5 Of The Biggest Technical Filmmaking Mistakes Beginners Make

This video is sponsored by Squarespace, the easiest way to create a beautiful website. Filmmaking is an art, but also comes with a technical side that can take time to master. Beginners starting out with a passion for movies and storytelling will quickly find out that these technical mistakes can sever the illusion of movie magic and pull the audience completely out of the world of the story. That's why today let's break down five of the biggest technical pitfalls new filmmakers face and more importantly diagnose how you can avoid making them. Seated or standing dialogue scenes are what make up the bulk of most narrative scripts and are incredibly important for conveying information and pushing the story along. Making a spatial continuity error when filming these scenes by placing the camera or subjects in the wrong position is therefore an ever-present looming danger which could make entire scenes unusable. Here's an example of how most dialogue scenes between two characters would be filmed. Everything seems normal and it's easy to imagine where the characters are in relation to each other. If it was instead shot like this, it makes the spatial relationship between the two characters a bit confusing. Something feels off, like both characters are standing on the same side of the room. Continuity mistakes can be easily avoided by following one of the most important filmmaking guidelines called the 180 degree rule. Here's what it is. If you place two characters in a room, imagine that there's an invisible line that runs through both of them. The 180 degree rule mandates that all shots filmed of these characters interacting should be done from the same side of the line. So if one close-up is shot at an angle from one side of the line, the camera should be repositioned on the same 180 degree side of the line to film the other close-up. If the camera crosses the line, the positions of the characters will flip on screen, creating confusion for the viewer. This is called breaking the line. An easy way to check if you have followed the 180 degree rule is to review the two shots and check that one of the characters eyeline is going from left to right, while the other character's eyeline is going from right to left. If both characters are looking in the same direction, for example from left to right, then you've jumped the line and made a mistake. There have been a few occasions where established filmmakers intentionally break this rule, often to provoke an emotional tone like a feeling of unease or disorientation. However, as with most technical guidelines, I'd highly recommend beginner filmmakers stick to convention early on. There's a danger that low budget, student or beginner films that break this rule will look like they made a clumsy mistake, even if jumping the line was a deliberate choice. If you feel that there's a genuine reason that you need to break the line, it helps to have a wider neutral shot to cut to that you can place in between the two shots where you want to jump the line. One of the most important but often underappreciated parts of a cinematographer's job is maintaining lighting and exposure continuity across each scene. Having one shot with vastly different lighting or brightness in a sequence is a sure fire way to disengage the viewer from the story and break the illusion of reality. One way to prevent this from happening is to set up continuous artificial light sources. If unmoved, these will supply consistent illumination for the extended period of time that it takes to move the camera around and film all the different shots in the scene. When these various shots are edited together, they will look seamless, as if the scene unfolded in real time. The choice of what lights you use and where you place them is a nuanced topic, but a starting point is to think about where the natural sources of light are coming from and then place your lights in a position that copies the direction and quality of that light. So if there's a lamp on the table, perhaps you can aim your light at the actor from the direction of the lamp. Or if there's a window, place your light so that it shines through it, just as the sun would. In most cases I'd avoid placing lights in arbitrary positions, which aren't motivated by real or imagined light sources. You don't want to end up with a frame which is lit by multiple suns, which makes the world unbelievable. Maintaining lighting continuity for exteriors can be much more tricky, as you may have to shoot a scene over a day with changing weather conditions, which go from cloud to bright sun. The most important starting point here is to make sure you maintain a consistent exposure that is neither too bright nor too dark by using exposure tools like a waveform, false colour or zebras. Depending on the situation you may have to try and schedule shooting around the weather, for example shoot one scene in the morning when it's overcast, come inside to shoot an interior, then go back outside in the afternoon once it's sunny to shoot a new scene. Another trick is using textiles like diffusion to create a cloud cover feel which will even out minor changes in natural light. Another must have for filmmakers looking to get started is building a website that showcases your portfolio and acts as a point of contact, which you can get thanks to our sponsor Squarespace. Setting up a website may seem a tad intimidating, but what I like about Squarespace is that they make the design process super simple and intuitive for your average person like me. You can build a beautiful, personalized site by selecting options recommended for your needs from their Blueprint AI. Squarespace acts as the designer so you don't have to. You can easily integrate your video