A video can disappoint for many reasons. You are planning a kids bar mitzvah party and hire a videographer to have a record of the few speakers. You hire a budget videographer for that simple video.
The video doesn’t show much of the boy playing with his friends during the smorgasbord. You worked hard on crafting the centerpieces. The video shows the unfinished room before banners were hung. Worse, the intricacies of all your hard work on the detailed centerpieces is invisible in wide shots. Close ups have no texture. They are flat looking.
The dancing was spirited with grandparents, rarely seen cousins, even your husband forgetting about all the preparation finally was in the moment. Your son’s expression of joy when lifted high – he truly was on top of the world right then. But the video only zoomed into his face the one moment he is off balance and the dancing shows people not as you remember them with exciting eyes and joyous smiles but rather as crowds … distant people, shown from a distance that remind you of people that you think you know.
Details that make people individuals, and their personalities are absent in this record. Sparkling eyes, determined expressions, tenacious hands and dizzying feet are not shot as close ups at just the right time and only show at seemingly arbitrary and lackluster moments.
You wait for the speeches to be better than the dancing. You recall with pride your husband’s speech, and how the audience followed his every word. Faces of close friends stands out in your mind but none of their reactions are in the video. Why?!?
Either speeches are shot theatrically like stage work, or they are shot as a press conference. Theatrical camera work involves the cameraman opinion at every moment on what is important, and how to enhance that.
News involves pointing a camera toward the podium: done! More, involves camera handling skill and decision making beyond a budget mindset. Straight forward basics get the least complaints. Drama requires altering angle, zoom, and composition to make a statement about the person speaking in real time as the dynamics of the speaker evolve. It is not for the faint of heart, or a client who expects to see the obvious, rather than insisting on the interesting. Additional cameras boost the expense, distract, and still may not get the right audience faces at the right time. An awareness of the important vs the unimportant is required. The client must accept not seeing equal footage of every similarly important guest. The viewer hears the speaker even when he is not seen on camera. Sometimes this can work really well and makes for a beautiful video. But that means finding faces reacting to the speaker’s words and delivery. A great speech helps. An entertaining speaker helps. A responsive audience helps. Even with all that, some clients expect to see the speaker most of the time and actually think wide shots show everything in a dance set, while zooms cut everything out. Factors like podium placement, having room to move but not great distance to span, and a crowd who welcome cameras rather than being irritated by one in their midst, all go to shape the approach which is chosen to make a shoot easy. Not having interesting reactions and detail actually is an industry wide reaction by many videographers to dumb down their approach and follow the path of least resistance and effort, every step of the way. Everything hardly shows anything at all. But they are afraid of missing something and budget guys are trained not to take chances, and to keep editing easy.