Pixel and Love

Lights, Camera and Action! Come Saturday and the SHEROES team was ready for yet another learning experience, this time taking things off-beat and doing an interactive session on “Film making using Smartphones”. Things started rolling when Mr. Punit Modhgil, Managing Director & Co-founder of Octane.in (India’s no.1 Marketing on demand platform) showed up with his dynamic and witty personality and immediately gauged our attention.

The session started with Punit stating, “No photo is true, cameras always lie”, and to our amusement, it actualy made sense. We were off to a start with Punit giving us a brief regarding what every camera basicaly comprises of, i.e. the Apparture, Shutter and ISO and when he was done with the basics, the gear shifted to the complex part, which included:

• The rule of thirds: The theory is that if you place points of interest in the intersections or along the lines that your photo becomes more balanced and will enable a viewer of the image to interact with it more naturally.
• Layers.
• Light Sources: Natural and Artificial.
• Symmetry.
• Breaking monotony of Structure.
• HDR (High Dynamic Range) Imaging: A method that aims to add more "dynamic range" to photographs, where dynamic range is the ratio of light to dark in a photograph.
• Flash Modes: Auto, Fill Flash and No Flash, depending on the position of the source of light.

The next phase was the Videography part. Videography as we know, is the process of capturing moving/motion pictures on electronic media. The fundamental to videography is linked to photography as till the point you are not aware of the functions of your device, you cannot start filming. The first step is to keep your device still, at all times during the filming process (Selfie sticks are useful after all). A practical exercise was conducted by Mr. Punit, taking volunteers from the SHEROES team to show how we can effectively take videos from our normal smartphones. The basic idea behind the concept was, that video and sound are to be recorded on different devices and then merged together, on softwares like Aftereffects in order to reduce the background noise and distortion.

THE MUST HAVE’S:

1. TRIPOD: Holding a small and lightweight smartphone still can be tricky. To avoid blurs and shaky videos, place the phone on a tripod. You can easily find tripods in the market that are specially designed for phones.
2.  AUDIO: Unless you are a The Artist fan and want to shoot a silent film, embedded microphones in the smartphones will do you no good. "Using a clip-on microphone that can be attached to the actors' clothes will mostly do the trick.
3. BATTERY: Another issue that crops up while shooting videos is the battery. Always ensure that the phone has a full charge or carry a portable charger that you can plug in on the go to power-up your smartphone.
4. STORAGE: HD videos consume a lot of space. So ensure you have enough memory in your smartphone. If short on memory, stop shooting and transfer the videos to the laptop.
5. FLASH LIGHT: An additional flash for the phone is easily available in the market, suited to your requirements.
6. APPLICATIONS: If you are unhappy with the limited features and video options in your smartphone, consider downloading movie making applications.

But most importantly, Mr. Punit told us a vital aspect of Videography, which is Experimentation, you have to practice in order to learn.” Experimentation is a must, one cannot become perfect without going through failures”, he said. So just take out your devices and start CLICKING.