work into libraries or organize images from your portfolio into galleries. Check out squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch your site go to squarespace.com slash indepthcinee to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. The camera settings you select are critical because they directly influence the visual style, mood and storytelling of your project. Although some may say there are no wrong choices when it comes to artistic decisions, there are some basic settings which should be stuck to as a rule in almost all cases. When setting up a camera you'll need to dial in your frame rate, shutter, ISO, the aperture of your lens and the white balance. Here are the default camera settings you should use in most situations. To get a normal non-slo-mo feeling of motion, PAL countries use a frame rate of 25fps, while NTSC regions will use either 24 or 23.98. If you're using a cinema camera with a shutter angle you can set this to 180 degrees. Or if using a mirrorless camera with a shutter speed you can set it to approximately double your frame rate, so 1 over 50. Most digital cameras these days come with a recommended ISO or base ISO, such as 800. In most cases I'd stick to this recommendation. If you're starting out I'd recommend setting the aperture of the lens to a low f-stop number, for example in the f2 to f2.8 range. If your lens is slower than this then I'd set it to the lowest f-stop value possible. This will give your footage a shallow depth of field, which if you're starting out is an easy way to visually elevate your footage. Rather than using auto mode, I'd recommend setting the white balance for each scene or new lighting situation you are faced with. There are three main settings I would try to stick to. For exterior daylight scenes I'd select a white balance of 5600K. For interior or night scenes lit by warm tungsten light you can shoot at 3200K. And for scenes with mixed warm and cool light sources you can set your white balance to 4300K. Although this would be the basic starting point, it's also possible to play around with different white balances. To find a number that you feel gives the scene the colour that you are after. Beginner filmmakers have a tendency to focus mainly on the footage they're getting. It's important to remember that the images only make up 50% of a movie going experience. The other 50% is done with sound. This is one of the big mistakes we made when filming our first no budget feature called Relics. Without professional sound you don't really have a usable product. So what are different pieces of sound that you'll need to focus on? Firstly and most importantly you'll need to record clean dialogue of all the spoken lines. To do this I'd recommend recording sound with both a lapel mic, which is placed on whoever's speaking, and also recording sound with a boom mic. Make sure that this boom mic as well as the microphone packs are never seen in shot. Next it's good to record ambience or a buzz track. In other words get around one minute of sound where nobody is speaking, recorded in the location that the scene just took place in. This can be layered underneath a dialogue and will help to smooth over any cuts in sound, for example if different pieces of dialogue are used from different takes. It's also useful to try grab wild sound of any foley or sound effect which may be relevant, such as the sound of footsteps or wind blowing outside. Colour grading is essential because it transforms raw footage into a polished, visually compelling final product that aligns with the story's mood and tone. When I was starting out as a cinematographer I didn't know much about grading and often wouldn't push for a look to be applied to the footage, which left some of the early short films I worked on largely ungraded. Cameras and post-production software have since come along in leaps and bounds and it's now easier than ever to give your project a nice graded look. Because many beginners won't have access to a dedicated colourist, there's a simple workflow that will get you around this issue. Firstly it's important that you shoot the footage in log. This is a flat picture profile which will give you more room to make adjustments to colour, contrast and exposure in grading or editing software. Once you've set your camera to log I would import the LUT which you want to use in the grade either to an external monitor or to the camera itself. These come in cube files and can be downloaded online or found in programs like DaVinci Resolve. It's important that this LUT is put in the correct colour space. For example, if using a Sony camera make sure the LUT is compatible with S-Log. You don't want to bake this look onto the footage, but rather use it as a way to monitor how the flat footage will look once you apply this LUT later. Make sure that you are happy with your lighting, white balance selection and exposure when you view the monitor on set with the look applied. Once you've shot your footage and brought it into editing software, this LUT can then be applied to give you the same look that you were viewing on set. Finally, you can do minor colour correction like adjusting the colour balance or going slightly up or down on exposure until all the shots in the scene have a consistent colour, look and brightness. By mastering LUTs and basic colour grading, beginner filmmakers can not only improve the quality of their current projects, but also lay a strong foundation for creating visually impactful films and using more advanced grading techniques in the future. Let me know down in the comments what mistakes you've overcome. Thank you to all of you for supporting the channel and a special thanks to those that get the videos early on Patreon. Otherwise, until next time, thanks for watching and goodbye.