04.1 Recommended: Recording Original Footage

The strongerst visual imagery is usually footage that you film yourself with a camera. This gives your film an original quality that lets viewrs experience how you see thw world. If your school, organization or family support recording original visual footage then you might consider how you choose to frame (with the Rule of Thirds) and the angles of perspective that you might take (from up high or from down low, for example).

Rule of Thirds

One of the most important guides that videographers and photographers use in regard to their composition and framing is the rule of thirds.

To use the rule of thirds, creators imagine that there is a grid with 9 boxes (a 3×3 array) on top of whatever it is they are recording or photographing. The four locations where the vertical and horizontal lines intersect are called “power points" — and this is where you should place points of interest within the frame. Examples of points of interest could be a person’s eye or the center of a flower. Most cameras and smart devices proide this grid as a native tool.

It is important to remember, though, that while this is called the rule of thirds, there are no “rules" in art! Sometimes it will make sense to use the rule of thirds to set up your shot, but sometimes it might make more sense to ignore this guideline and set up your framing in a different way.

Transferring Original Footage from a Camera to the Cloud

If you record orginal on a camera or device at home, you can transfer to a location that you can access at school. There are a few options. You can upload it to your student account at drive.google.com. If you are editing in Canva and CapCut, you can also upload the footage directly to your accunt or project on these webbased Apps.