SHOOT BETTER HANDHELD: Tips other than “shoot 60fps"

What is going on guys? I hope you're good. I wouldn't know that because we can't talk to each other. Maybe leave a comment down below if you're doing good. But today we are talking about handheld cinematography. How to improve your handheld shooting. I love this video because I shoot so much of my work handheld. It's one of my favorite ways to shoot. I've shot entire films with just the camera in my hand. No monopod, no tripod, no gimbals, no nothing. So today I want to give you a few quick tips on how to make your handheld more cinematic. How to get rid of that kind of like amateur shake in it and just be more confident with your handheld cinematography. Pretty much actually on every video I post, a couple of you are asking me, when is the handheld camera video coming? Well, it's coming right now. Well, almost. If you want to see the tips and tricks about that, skip ahead to this point. In the meantime, I want to talk about a little bit of gear. I usually don't talk about gear. I actually get a lot of gear sent to me these days and I'm having a tough time keeping up with it. And to be honest, some of the gear doesn't necessarily interest me. Although I'm gonna have a review video next week talking about stuff like the Insta360, which they sent me and I was surprised how much I actually loved this thing. It's a ton of fun. What I really want to talk about is the light behind me. Let me just grab, it's just on the ground here. So I'm not getting paid to talk about this light right now, but I really want to talk about it because I love this light so much. It's the pocket light, the F7 pocket light. You can see that there. And this thing is amazing. It totally took me off guard. First off, it's extremely well-built. The thing is solid. It's heavy, which is a good thing. It's super bright. I'm just gonna make my face completely blown out here. Flare the camera. It comes with like the soft box and there's an egg shell and a crate here to focus the lighting in. And you can dial in any color under the moon. But here's the thing. This is what got me most excited about this light because there is scenes designed into it, like actual scenes for movies. Before I go on, I'm so hot right now. I don't know why I'm wearing a winter jacket. Anyways, this light has this really cool feature and it's called Scenes. I don't know if you can see it here. I'm just gonna skip over, but there's a scene right here. So right now I'm on scene eight. This is so cool. This is the TV mode. It makes it look like I'm watching TV. There's like 20 different scenes. Let me choose some other ones here. This is the police. Makes it look like the cops are outside. It's so cool. There's so many possibilities. It opens up my mind. I can't wait to shoot some more stuff with this. They really get specific. Here is fire department. This is fire department. And then you have like ambulance. I didn't know there was really much of a difference. We got thunder here. Spooky. Thunder. You can imagine you could put this outside a window and then you have thunder and lightning coming in. All in all, there's like 20 scenes. The thing lasts forever. It's rock solid. I just think this light is the coolest. So thank you for humoring me on this. Like I said, I normally don't care to do money gear views, but this light is super awesome. I'll put a link below. And I need to reiterate, I'm not being paid to talk about this, but I was just so excited about it, I had to put it in this video. But let's get back to handheld camera making. So I love handheld filmmaking. I love using the camera directly in my hands, not on a tripod, not on any sort of support system. Handheld camera making is one of my favorite ways to shoot. And I've actually shot entire films, never using a tripod, like my film, Rescate, which we got a Vimeo staff pic and documentary of the year on Boom TV. This film I shot entirely handheld, like literally never put it on anything. Like never used a tripod, a monopod, just used handheld so much. And I love it. In the moment that I decided to become a paramedic, it was in a moment that, in a traffic accident, tragically. So there's a couple of quick tips for you to be able to improve that handheld filmmaking. And I don't know why I'm doing this, this just feels like I'm talking about handheld filmmaking. But first off, before we start, this isn't even a tip. You need to get a top handle. Now, this is a big bulky F7. You can get tiny top handles for your DSLRs or your mirrorless cameras. And I highly, highly, highly recommend you get one. A lot of the stuff I'm gonna be talking about today will actually be relating back to top handles. And talked about this in other videos, why top handles are so good is the camera rests in your hand and gravity does the rest of the job. It pulls the camera towards the ground and there's a lot less shake instantly by using a top handle. And so that's one way to make your handheld filmmaking way more smooth. And I'll put a link below to some very affordable top handles. They're like 35 bucks. It's totally worth it. If you're serious about filmmaking, you should have a top handle. Even if you're not serious about filmmaking, even if you're a very un-serious person, get a top handle. You could use it for many things in your life. My first tip is keep it close. Keep the camera close to your body. Now, this mostly applies if you're not walking and I'll talk about that in a minute. But if you're