Video Advice by Anthony D. Coppedge Contributing Writer February 11, 2008

There are many other preset “shots” that will be invaluable time-savers. Experiment and find others that you’ll use often based on your service.

Also, as a camera operator, learn the rule of thirds. This is a biggie, so memorize this.

If you divide the picture into equal vertical thirds, you’d have a left third, middle-third and right third. The center camera (you must have a center camera – I’ll not accept an exception to this rule) must keep the subject matter in that middle third at least 80% of the time. Why not 100%? Because people tend to move.

If you zoomed into a waist up shot and tried to follow every body movement to keep the subject perfectly centered, your camera would ALWAYS be jerking left and right. Stop that! It’s OK for the subject to begin to wander left or right. Don’t move – let them ‘sway’ in that center-third. Only when they begin to get to the edge of the screen do you begin to compensate – smoothly – and then the focus is again on the center-third.

For “side cameras” (off center axis from the center camera by 30 degrees or more), the rule of thirds is slightly different – but your camera also has these same thirds.

From a side perspective, the subject is usually talking towards either the left or right side of your screen. If you perfectly center them, the viewer will wonder why it looks like they’re talking to a wall. You need to lead the area they’re looking towards by maybe 10%-20% of the screen. It will seem more natural that, “Oh, hey, he’s looking at something I can’t see but at least know is there – the audience.”

Training

The need to train your volunteers and practice the camera shots, zooms, pans and overall movement will necessitate doing drills when nothing else is going on. Drills such as:
• Focus on the bottle – rolling a coke bottle away from the camera while staying zoomed in, tracking and focusing (manually – NEVER, EVER auto focusing) on the text label.
• Speed drill – director calls shots in rapid fire – and the camera “op” has only 1-2 seconds to set the shot up correctly.
• Smoothest Operator – who can keep the most consistent zoom, pan and tilt to follow a moving person on the stage – from wide shots all the way into close ups and vise versa.
• Director consistency – audio recording the headset mic of the director onto the videotape of a service/practice – so that the Director can see how far behind the curve he/she is or how consistent their commands are to the cameras.
• Shading – for those cameras that are nice enough to have a CCU – how even can you keep the light level during quick light cue changes? Especially useful when shading multiple cameras simultaneously.
• Watch a program with the crew together – you can critique each other and even laugh at the events the cameras record when you notice slip ups. It’s fun, educational and very good at team building.

With experience, and a few basic concepts, you can make IMAG in service work well.

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