Gear - Accessories

You don’t need anything other than a camera, but this stuff will help you achieve better results:

Tripods

Saying ‘hold the camera still’ to an excited SciCast film-maker is like trying to train custard to flow uphill. It’s best to attach a weighty boat anchor of a tripod to the camera in the hopes they’ll get the hint. A few notes on things to look for:

  • If you’re buying a tripod, make sure you’re buying a video tripod, which you can pan and tilt smoothly, and not a stills tripod, which locks off solidly. If the shop you’re in doesn’t know the difference, try another shop.
  • ‘Lightweight’ is not a phrase you want to hear. But don’t buy something so heavy teenagers can’t lift it.
  • A decent tripod will cost you between £50 and £100; more expensive ones are designed for heavier semi-professional cameras.
  • Be aware of safety issues: tripods are significant trip hazards, and there are manual handling worries too. They’re awkward things to carry, and offer lots of painful finger-traps.

Wide-angle adaptors

A common flaw of cheap cameras is that the lens doesn’t zoom out wide enough. To include both a person and the experiment they’re doing on a table, you have to stand far enough away that the camera’s microphone doesn’t pick anything up.

One option is to look carefully at your camera’s lens, and see if there’s a screw thread surrounding it. If so, you may be able to fit a wide- angle adaptor: an accessory lens that gives you a wider field of view. These tend to be optically rather poor, so take your camera to the shop and test out a few different models, if you can. Make sure your camera can still focus, that the corners of the picture don’t go terribly dark (‘vignetting’), and see how distorted the picture looks: doors and walls will usually bow out or ‘pincushion’, the questions is how distracting is the effect?

If you can find one that’s even half-decent, the extra versatility may be well worth the money.

Spare batteries

Cameras eat batteries. On the other hand, SciCast films are short, and you’ll typically shoot around ten minutes of material for each. So unless your battery’s really past its prime, you should be OK.

Lights

To be honest, we usually don’t bother. Lighting for video is, as far as we’re concerned, a complete black art, and far more bother than it’s worth. Not to mention the risk of tripping over stands and cables. However, if you have theatrical lights kicking around in school anyway, and you want to make a bit of a production of it, who are we to stop you?

All the usual techniques of stage lighting apply, but with a slightly different emphasis. Cameras will usually be pointed at more specific detail, so you’re aiming for a less exaggerated look. So be careful with colour gels, it’s easy to go too far.

Also, cameras tend to flatten the scene. One of the goals of video lighting is to reveal form and shape, to add back depth the camera doesn’t capture. That’s why the usual photography approach is to apply a soft ‘fill’ from one side, and a harder detail light from the other.

Finally, video cameras don’t cope well with very high contrast. If you have deep shadows behind your performers but their faces are brightly-lit, your video will be a ghastly smudge. The professionals light the background and performers separately, so they can control the camera exposure with more finesse.

There’s an excellent series of articles about lighting at photography blog Strobist. It’s aimed at stills photographers, but most of the same ideas apply to video. It’s just that video lights don’t do that annoying flashing thing!