Top 5 Filmmaking Accessories (Camera Accessories for Filmmaking)

What's up everyone, welcome back to the channel. My name is Alex Chung and today I wanna talk about my top five favorite filmmaking accessories that I take with me pretty much every single time that I go out and shoot. Everything that I talk about today will be in the description down below. And just a quick heads up, this video is sponsored by SmallRig and we'll talk about them and how you guys can save 5% on any SmallRig product. All right, we're diving straight in and the first thing I wanna talk about is this LED light from SmallRig. This is their Pix M160 LED light. Now I actually used it in my previous video in this nighttime office scene to make it seem like the lamp behind me was acting like a backlight. There's three different modes to it. The first one is a color temperature mode where you can change the color of the light based on the Kelvin. Right now I have it at 2,500 Kelvin and it can go all the way up to 8,500 Kelvin, which is like really cool. And it's also dimmable so you can set how bright you want the light to be all the way from zero to 100% brightness. There's an HSI mode which lets you literally pick any color that you want and you can just change the hue of the color and also the saturation. And lastly, you have the scene mode which lets you select from a preset of different lighting effects. There are four different scenes and within each scene there are three different lighting presets. What I love about this light is how small and portable it is and you can basically hide it anywhere to give yourself an edge light or a nice fill light. The back of this light is magnetized so you can attach it to any metal object and you have hands-free operation. It's got quarter inch mounting points on the bottom and on the side so that you can attach it to your camera or onto an articulating arm. But my favorite thing about this light is that when you don't wanna use it as a light, you can actually use it as a power bank to charge your devices. This is a 3,800 milliamp hour battery. At the bottom there's a USB-A port so that you can plug your devices in and start charging right away. It is a little bit smaller on the power bank size but for those times when you just need a little bit of battery, this will definitely come in handy. The light comes with a honeycomb grid, a diffuser, a little small ball head, and a carrying bag. The next accessory is the SmallRig Mini Matte Box. It looks like this and you've seen it before. It goes in front of your camera and when you attach it to your camera, it makes it look really cool, really badass and clients will think you're an actual professional because you have one of these. Just kidding but not really. What a matte box will do is add filtration to the front of your lens and it has a flag up front that blocks off any unwanted light flares. The Mini Matte Box is a mini version of the lightweight matte box that SmallRig also makes. Even though this is a lightweight matte box, it's still pretty massive if you look at it from side to side but they also do the same things. You've got an adapter ring that goes right in front of your lens and then the matte box goes right on top of that and that's how you secure your matte box onto your camera. And then you mount your filters right onto this tray right here and then you just slide it over the front. What's really cool about this SmallRig design is that you can stack multiple filter trays in front of each other so that you can use as many filters as you need. You've got four quarter inch mounting points at the top right here and then one at the bottom for a rod support system. I love using the Mini Matte Box because it's so lightweight and portable. If I didn't want to use it, I can just take it off and easily store it into my backpack or a Pelican case. All right, moving on to the third item, this is the SmallRig Top Handle. This is by far one of my most used accessory and it's pretty much always on my camera at all times. This top handle goes on top of your camera so that it adds an extra point of contact when you're shooting. And it comes in super handy when you actually need to grab low angle shots. You don't have to awkwardly hold the camera like on the side and then you're crouching at the bottom. You can just really comfortably just grip it at the top and get some really good, nice low angle shots. It just feels so natural to pick it up and set it down by using the top handle versus again, using that side grip which is a little bit awkward sometimes. And it's got tons of threaded mounting points that you can use to attach different accessories onto the front, onto the top right here. There's also two cold shoe mounts right here in the front and one in the back. One of my favorite things about this design is that they've magnetized a small little Allen wrench to the side of the handle so that you can tighten and loosen hex screws if you needed to. I would say if you're only gonna buy one thing out of this entire list, I would highly, highly recommend you pick up a top handle for your own camera. Before we move on to the next part of the video, I wanna thank today's sponsor, SmallRig. They make incredible accessories for your cameras, your gimbals, your phones, and even external monitors. These accessories add a ton of functionality to your equipment without having to spend a whole ton of money. Now, I'm not gonna be one of those people who are like, oh wow, these are so great. These products are so awesome. You should go buy them without ever having used them before. In fact, if you take a look at my ever-growing collection of SmallRig products, you'll see that by now, I have bought almost every single SmallRig product. And this is all before I got sponsored which means I spent a whole ton of my own money onto a lot, a lot of SmallRig products which kinda sucks. But you know what doesn't suck is the 5% discount that SmallRig is giving you guys when you use the code SmallRig01 at checkout only on Amazon. And now, back to the video. This next item is a newer thing that I recently got and it's this Everyday Carry Pocket Knife. I've actually got two and this first one is the Spyderco Tenacious Pocket Knife which I got last month for our Yellowstone trip just in case we needed to use it as a tool. However, it's kinda big. Like when you open it up all the way, it's kinda big and I didn't like how pointy the edge was at the top. So instead, I got the CRKT Squid which is a lot smaller and it's not so sharp and pointy at the top. And I love the assistant opening where it pops open after you push it halfway. And this pocket knife comes in super handy especially when I need to cut things like gaff tape if it's stuck and mangled onto a power cord. I can just like easily cut it open or if I need to pry things open like this Tascam Recorder's SD cards cover right here. For some reason, it's like incredibly hard to pick open with just your fingernail. So what I do is just take the knife and slip it in there and then just open it. It's so much easier. All right, and the last accessory that I recommend is getting a power outlet splitter like this. It comes in super handy, especially on weddings, right? When you have everybody plugging into like two outlets and the DJ's there, the stage lighting needs to be plugged in and you need to plug in your lights and then everybody else needs to charge their phone. It's like, it's such a hassle. When you get to the reception and you need to set up two lights, you only have one outlet. So with this little splitter, you plug it into that only outlet that's left for you. It's like the most like terrible, janky, loose outlet, right? It's always that one outlet that nobody wants. So you plug it in, then you can split into three different other outlets. I highly recommend picking up a couple of these and it'll definitely save your life in those situations. But that's pretty much it. Thank you again to SmallRig for sponsoring this video. They are giving you guys a 5% discount on any SmallRig product when you use the code SmallRig01 when you check out on Amazon. If you liked this video, hit that like button, make sure to subscribe, hit the button to get notified of every video that I post. Until the next one, my name is Alex Chung and I'll see you guys later. Bye.