Best Tips To Make Better Home Movies With Your Phone
As we approach Father’s day, it’s a good reminder that being a parent is about both being present for your kids, but also about constantly being dumbstruck at how quickly the time has passed. One great way to help you do both, is to take home movies. Right now the cameras powered by even an older phone far exceeds the imaging and audio capabilities of our parents and grandparents. But it does take a little thoughtful technique to get the most out of filming for memories, here’s some tips.
Get Documenting
The goal of your home movie should be to document now. What do you look like, what does your family, pets, and home all look like at their best but also most normal. I say this because I understand we all could look better, but if you spend all of your time trying to get everything to look perfect, you’ll never hit a record.
Remember why you are making this—so you can reflect on the people in your life and the places you live and visit. It doesn’t need to be overly stage managed and conceived. Show the sign of the zoo and everyone walking past it. Show the messy kitchen if it’s generally messy. Show your mom, she may be gone soon.
The video linked above helped me recall that my son wasn’t even riding a real bike a year ago. Now he’s zipping around on one.
Get The Shot
Let the action come to you. Be prepared to move closer, capture faces, and allow for your subjects to leave and enter the frame. Watch that video above. They were just doing what was natural to them, but I ran ahead, or held back, or let them go left to right in the frame.
Compositions like that will help you edit and will give your movie life.
Also consider upgrading your phone camera app to something like Filmic Pro.
Get Editing
After taking the video on your phone, there are several apps that allow you to directly edit it, and most keep the original video clips intact.
My biggest secret to editing, cut out the boring parts. What’s boring? Things we’ve seen already, parts where the subject or actions aren’t clear.
People also can get lost in the weeds on which program to edit with, use the one that’s accessible to you. We use DaVinci Resolve which is cross platform on desktop and has an amazing free option, and iMovie or LumaFusion on ios. This list has a comprehensive review for ios and Android.
Get The Best Audio
One of the biggest problems with taking home videos (and any videos really) is the audio quality. Consider adding an external microphone like the Rode Video Micro, or only using incidental audio.
You may also want to look at using a music service like Epidemic Sound, or the YouTube.com audio library in the creator studio.
Get Posting
I find the quicker I can shoot, edit, and post something, the better. It allows me to really be present in the creation of the movie, but also allows me to move on after it’s done, without worrying and belaboring it.
Conclusion
We all can make amazing movies with our phones, use those tools, get more comfortable with them and you can create lasting, loving documents for the years to come.
