How to Film Yourself

Hello, good morning, it's 9:00 a.m. m. I am at the beginning of a trail and I feel inspired. If you're new here, my name is Christian. I live in a van, uh, if you come back. Hello, today is perfect, it's kind of rainy. but there's fog on all the trees and on the mountain peaks and right along the river and it's absolutely stunning and the greens are really popping and since it's raining there are a little less people out exploring. I was thinking it might be fun to make a video. where I show you how I

film

myself, this won't be like a full tutorial, step by step guide on how to

film

yourself

, more like, bring your friend to work one day or in this case, bring your friend, work a little bit weak because this will probably take me at least a couple of days to film, so when I try to film myself it's already a bit challenging because I'm in a small space, so you don't always have the naturalness. the lightweight tripod legs don't necessarily extend filming myself filming myself um it'll be an extra layer of challenge we'll see how it goes it can be a little chaotic yeah next up okay are you still filming? we're going to need a variety of cameras To make this happen, a few different tripods and lots of storage space, since I want to film myself filming myself, we're going to want a main bcam.

I'm going to use the iPhone 15 Pro, it can record a record of Apple pros, which means I can get higher quality images that we can play with a little more in the editing process, but those file sizes are huge. This is the Samsung t94 terb SSD. I have a USB C hub here that allows me to plug in the SSD and also an external microphone here at the bottom that I've clipped here, so even if I'm about 15 or 20 feet away, you can still hear me like I'm standing next to it. you because when you are filming alone there is a lot of running into the shot, running out of the shot, running here, running there.

A lot of times my footage is 1 to 2 or 3 minutes long and ultimately I may only use about 10 seconds of that that I have to cut down, but it has to be recording all the time, which is why this SSD is really useful , your phone will turn off long before you fill this 4tbte unit if you don't have a way to charge your phone on the go or you don't have a setup like this where you can plug in a charger, you can get the one tab unit and you'll fill it before your phone dies hello hello hello that's nice looking, can you even see me?

We have forests everywhere, we have mountains out there. right, I found this really cool path, um, it's like lined with trees, it's really pretty, here's the path, look at all the tree cover and there's power lines, if I set up my tripod, you're going to have a weird angle I think. I'm going to open up the drone, float it, and then drive down the road to see what it looks like. Okay, we took the photo, so this is a lot of what filming

yourself

is running back and forth, driving back and forth, you can definitely get that. a workout, okay, so here comes a car, so it's a really good thing that he raised that drone high enough that it's not a problem, no, he's taking the shit out of me, okay, I don't know how I'm going to do it.

Take my drone now, try to go here and fly it towards no one on this road and suddenly someone says: I'm going to park in the only place where I have my perfect drone, so yeah, that person probably parked there because of the drone, maybe they live on the street or on the same street and they say what it's like you're trying to set up a shot and you get everything the way you want it and just when you're about to start filming someone shows up and it's like oh what are you doing here? oh, you're a cool photographer, oh, what's your favorite place?

I mean, and then 30 minutes go by, so it's inevitable that I'll think of a shot and set it up. and then when I'm looking around I see a different shot that looks more attractive in this case. I knelt down to tie my shoe and saw a different perspective of this fallen branch and thought it would be really nice. In close-up, sometimes I honestly do five or six different perspectives of a shot that ultimately you know only one shot is going to be included in the edit, it can be like 5 or 6 seconds and sometimes I've spent almost half an hour yes No more filming from different perspectives, but you know, it's all part of the process.

I learn something every time I do it and I hope over time it gets better if it takes you a long time to do a take and you keep changing it and then just. I know you're not alone, we've got the shot, we set up the shot, so I'm going to go into the scene so the truck is out of focus. Sometimes you can use the foreground and go in and blur just to give it a little bit more of an artistic feel okay so what I just did is an establishing shot so I just wanted to show where we were and just an overview of the truck walking in and out.

I will say that normally I would be wearing a different outfit because I look like a tree right now, which doesn't suit the environment very well, but I live in a van. This is when I start pulling out all my other lenses and setting up different artistic shots. I'll start using prime lenses like the 85 or the 35 um for that shallow depth of field or I'll take out the zoom the 2470, this is the 15 to 35 so it's much better for those wide shots. favorite because I can really focus on nature and just different compositions, it's a lot like photography, but with some movement creating a movie is like putting together a puzzle almost every step of the process you're problem solving, the lighting can change, The weather can make you lose sight of it.

Concentration or equipment may fail, but how do you complete a puzzle when you're missing half the pieces? How do you tell a story when you have fewer heartfelt moments and fewer characters to work with? This is the challenge I found most interesting during filming. alone and that's why I often use voiceover music and sound design so that I hope the viewer feels like they are here with me. I'm sure you've noticed that I'm alone most of the time and that's just one of the disadvantages or advantages, depending on how you look at it, of living on the road full time.

