What illustrates the message you want to communicate to your audience? What point of view do you want to show?
These are just two examples of questions you might ask yourself as you begin to plan what imagery to use in your short film or video. For Hope on the Rize, you are welcome to use videos and photographs you took yourself, as well as copyright-free videos and photographs available online.
If you choose to incorporate some of your own videos and photographs in your film, this video is a great resource to watch before you begin.
Film Riot covers some important factors to consider, like composition and framing. One way to think of composition is what guides your eyes across a scene on the screen. Framing is related to composition, and it refers to where objects and people are placed in any given shot.
This video also discusses different types of lenses, in case the camera you are using has the capability to use different lenses.
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.
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.
It is possible that you do not want to use your own videos and photographs in your short film. Perhaps you want to use a shot of something that would be difficult or impossible for you to get on your own, like dolphins swimming through the ocean, the Earth from outer space, or a brown bear climbing a tree. In that case, there are websites you can browse to find copyright-free videos and photos from other creators. We recommend Pexels, Videezy, Unsplash, and Videvo.
Note: Be careful where you obtain other creators’ footage and images! Make sure to use one of the recommended sites, and if you use a different site, double-check the licenses of the video/image to make sure you are allowed to use it in your own creation.
An exercise that might be helpful for you as you plan your videos/images: play this YouTube video, composed of stock footage, in the background as you read your script aloud! See how it feels to pair certain lines with certain visuals — and you might get some inspiration for what you want to include in your own short film.
