Filming With Your Mobile Phone

Combined with the power of text messaging and platforms like Twitter to share directly from a live event, mobile phones can be an incredibly powerful tool.

The following are some baseline tips, not an in-depth guide, to help you film with your mobile device safely, capture the best footage you can, keep it safe and ultimately, to share it.

Tips For Filming With Your Mobile Device

Safety:

• Be safe – assess the risks and make decisions to keep yourself safe.
• If applicable, ask someone to watch your back so you can concentrate on filming.

Settings:

• Choose the highest quality setting your phone can handle – each phone is different, so explore to determine how you can maximize your quality and ensure the space needed to capture an event.
• Set your settings to save your media to a memory card, not your phone (and get a large memory card).

Basic Techniques:

• Keep your hands steady and pan slowly – focus on filming as best you can.
• Familiarize yourself with your device: Do a test-run (or two).

Content:

• Film short videos
• Focus on key actors and events.
• As best you can, get footage to capture the context of the event – the who, what, where, when and why.
• If it is safe to do so, get in close. Your image will probably be better and your audio will improve.
• Conduct interviews with witnesses to get context of what is happening in the moment – you may not have the opportunity later.
• If applicable, record yourself in the moment describing what happened and as many details as possible from where you are at. Include the date and time of what you saw, as well as what you are feeling.

VIDEO: Watch this short video from Howcast to learn how to best film with your mobile phone:

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