What that means for me from a work perspective is that I am the one who conceives the shooting and editing of all my work. videos also means that my theme, the story in almost all cases has to revolve around me, what I am doing, what I think, how I feel, I become the main character, which, to be honest, I don't actually I love it. I'm trying to get away from that, it was never my intention to become a focal point, especially sharing a lot of my thoughts, but I've found that personally, when I watch content, I'm less interested in just sweeping.

Landscapes and seeing scenes of nature and I like it, it's beautiful but it's not attractive, like there's no real story to hold on to, so while I'm trying to develop my skills as a filmmaker, I'm trying to put more emphasis on, ya You know, telling stories and just learning. how to do it and I'm the only one I have to work with because I travel all the time and so it's hard to recruit people or if you can you know it's just a different way of working usually someone might only be available for one or a couple of days, which means you have to know exactly what you're doing and you have to have it well defined in terms of what type of capture or what type of content you want to capture and the locations. you want to go and that's not how I think for me personally.

I love to spend a lot of time in a place, um at least a few days to just take in how a place feels and the different compositions and what I'm really drawn to and then I'll start imagining different scenes and sequences that I want to create and that's when I'll start to film, so I like to take my time. I like to let concepts breathe and that can just be a little more challenging when you bring in other people or even just one more person, so that's one advantage of filming yourself and being a solo creator is that you don't have to.

You have to compromise or make any type of accommodation for anyone. Otherwise, if you decide you don't like it, you can just throw it all away and start over. And that's something I really love about the creative process: the freedom to really explore and not feel like I'm in anyone else's control. um calendar, I said timeline too many times so I had to think of a new word, I always accidentally call people every time I try to use my drone, those mountains look pretty. Frosty wants a punch, well it's not windy yet, we don't. I need audio because it's really just cars passing by, we don't want to extend the tripod legs too much unless it's a completely windless day, this long lens, if it picks up any wind since it's pierced, it will vibrate a lot and I have some amazing conditions that I filmed which are completely unusable because it's like the whole time there's a mark on my forehead oh, I'm still recording, it's going to be a big file, 20 minutes to film, uh, me trying to film myself getting ready to film.

I'm holding it right now because if I put it down you won't really see what I'm doing. You can also see this beautiful landscape. I usually set up my camera behind the truck if I can. I'm on a busy road just because it attracts a little less attention and if cars or big trucks pass by and kick up rocks or something, they're less likely to hit my lens, these are much more accessible from anyone else. do it right, notes to put your hiking boots in a more convenient place if you notice I have a backpack, both tripods, the one I'm holding, the one here, I have a lot of stuff in my pockets when I'm filming myself, I usually get rid of of all these things and try to casually walk through the scene, so I want to create the effect of what I'm seeing when I walk under all these moss-covered tree branches, so I'm going to point my camera up. and capture in slow motion and just slide around and hopefully get smooth images of what I'm seeing.

I'm so glad I brought this waterproof jacket because it was only lightly drizzled when I got out of the van, but now it's starting to go down luckily I'm under a bunch of trees. I really love this weather so much it probably looks so ridiculous right now. One thing I really like about this disc is that it has a nice texture, has a good grip, and is designed. It can be dropped up to 3m or 10ft, but it's not designed for heavy rain, so we're removing it. I do my best to import images as I go so I can make backups and also make some initial selections.

I use the 512GB Samsung Pro Ultimate SD in each of these cameras. I like the high capacity storage options and that they are compatible with all my devices, since we film on the SSD we can just plug it in and edit, the T9 is perfect for video editing because it is fast and doesn't get hot like other drives. I personally use a MacBook Pro with a standard Thunderbolt port, but if you have this dedicated USB port you can get even faster transfer speeds of up to 2000 megabytes per second. I just bought a raspberry bun and an American there are three guys outside playing the guitar the trains go by there is fog swirling in the mountains and the river is so nice obviously it's a pretty hectic place to film there are thousands of cars everywhere when you enter the view is really good when I started working with videos, I found that a lot of advice focused on the importance of having a process and developing a template or style and although I think they are very useful and effective tips, I personally like all the videos. feeling like a blank slate where I can experiment and just make mistakes.

I love the mystery of not knowing what kind of story will unfold and the challenge of documenting it alone. I'm sharing this because I think it's important to know that there is no right or wrong way to film yourself, just have fun because when you're excited to create and inspired to learn, honestly, it's kind of hard to go wrong, okay, wow, this place is so great, it's right next to the road. It's so amazing, that's why I love exploring. It's so cool, you never know what you're going to find. It's probably too dark to get anything good right now, but I'm going to open it up and see why I walked past this amazing one. view with the fog and a bridge and the river and the trees and I thought I had to open it up and see what it looks like.

I'll probably have to come back when it's not so dark, but let's see what we see. what we get, are you still recording? Okay, wow, recording, oh, I just hit my lens. I'm very horny right now. almost out of gas no, yeah, no idea if this footage is flying around back there, basically all of that was out of focus 5 hours later, there's stuff in my lens