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I am a teacher and a coach, and I want to make better videos of high school and gradeschool basketball games.

In your Video Course, you talk about watching a guy shooting a soccer game by panning the camera back and forth and back and forth. Obviously that’s not it (although I felt like you mocked him a bit harshly!) But you didn’t really show us how to do it right!

We are not multiple camera crew people– we are just simple folks. I would like to know how you would shoot video of a high school girls basketball game without your normal 150 person crew.

–John

 

Apologies if my rant made you feel like I was taking you to task. My example was about learning to think in shots. Trying to cover an event by swinging a camera randomly doesn’t  work (and will lead to motion sickness on playback.) If you plan your video in discrete shots, you won’t have that problem.

As you’ve figured out though, for some people shooting short shots creates a different problem: you miss a lot of action.

Before you get to the court, camera in hand, you have a decision to make: Are you documenting or making a documentary?

Documenting an event is what we’re used to seeing as breaking news or a live event TV: we’re on the ground at the giant fire or the football game or the political event. It’s happening right now and our job is to cover the heck out of it.

And here’s a hard truth:

If you only have one camera, you can’t shoot it all. Nobody can– not even me with a crew of 150, a full craft service table and a PA to move my sun-shade. The NBA has 20 cameras pointing at the basketball court for a reason: One camera can’t possibly see everything, everywhere, all at once.

Imagine being close enough to get a fantastic shot of the player shooting a three-pointer– you’ll never be turned around in time to follow the rebound back down the court. If you sit in the bleachers and lock your camera on a wide shot, you might get usable footage for post-game analysis, but it will be really tedious to watch. (Which is why the NBA points 20 cameras at the court.)

Either your goal (shoot everything) or your tech (one camera) have to change. Let’s talk goal first. Instead of trying to document the game, what if you make your video a documentary?

In documentary, we create a story in the edit room based on something that already happened. Whether it’s a concert, or the story of a football team’s season, or Survivor or Supersize Me! the footage has been edited, augmented, re-mixed and rearranged to become a film, a special or a reality show. Each a kind of documentary. And lots of them are shot single camera.

To make a great documentary video with just one camera:

  1. Aim to tell the story of a game rather than document the plays.
  2. Shoot tons of great, short shots that might help you tell that story. Say you’re shooting a video about the progress your most-improved players are making. You might shoot them at practice earlier in the week, you might follow them on the bus as the team arrives at the venue, their reactions to the coach’s speech in the locker room, those players running out on the court. And as many amazing plays as you can, worrying more about getting some great action with those players than all the action. Key: Think about a story, shoot whatever you can that relates to it.
  3. Add interviews: maybe team members before and after, the other coach, parents. Who can talk about the story?
  4. When you’re done with all that shooting, edit. Keep it simple: Lay your shots out in order. Cut the bad ones, then shorten the good ones. Move the interviews around to where you like them.
  5. Try to end up with a video that ends before you get tired of it. Any length is fine as long as things stay interesting, but at the start you might aim for 3 minutes or so, just as a radical exercise in keeping it short.

The result? A good, short, entertaining, professional-looking documentary based on the game,but not a document of the game itself.

Alternatively, if you really want to document and do it well– say you’re streaming the game, or it’s a big championship– you’ll have to change your tech. You need more cameras. Fortunately, you don’t need a crew of 150 to do this—just some iPhones and volunteers.

Teach 6 or 8 people how to shoot, give them their “shooting zones”  so they don’t get in each others’ way, and send them out on the court to shoot the entire game. Collect the footage and edit later.

Even easier, use one of the many live-stream apps to help you. I use Switcher Studio to stream our big show at the non-profit performing arts camp I teach at every Summer. Switcher lets you link any number of iPhones to an iPad, which then becomes your studio control, meaning you can cut from camera to camera instantly, just like the NFL. You can live stream, record, or both. (No, I don’t get a commission from this endorsement. Although now that you mention it…)

At Summer Stars we train 8 or 9 volunteers with iPhones to become camera people, link them and go. The result looks like this.

Not quite the Superbowl, but way better than waving your camera back and forth and back and forth…

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