just standing there doing some simple camera moves, keep the camera close to your body because anytime you hold a weight, especially a camera out front of your body, eventually you're gonna start shaking because you're engaging your muscles. For me, the way I get smooth camera movements is I'm trying to do the least amount of lifting with the camera that I can. The more I can keep the camera on my body and use my legs and my hips to sway, the more smooth the camera movements will be. And my secret weapon as a filmmaker is my hip. Now, I have big hips, they jab out. I always hated them growing up because I couldn't find the right size pants and I wanted skinny jeans, but that's another issue. I love my hips for filmmaking because I just rest the camera on my hip and let my hip and my legs do the weight lifting. Now, if you can get that camera nuzzled in on your hip and rest it there, then you won't have to do as much lifting and you can begin swaying back and forth to get any kind of camera movement that you need unless you need to start doing larger camera moves. But for the most part, if you're shooting an interview or someone's face, you're not gonna need to be doing that big of a camera movement. So putting the camera on your hip will definitely help. Otherwise, you can put your foot up on something like an Apple box or a step or even a chair and rest the camera on your leg. Using your body and your legs as support is really helpful because they're already planted to the ground. So remember, keep your camera close. I see so many people holding their cameras out in front of them and eventually, the shake starts taking over and they're trying to fight the shake. And once you start shaking, you can never fight the shake because the more you squeeze and the more you flex, the more you will shake. So get that camera in on your body. Stop lifting it as much as you can. And this is where things like easy rigs come in and they help take the weight and they distribute it through your body. But we're talking about straight up handheld filmmaking right now. I love easy rigs and I use them a lot. But right now, I'm talking about having no camera support, just you, the camera, and a top handle. Another quick tip is you get your camera on a camera strap and you pull on the strap on your neck. You're creating three points of contact and this is a great way to keep your camera smooth. Now, when I've done this extensively over the course of the day, it kinda gives you like a kink in your neck. So something that you can do in a pinch for just a few minutes at a time. But if you're gonna be doing it all day, it starts really bothering your back. Also, the most obvious thing to help your handheld filmmaking is slow motion. 60 frames per second will smooth out a lot of the jitters. I know some people would roast me saying, well, you didn't mention 60 frames. Of course, 60 frames, 120 frames, all of it helps. And as well, do you like my light that I use in all these videos? It's just my computer monitor. So I actually just go to a document that's just a giant white square. It becomes a soft box. Who needs lights? And tip number two, and now some of these tips might be seeming a bit obvious and might seem a bit patronizing, but I promise you if you follow them, they will drastically improve your handheld filmmaking. So number two is take light steps. And what I mean by that is most often your camera shake is coming from the actual steps you're taking. It's the shock that comes through your heel when you land going up through your legs and into your arms. So if you can mitigate that shock as much as possible, if you can picture yourself like a Navy SEAL walking as quiet and as light as you can, so whenever your heel lands on the ground, you wanna land as soft as possible. The way you move the camera will drastically improve if you're taking lighter steps. So when I'm doing a shot that requires movement, I gotta get the camera off my body because if it's close to my body, it's gonna be feeling the shock of my steps. So I get the camera off, so my arms become kind of like fleshy gimbals. And then I start taking the lightest steps possible. And the combination of these light steps removes any shock coming through my arms. And with the camera off my body, it's also mitigating some of that shake that's coming through my shoulders and my torso that would normally go into my arms. So the combination of those light steps and the camera out front drastically improves the smoothness of this. And I get a lot of people asking me, how did you shoot that handheld? How did you do that? Well, it's getting the camera out in front of me when there's movement. Now it's different, like I said, if I'm doing a long shot that doesn't require any steps, I'll get the camera up against my body and allow the weight to go in on my shoulders. Tip number three is I like to cradle my camera. I like to get my hand underneath my camera and do all my camera movement like so. I want my hand resting here so that I have another point of contact so that it's not just my arm above doing all the weight holding. And if I have my hand to the side, I'm not really taking much weight. I like to cradle my camera. And that way I'm able to distribute the weight through both my arms. And I'm actually taking some of the weight as I do these camera movements. And when you have more weight in your hand, the less likely you're gonna be shaking because you're actually gonna be way down again by