This week, I thought I'd challenge myself to film using only inexpensive gear and things you can find around the house
Let's see if we can make this footage look not terrible
So it starts with the Canon t3i
I got this six years ago, and it's now pretty cheap on eBay
I'm pairing it with this 24 millimeter
Which for me is the ideal first lens because it's not too zoomed in and consumer F. 2.8.
Meaning it's decent in low-light
I then found some string in a drawer
And use the old trick where you put the string on the bottom of the camera
And make a triangle with your feet using the tension to stabilize those shaky shaky hands
It's also way more portable than a tripod which is nice
For sound,
I've got this little mic which can sit on the camera
But it'll sound better if we connect it to this little audio recorder
with an extension cable and then grab one of these
Unscrew the bottom and tape a mic to it.
I call it the Broom Pole Boom Pole and lastly for lighting
I got this fixture
And the bulb was pretty cheap too.
We don't need a light stand because we can clamp it to stuff
So as far as kit goes
That's a pretty basic package one lens no tripod
So I did not have high hopes for this footage for the first shot
I wanted to try out all of the kit
So I needed to block off this big window to make the room dark enough
For our lighting now on a professional film set would use thick fabric
But I found some bin bags under the sink which almost cheaper with a bit of tape
I managed to block out most of the light and actually created quite a cool effect
So I'll save that idea for another project, I reckon
Anyway,
It still wasn't quite dark enough, so I grabbed a couple of towels and hung them up to block the light a bit more
It's the best I could do
After clamping the light to a stool,
I positioned it where it could illuminate both of the actors from this side or from the
The trick here when the bulb isn't very powerful is to get it as close as possible
Without it actually being visible, so I just had to make sure it was being blocked by the other actor
You'll also notice the background is quite blue because the daylight spinning through that bin bag window
Is much cooler than the DIY light
And that actually gives it a kind of evening vibe
But I'll be honest this doesn't look great now depending on the scene this could be perfect lighting
Maybe we do want it to feel a bit cheap or a bit messy
But it is true that we'd have a lot more options if we had a brighter light
We could bounce off a wall, or a diffuser with some tissue paper
So I would recommend spending a bit more than I did
Or we could save our money and just take down those bin bags and make use of that lovely big light source called the Sun
By setting up next to this large window we get a soft light that wraps around gives a very flattering look
Still using the string tripod
Which definitely wasn't perfect you can have to use a lot of tension to keep it stable?
It would definitely help to use a lens with image stabilization
Obviously that's going to cost more so a decent alternative is to use software
stabilization when you're editing and that can kind of smooth out the small shakes
Here's what it looked like before and here's what it looked like after stabilizing
But honestly next time I'd probably just invest in a really cheap tripod for these para shots.
It's definitely worth having
Now, let's look at audio because the room was fairly empty there was some real echo
So I grabbed my drying rack and hung a towel on it
To absorb some of those sound vibrations as they're bouncing around the room
Now I've actually used this audio setup before and I'm always really impressed with the quality in fact
I'm even using it right now for this whole voiceover
and it's just a classic techniques of making sure that the microphone is fairly close
To whoever is speaking
And that the
Environment you're recording in doesn't have like cars going past or like noisy
Air-conditioning units do that they all sound pretty good for this next shot
You can see here the window is mostly blown out which is mostly something seen in amateur
Productions rather than like why would films although there are plenty of exceptions
But let's say we did one to hold on to that detail outside our best option is to make the whole image darker
Here I stopped down to f4 point nine and now you can see we've got most of that detail back
But obviously the rest of the image is darker as well, so we need to then carefully brighten the image when we're editing now
I'm not going to pretend that doing this will work for every situation
But in this case. I think it did work at some point though
It's better to either just set up your own lights or just avoid showing windows like this
So what I love about doing these kind of challenges is that it really shows
What makes a difference like I spent a while hanging out those BIM backs for these shots
But in the end just working with what was already there was faster and cheaper
I've seen big-budget shoots make use of these kind of DIY type hacks duct tape and a bit of ingenuity
Can go a very long way, so I'm glad to be practicing these low-budget skills
But even so a lot of you guys tell me I need to get a better camera
So I thought I'd rent a slightly better camera for the day and so in next week's video
I'll be comparing the DIY footage with this monster so stay tuned for that. I'll see you next week