It’s been 27 years since Steve Spielberg’s Jurassic Park hit the cinema screens and became part of a select set of movies that have gone into global film-making legend. The movie is a masterpiece of CGI film-making. The movie visuals and cinematography, according to several armchair observers, seem to be better than the movies made today, including many of its sequels.
It is flabbergasting to think that even with the advantages of almost three decades of technological progress, Jurassic Park remains a visual treat for movie lovers. So, how did Spielberg do it? The devil lies in the detail.
In a nutshell, Steven Spielberg used a combination of perfect scale framing, an aspect ratio of 1.85:1, which gave viewers 24% more vertical landscaping within each frame, thereby helping see the size and scale of the brontosaurus. And finally, his team also used a kaleidoscope of angles to show the dinosaurs with various objects.
Another director that is famous for the cinematography of his movies (amongst many other things!) is Christopher Nolan. His movies Dunkirk, Interstellar, and Inception, are masterpieces in the effective use of technology to provide the best possible visual experience for his audience.
Spielberg and Nolan are two stalwarts of the movie-making world. They work with experts, have gargantuan budgets to spend, and therefore have no shortage of technology, resources, or talent. Since the advent of YouTube and the myriad video platforms that have empowered the audience to be creators and inverted the creation pyramid, we have millions of people jostling to create quality videos.
Video Editing At Home Is Now Easy
What about the rest of the world’s creators? What about the amateur video creator who works on a limited budget? Can they even aspire to have such levels of quality? Well, to be honest, reaching the quality of Christopher Nolan and Steven Spielberg, and their teams may be difficult. However, video creators at home can keep several tops in mind to reach a high level of quality in their videos. Excellent video editing tools available in the market can help you craft great videos from home. Tools such as InVideo provide a variety of features and facilitate good results.
Creating videos from home may feel like a simple process with very little room for video editing innovations, but with the right tools, numerous things can be done to create high-quality videos. These tools give you the superpowers to be your home version of Speilberg or Nolan. One of the features of such tools that can be very powerful in building great videos is filters.
Usually, there are broadly two aspects to keep in mind for filters: being able to find the right tools with the appropriate filters and decision-making in terms of choosing the correct filter. This short article is to help you understand how to pick the best filters for your video and create the best possible videos for your audience. Remember! The devil is always in the details (and sometimes for videos, in the filters!)
1. Don’t Forget The Basics
There are several ‘how to videos‘ available on the internet in general and specifically on video-editing tools’ websites, and numerous other places that help you understand the basics of choosing the right filters. The important part here is to go through the necessary checklist of the basics: Having the correct visual aspects for your video such as the temperature, saturation, contrast, and hue, and using the right color combinations for different parts of your video such as transitions, associations, dramatic arcs, etc.
Getting the basics right can often make the difference between a video that appears to be well-edited and a video that is lousily made.
2. Use The Right Tool For Filters
The internet is flooded with a multitude of video editing tools that you can use. Such tools offer multiple filters and enable you to easily use these filters on your video. Now, you need to be careful when choosing the right tool for filters. If you are focusing more on reducing execution time rather than extremely high quality, then you may want to go with a video-editing tool that offers a variety of ready-to-use filters and features for readymade video structures such as a photo slideshow with music.
However, if you are looking at crafting very high-quality premium videos and you have a significant budget, then it might make sense to go for premium versions of such video editing tools. If you have the deep expertise to deal with technical levels of filters, then try to find a video-editing tool that gives you as much flexibility as possible rather than offering ready-to-use filter options. Ultimately, choosing the right tool for filters is all about following a ‘horses for courses’ strategy.
3. Keep It Subtle
In the 21st century, minimalism can sometimes go a long way in attracting the audiences. When you are picking filters for your videos, then another crucial aspect to keep in mind is to not go overboard with filters.
You may end up using too many filters for your transitions, or your filters may be so loud that they take away attention from the video content and keep it focused on the filter, or you may even end up bamboozling your audience with the frequency of change in filters.
Remember, filters should support and augment the videos rather than becoming centerpieces themselves. Subtlety can often rule!
4. Decide The Filter Based On The Story
Yet another aspect to keep in mind while choosing the right filters is to decide filters based on the story. What’s the dramatic arc of your narrative? What is the emotion that you want your viewers to feel at different points of time? How do you want the viewer to feel at the beginning? What parts of your video have vivid and riveting visuals?
All these questions should help you decide the filters rather than the other way around. A small example: A simple filter like ‘Sepia’ is usually suited to the feeling of ‘nostalgia.’ All in all, first have your story ready and then build or decide filters around it.
5. Research, Research, Research!
Finally, remember that the number of video creators in the world is now huge. There are 50 million video creators on YouTube alone, and 95% of the global internet population watches YouTube. And these are just YouTube numbers. Videos are proliferated across the Social Media spectrum.
Millions of video creators and billions of videos jostling for visibility means competition, and to succeed in gaining visibility amongst your audience, attention to detail is vital. That is where your diligence to do research comes in. Getting the basics right and finding the right video editing tools for your filters can only be successful with diligent research.