gravity, like I was saying. So I like to cradle the camera. I'll get my other hand on top of the top handle. And to me, this is the most smooth way possible that I can be. Also too, when you're panning, don't pan with your arms, pan with your hips. Use again, your planted legs. Your legs are stable. So use your legs as much as you can. So I like to pan with my hips when I can. And then you throw in some image stabilization into the lens and you're laughing. It's almost as if you don't need a gimbal. Well, you still need a gimbal sometimes, but it's amazing what you can get away with when you have an IS lens and some handy tips for your handheld filmmaking. And also when you're shooting handheld and you're following people with the camera, you're following a subject or whatever it is, try to use wider lenses. This is gonna give you a lot more grace with the shake in the camera. If you're on a longer lens, it's gonna accentuate the camera movements. Typically, if I'm gonna following people, I try to be on like a 17 mil to 24 mil, somewhere in that range on a full frame sensor. Here in this footage, I'm using my FS7 with a speed booster and a 24 mil. So it's somewhere in like the 16 mil range, but kind of that wider angle lens is gonna help you when you're handheld and you're following people. It won't look like an earthquake. Another tip, and I've kind of lost track of my tips now, if this is tip three or four or whatever it is, is weigh your camera down. Now, your camera, especially something like an iPhone, is naturally gonna be shaky because it's so light. The lighter the camera is, the more of the shake will come through your hands and through your arms into that camera. So I like to add a bit of weight to my camera. Now, not too much. There's a happy medium between this. So if I'm shooting on a mirrorless camera, I'll sometimes do all my handheld movements with my GorillaPod still attached because that adds some weight to the camera. The heavier your camera is, the less that the little shakes will come through and it will be more of the sways. And the sways are more organic. They're less jarring, they're less distracting. So think about adding some weight to your camera. Maybe that's a follow focus. Maybe that's some counterweights. Maybe that's even getting a shoulder rig. It could even be adding a cage to your camera and some accessories. But just getting a bit more weight on your camera will hugely improve your handheld filmmaking. That's why a camera like the FS7 here that I use for so much of my shooting is so great for handheld filmmaking because it's not too heavy, but it's also not too light. It's probably about, I don't know, I'm guessing like 10 pounds maybe, nine pounds. I have it stripped down. Usually there's a side handle on it and some other stuff, but I have this camera pretty stripped down, but it's just enough weight that you can see here, even just holding it, it's not shaking. Now it is swaying a bit, but there's enough weight on this that it's not gonna be flailing around. So the images that I get from it are fairly stable to begin with. So add some weight to your camera. Don't be afraid to add weight to it. Don't be scared of that. The weight is actually going to help you. So I hope these tips have helped. Just to recap them, keep your camera close when you're not walking. Use your body, use your legs, use your hips, use your shoulder as ways to rest the camera. Don't be holding the camera out in front of you. It's a bad idea. The only time you should be holding the camera in front of you is if you have a neck strap. That way you'll stabilize it. Number two, take light steps. Remember, think of like the army soldiers. You wanna be walking very light. Your heel, when it strikes the ground, is the thing that will make the camera shake the most. So whenever your heel lands on the ground, you wanna land as soft as possible. Make sure to add a top handle. A top handle helps take gravity into effect. You wanna allow that camera to sit and rest in your hand, rest in your body, especially if you come underneath and cradle it. That way you're not fighting gravity out in front of you. You wanna grab something like a top handle and you wanna cradle the bottom of the camera. And number four, I think it was number four, whatever it is, the other tip is weigh your camera down a bit. Add some weight to your camera. A bit of weight is okay. Now, it might mean you have to go to the gym and lift some weights and that's okay. The best cameramen that I know are all very fit and go to the gym as much as they can. So this might be a great time to get some push-ups in, some chin-ups in, because it's actually gonna help your filmmaking. It's gonna help your handheld filmmaking. But anyways, guys, I'll see you on the next one. I'm gonna be doing a bit more gear review in the next one. So if you don't like gear reviews, you can just avoid that. There is so much gear being sent and I don't really want this to be a gear review channel. I wanna be talking about directing. So I'm gonna be talking about how the pieces of gear I've been sent will improve your filmmaking, or if they're just cool pieces of gear that really don't have any purpose. Because stuff like this, like the 360 camera, I didn't think it would actually help my filmmaking, but the more I've used it, I've seen incredible ways that I can use it to help my clients and to help my film. So I'll be talking about that. But until then, I'll see you guys on the next one. Later!