Whether you’re shooting for your latest narrative or documentary feature or looking to get some beautiful shots for your travel blog or a video production landscape footage can be both challenging and fun. Let’s look at five key practices to help ensure you as a videographer capture the best and most beautiful landscape footage possible for your next post on a video marketing website.
When setting up your shot, your first composition decision is going to be where to sort your horizon line. If you follow the rule of thirds (more on the concept here), you have some options. You can put the horizon on the bottom line if you’d like your viewer to focus on the sky. You can put the horizon on the top if you’d like to focus on the land. Plus can also put the horizon down the very middle to create symmetry.
Whatever you choose, feel free to experiment. However, unless you’re going for a canted-angle look, be sure your tripod or stand is accurately calibrated to the ground, or your horizon line could look uneven.
As the greatest light source there is, the sun’s position can drastically change your landscape footage in many ways. For science geeks, it’s fun to note that the sun even affects night shoots. However, during the day, you can use the sun as part of your landscape footage by either shooting with it at your back, or shooting into it. You can also utilize the high noon sun to temporarily shoot without shadows, or use dusk or dawn light to get fantastic new colors.
Also keep an eye out for clouds and try to find ways to incorporate them into your compositions. Shooting time-lapse footage (more on that below) can add great dynamism, and it can add to your framing by creating beautiful counterpoints to the land below.
From there, you have compositional options for objects in the foreground, middle ground, and background. If you’re not familiar with those terms, here’s a great article that breaks down the multiple composition planes. To really utilize all three, consider putting objects in the immediate foreground just barely on the edges of the frames to provide perspective. Find shots that have interesting features in the middle ground as well before opening up into the wide background across the horizon and sky.
You can also experiment with depth-of-field and where you set your focus between the foreground, middle ground, and background. Add ND filters to help you stop down to get shallower DOF too. You can also try rack-focuses to move the focus across the landscape (here’s a good article on that).
These tips so far will help your video marketing agency or video production company grow and like one of our previous blogs says one day u might be able to make money off of this.
Perhaps the greatest trick you can use for your landscape videography (for a videographer) to distinguish it from your regular landscape photography is to add or create movement. You can start by using simple pans and tilts. A pan that starts on an object close in the foreground then reveals the wide landscape in the background is a great approach. It also helps to find movement even in a static frame. A car running down a highway or people moving across the screen will add more visual information for viewers to latch onto and will make your video marketing grow.
From there you can add other types of movement utilizing sliders — or even create movement on your own by using time-lapses including clouds, shadows, and the sun. Check out some more camera movement tips and tricks below.
Time-lapses are a great way to really capture the majesty of the outdoors. To take a time-lapse, you have a couple of options. First you can simply record footage for 10-12 minutes (or longer), which you can speed up in post. However this takes up a good deal of card and drive space. You can also use an interval meter to take a series of photos over a set period as well.
If you’re a new videographer or blogger then it might take some time for it all to catch on. One day you might even be doing it in your dreams.
Modus Film is a video production company based in Kent and London. Our services are nationwide and our video marketing agency can help you make some ground breaking content. If you want to discuss this further contact us or better yet see how video marketing can transform your current marketing mix. We are now fully PPE compliant. Plus we carry on working!
As video marketing experts we are specialists in all forms of video marketing. Here at Modus Film, we have completed many projects for our clients that have required us to define a digital strategy with really great results. If you want to speak to a specialist email [email protected] or call us on 01233 273 273.
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