The beginning of the journey to the middle of short film earth..

" Spare economic narratives, interesting storytelling, well structured work which draws in the audience quickly"  - Catherine Des Forges 

"Short films are long films that end earlier. A good idea, succinctly told, less is more" - Gareth Evans 

Developing camera techniques to create something ever so much beautiful than before, all with the flick of switch, scroll of the scroll button or just simply some sources of light. By the end of this I expect you to know how to use a Sony V1 camera to make the simplest things look amazing, and describe the functions of the manual aspects of the camera controls. 

<<< This is the Sony V1 

* Shoot videos in HDV1080i 

The controls that can control the greatness of your work 

• Gain - Gives you more light in that literally doesn't exist in the environment in which your filming, however this could make your quality grainy. 

- Gain is measured in 'db' (e.g. 6db would be shown on your camera's screen) 

- Starts at 0db-3db and goes up to about 18db, but DO NOT GO OVER 12db , I REPEAT DO NOT GO OVER 12bd. As the quality or grainy will look unbearably ugly and can't be fixed properly in post production editing, so do try to film in good lighting conditions or use separate lighting equipment. 

• Shutter Speed - controls the frame amount 

*MINI FACT* In the UK we usually use a 24 frames per second rule

- To slow something down, increase the shutter speed 

- To speed something up, decrease shutter speed 

• White Balance - In photography and image processing, color balance is the global adjustment of the intensities of the colors (typically red, green, and blue primary colors (via wikipedia.com)

- The 'sun' icon indicates an outdoor balance, thus perfect for outdoor filming. This means you'll get that nice realistic 'blue' colour


- the 'light bulb' icon indicates a indoor balance, perfect for indoor filming. This will create that orange/tunston (sp?) colour


- the manual white balance icon is 'two right angled triangles with a square between then, with a big capitall B'. If your in an environment which has both outdoor and indoor light you might want to use this setting to adjust your white balance effectively. 

• Exposure/Iris - defines how much light is let into the camera 

- the smaller the apeture (sp? oh my spelling is bad) the bigger the number, e.g. f11,f16 

- the bigger the apeture (sp?) the smaller the number, e.g. f2.8 

Side note: 

- You can't do shutter speed and exposure at the same time

- You can't be fully zoomed in and get a exposure below f2.8