Capturing Quality Content From Home - A Brief Guide

Jacob walks the everyday Joe through a few ways to make great content from home just by using your phone.

Transcript

Alright.

So, being that we're all stuck at home, we wanted to go over some very simple guidelines on how to capture some compelling content, at home, without any gear, using your phone.

Okay, I promise it's not gonna be that hard. Not gonna be as hard as this. Not gonna be as hard as this. Or this. It's gonna be easy.

So we break this down into a few different things: lighting, sound, capturing, and delivery.

So first things first: lighting.

We recommend that you find a well-lit window, anywhere in your house.

Bonus points if you can position the window like I have here at a 45 degree angle from your face, giving you a kind of lighting on one side, and a darker shadow on the other, giving you more of that sweet Ken Burns type effect that you might find in a real interview, in a real studio.

I believe it is the artist's responsibility to lead people--

Really, it creates just a nice professional finish that most people don't get from their phones, because they don't consider the lighting.

Secondly: sound. 

You love it when it sounds good. We all like records, because they sound good. 

The sound, often on your phone, or on Zoom, on a lot of these digital tools, kind of just sound compressed and digital.

A lot of the little issues like a little bit of echo, tinniness in your voice, can be fixed in post. What can't be fixed is a ton of echo, your kid yelling in the background, your dog barking in the background, or any other constant noise that's going on while you're recording. So try to find a quiet room, one that ideally has a lot of soft surfaces, and is small.

Okay: capture.

This part is actually very simple. If you're an iPhone or an Android user, you have an extremely capable video capturing and audio captioning tool in your pocket. So position your phone horizontally.

This is important.

We can always make it vertical later, if we're talking about something like Instagram Stories, but horizontal is how we're gonna capture all of these.

If you don't have any kind of stand for your phone, just prop it up on some books, prop it against your laptop, prop it up against anything where you can stare directly at it, as if you were another human being.

Try to get in near eye-level, and position yourself in the dead center of the frame. Just imagine that the phone is interviewing you.

Oh I get it!

Okay, lastly: delivery.

Easy. After you record the video and audio on your phone, you can simply share it with anyone, through the iCloud mechanism or whatever Google uses for that, or you can email it.

Do not text it. Do-- do-- do not text it. Texting will compress it. Makes it look like garbage.

It makes-- you could have just recorded it on Zoom and called it a day. 

That's it. With these easy steps, we can easily capture a compelling content, while we're all safely distancing a home, until all this is over and we can go out into the wild.