Essential Tips to Shoot the Best Film of Your Career

There are several different ways you can shoot your footage when you are creating a perfect film.  The choice of which shooting perspective you want to use is entirely up to you, but there are clear advantages and disadvantage to each.  If you are just starting out in your film making career you might want to spend a lot of time playing with both shooting styles so that you can determine which you are most comfortable with.  While following the tips and suggestions of other filmmakers can help make things a bit easier for you, it will ultimately be your own personal style that will determine how you shoot your films.

The first major shooting style is going through during your film and shooting the same scenes but at different angles.  If you have a lot of equipment including cameras you could just record each scene once from the different angles.  If you only have a single camera, you will need to move it around and record each scene multiple times.  The method that you prefer will often be heavily influenced by your budget and the number of good cameras you have available.  If you are using several different cameras to record, the same scene once you need to ensure that all of the cameras are the same recording quality.  If you have a camera that does not record at a good quality you will find that almost all if not actually all of the footage shot with the inferior camera is wasted.  

By shooting in this style, you can easily edit the film later using a computer and the software of your choice.  There are many advantages to shooting this way since you can use the software to create a myriad of special effects and transitions that are fitting with your film.  However, you need a good set of software in able to actually make the film look good during editing.  Poor quality software could make it quite difficult to edit, as well as could negatively impact the quality of the video that you have shot making it almost impossible to actually product a professional quality video.  There are some pieces of software that can help to repair and correct any deficiencies that your camera might have, and if you have lower quality cameras you might find that this is well worth the expense.

The second shooting style involves editing the movie as it is recorded.  This would involve more work during the filming, but once filming is done you have a completed movie.  This would involve backing the video up and starting scenes over exactly perfect from whichever angle you wanted to see.  This is something that can be extremely difficult to learn, because without a proper idea and even a good creative vision your film could look extremely choppy and dicey.  This style of shooting reduces the need to have a computer and extensive software and if you are good at shooting in this style, it could even reduce the length of time it takes you to create each film.

The biggest drawback to this method is you are often able to see minor mistakes in the footage later as you are viewing the completed film.  Due to the fact that you shot each scene only once, and have no footage to edit with you are left with the mistakes as well.  While the mistakes may be minor or they just might be a missed word in the script or possibly something major they cannot be corrected.  There are times when this type of shooting is best though, especially if you are looking to create a video that is recorded as a single shot.  However, practicing this method is highly advisable before attempting to create an entire movie so that you have ample opportunity to refine your skills.  To achieve the best results you should work out a couple of scenes that you want to practice with and then use this as an opportunity to build your skills to the necessary level.