224 Making Your Masterpiece: Shooting and Importing Video
Shooting to Edit
At its heart, editing is about collecting the “good parts” and stringing them
together in an engaging way. But in order to edit something, you need to have
shots that will go well together, so moving from one to the next isn’t jarring
or confusing. Getting the right shots while you’re shooting will make the time
you spend editing much shorter and more enjoyable.
Over the past 100 years of film history, a film language has emerged. You may
not know how to speak it fluently, but you certainly can understand it. Whenever
you watch a movie or a television program, you follow intuitively what’s going
on, even though the content has been chopped up and recombined in all sorts
of ways. Now that you’re behind the camera, you can take advantage of the same
techniques to help make your video easy to understand and fun to watch.
The most basic idea is that you want to get multiple shots of the same subject
from different angles. If you’re shooting a group of people playing pool, you want
to get some shots that show the whole pool table, and some shots of individual
players, and some shots of the balls on the table. The more shots you get, the
more choices you have in the editing room, and the better you can make your
movie. The combination of shots that cover a particular scene is called coverage.
Covering a Scene
Instead of collecting a series of random shots with your camcorder, shoot in
pairs. Think of every shot as having some kind of relationship to at least one
other shot. If you shoot someone from far off, your next shot should be the
same person close up. If you show someone reading a book, show the audience
what she’s reading. Whatever you do, get a minimum of two shots of the same
subject. You’ll use these when you go to edit.
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