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Creating cinematic videos with a smartphone is always fun for me. Suppose you love to shoot videos with your smartphone and want to make a cinematic video with it. Then this article can be super helpful to you. So, let’s explore How To Shoot Cinematic Videos with Your Smartphone.
Before we jump straight into the steps, I want to let you know that the first two steps will be easy and the basics, but the last three will be super important.
So, read this post carefully and till the end, and I promise you’ll be able to create amazing cinematic videos in the future.
1. Use MAX Settings
Now, to shoot high-quality videos, you need to have a camera that can capture videos at a higher resolution. Because, in the end, you are going to colour grade the footage. So having a higher quality video will make the quality better—no concern how you colour grades the footage.
I have a Redmi K20 Pro, and it can shoot 4K at 60FPS, so go and check your camera settings and select the highest possible capture option available on your device. After checking it off, you are good to go.
2. Use Of Slides
An excellent cinematic video can attract the audience until its end and create an engagement to your audience. You have to take some smooth & slow shots with the help of slides. You can use some gimbals to achieve something like this, but you can only capture it with your hand if you follow my way.
Firstly, put both hands on the sides of your device and tilt your device in landscape mode so that you can capture a better dynamic range. Then try to move your hands in a vertical or horizontal direction in a slow manner.
This thing will add drama & more cinematic vibes to your video, and the audience watch time will stretch as well. You can check out this video for detailed information.
3. Follow The Motion
Following motion can bump up your video to another level. If you follow the sequence and each clip’s activity, you will find each shot has a particular meaning, and it can convey more than just a video. You can have static clips also but let’s forget them in this part.
If you have a clip shot from a garden, you should have to put flowers or anything else related & relevant to the park itself. No matter how sound the clips are, you should follow the motion.
If you use the first clip as a garden, then put a clip of a dog next, then it will not create meaning. So, try to avoid this and use motions and meaningful things as much as you can while creating a cinematic video.
4. Use Of Transitions
When you’re creating a cinematic video, many people use many transitions that, in tier opinion, can make their footage a lot better. But, in reality, that’s not even true. The fewer effects you use, the better the video will look.
Rather than using transition presets, I would like to suggest you try following the direction, which will help you to improve the video flow and sequence.
If you’re shooting a clip from left to right and you want to use a transition to the following clip, then make sure to hit the next clip while keeping the recording direction from left to right again.
And when you are composing the footage in post-production, this shooting style will help you a lot.
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Same as that, if you want to create a rotatable sequence from two footages, you’ll have to shoot the first clip in a direction and shoot the second clip in the same order as this. You can have a better understanding by watching the actual tutorial video from youtube.
5. Color Correct & Color Grade
One of the main things to shoot a cinematic video is to colour grade and colour correct the footage. Now, in smartphones, we don’t get a ton of controls to shoot in flat profiles. But, in the post-production, we can eventually look at the clips a lot better and visually appealing. Firstly let’s break down the colour correction.
Colour Correction:
When we shoot a cinematic video with a smartphone, we have to retouch the colouring of the footage to make the actual video a lot better to watch and express the video and the meaning.
To colour correct the clips, we have to fix the exposure, contrast, hues, saturation, blacks, and all the basic settings which take an essential place in the video colour.
In making the footage colour as the real world, we have to perform the colour correction, which fixes each footage’s quality and colour, and that process is called a colour correction.
Colour Grading:
After the colour correction part is finished, we have to colour grade the footage by which they can generate a perfect vibe and meaning of that video and make a spot for the audience.
Colour grading takes a lot of time and effort when it comes to making a film-like video. But, we don’t have to go through a lot. Many professional filmmakers use general colour grading, and the most used colour grading is orange and teal.
You can find many loots for free to download that you can use to grade your clips. Here you can see the difference in colour grading.
Conclusion
In the end, if we try to recall all the previous explanations, in short, that would be like these:
- Make sure to Shoot the Videos in the Highest Quality Possible from Your Smartphone.
- Use Pan/ Slides to give life to the video.
- Follow the Motion to generate a direction for your videos.
- Use fewer transition effects to create a cinematic video.
- Make sure to colour grade and colour correct the footage in post-production.
If you try to follow the steps mentioned above in the steps, I can confirm that you can create a unique cinematic video with your smartphone.
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