Best Phone Filming Gear and Tips
Those modern tiny, thin, and elegant devices allow producing almost professional footage which can be watched not only at social media, but even at film festivals and other events.
Keep reading and get to know what will help you to film better with the help of your smartphone.
Make your phone stand for filming
Shaky image will spoil and eliminate even the most artistic and ingenious shooting. Make sure that your phone is still and nice. There are several ways to do so:
- Just put it on the flat surface.
- Get a stabilizer. A tripod is really efficient but for moving objects gimbals or video rig grips are more handy cell phone holders.
Never ever shoot a vertical video if you want to get a cinematic effect! In this case it’s better to put your smartphone in a landscape orientation. It’s also a good idea to turn on an airplane mode to make sure that nobody will call or text you during the shooting.
Use lenses
Mobile filmmaking seams easy as modern smartphones have lots of in-built automatic functions: focus, exposure, white balance settings. You can also zoom the image in and out in an eye blink.
Please, don’t!
Use manual settings and lenses instead, otherwise you’ll get a blurred “pixelated” image.
There are dozens and hundreds of add-on lenses which can not only enhance your shooting but also create needed effects, such as “fisheye” or enable a wider field of view.
The exact lenses types are the same as for reflex photographic cams.
Lighting matters
The best time for shooting is the golden hour. But if you film indoors, at night or in poor weather, you’ll need a special kit to provide the best shooting conditions. Make sure you don’t shoot “against the Sun”, otherwise you’ll have just dim silhouettes on your footage.
Use an external microphone
Smartphones have almost professional cameras, that’s true. Unfortunately, this is not to say about mics – they are still quite poor. The problem is that the better audio option would cause the bigger and thicker smartphone case, which wouldn’t be welcome at the market.
The solution is simple – an external microphone.
Lifehack! If you don’t have an external mic yet, you can record an audio to another smartphone, just moving it closer to the sound.
Use an external storage
Such accessories include pen-drives for mobile phones or additional memory cards. If you save your shooting to such an external storage, it will not take your phone’s memory and it will be a way easy to transfer the recording to another device – for example, for further editing.
How to edit a ready film
Talking about video editing – the majority of phones have only very basic functions to avail of, so you’ll need a reliable and handy service.
For example – Clideo. For now it offers 22 user-friendly and free online tools to make your video just perfect.
Just a sample list of a few of them:
And 17 more!
Each of them allows uploading files up to 500 MB for free and is compatible with all the operating systems and devices. Clideo is very secure, it never shares your data with third parties.
