPhone, the microphone is actually really good and you can get away with that. Then you just have to be close enough to the microphone to make the sound quality.
Good enough because no microphone, well, really, really expensive ones may be able to, but. 99% of microphones will not be able to record your sound very well if they are too distant from your mouth. So a good rule of thumb at bananas length between your lips and the microphone, then you'll get good sound on that.
And it matters a lot for, for your videos. Seven well, it's the fifth tip for how to film yourself. We are ready to talk about a scene design. Actually the tip is to move away from the. I see a lot of kind of talking head videos where you are placed up against a wall. So the background is just a white wall or a blue wall or whatever color the wall is super uninspiring to look at a simple tip is to, like I told you to, to face the window.
If you move over to the window and you have more space behind you, it's going to be a much more interesting. So yeah, move away from the wall and film yourself kind of sitting in a, in a larger room instead of kind of closing the shot right behind you. You want more distance behind your bed back so people can look at, oh, that's a nice plans and that's a little lit lamp over there.
And I can see kind of an environment around the. The sixth tip I want to give you is two luck exposure. That is kind of a technical term exposure, but what it means is that you, when you hit recording your camera, typically what will happen is that if the lighting changes in your shot, The sun comes out or you move closer, further away from the camera.
The camera will automatically adjust the light up and down. And you don't want that. You don't want this variation in light. So on a phone, you can do it by holding your finger on the screen for a second or two. And it'll say. A E luck or something, right. Also exposure luck on a camera. There is a small like asterix or star that you can click or press.
The main principle is to lock exposure. So when you feel like you have good lighting in your shot, maybe you sit up against the window. You've turned down the kind of the sensor. So if you use a camera, you can adjust the settings, but if it's on your phone, it will automatically kind of lower the light a little bit.
If you have much light in your. Your phone will automatically adjust the light. And then when you think it looks good, you're not totally pale white in the face and you're not super dark. Just hold the finger on the screen, on your face, on your phone for a couple of seconds and it'll lock the exposure and you'll keep it there.
So it doesn't. This just makes it look so much more professional. It's like a, an easy tell when the video lighting varies up and down, it's, it's made by an immature. I think you can say that pretty comfortably. The last tip I want to give you is that a simple editing goes along. So don't just share the raw video you want to do just a little bit of editing before you share the video.
The two most important things to do in the editing editing is to cut out dull moments. So whenever you have an long pause, you don't know what to say. You have to reach. Or you can't really remember the next sentence, cut that out and make the pacing higher or faster by having something happening all the time.
Right? So there's a constant flow of information or at least a couple of sentences, five to seven sentences. Constant flow, then a small pause so people can digest what you say. Just don't leave in all the pauses. We are used to editors content. So if you have a video that is just shot raw with long pauses, it's not going to be very engaging.
The other must have is to add a subtle music. I think of course it depends on the format. This is a podcast and I don't add music to the, on top of this. But I think if you do an, explain a video or you record yourself for a, some kind of a format it's often nice to have just a little bit of music in the backgrounds.
One thing that it does is that it acts at kind of a, feel, a feeling emotion and also a professional feel to your music, to your video. So you can kind of tell that this is edited it's, it's created, it's not. Push record and sent someone invested a little bit of energy and time in this format.
And that's just a really nice thing, too. It's a signal with with your video. And another thing that music does is that it covers up reverb. So there's a lot of reverb in your room. You can hear when you clap, you know, the clap stays, bounces off the walls. A couple of times it's very hollow and you know, if, if it's not kind of a soundproofed.
Maybe the sound quality is not perfect. And the way you can cover that up a little bit is with music. So you can make the, the quality of the voice kind of shine a little more, and you can kind of artificially race the voice over quality by covering up all that reverb with a little bit of music, make it subtle, make it very, you know down to earth, not too much instrumentation, no vocal.
I think it's bad with vocals on top of your own vocals. So a background music low five beats, a subtle cozy chill, jazz vibes whatever background music you can find is a really good way to to up your video. Those were seven practical tips for how to film yourself. I hope this will be your new to-do list to read through and go through before you press record the next time you are to feel yourself for whatever content you're creating.
Thanks for listening. See you next episode.
