How to Shoot Cinematic Video Outdoors! - Low Budget Videography

What's up everybody, welcome back to the channel. Before we begin, I want to say thank you to everyone who has been a new subscriber and old subscriber who has been telling me that these videos have helped you guys out on your shoots and just been inspiring. And it's just really nice to hear that as a small creator here on YouTube. So I'll definitely keep making these videos for you guys. Alright, so in this video, we're going to be breaking down the video that you just saw. This short ad that I shot is yet another example of stuff that you can pull off on a low budget with minimal equipment if you're shooting solo outdoors. Obviously, having all the tools and people at your disposal will definitely make your work look a lot better so that you can fine tune everything to your liking. But on low budget projects, you're almost always the only one shooting and lighting the entire project at the same time. Now, I'm not saying that my work, my video here is like a great example of like amazing work. It's decent. It's not bad. It's, you know, work that will get you paid by brands who have low budget for marketing videos. So moving right into the video, I have my laptop right here so that I can follow along with you guys. The key to achieving this contrasty and interesting look when you're shooting outdoors is to really backlight and sidelight everything. Like everything is going to be backlit or sidelit and it's going to look the best if you do this way. You will almost never be shooting in the same direction that the sun is shining. You want to have the talent in between you and the sun at all times. Again, if you're working on a low budget, you probably won't have an entire crew like tons of equipment, like C stands and all that kind of stuff, diffusion to like flag off shape and soften light to your liking. So therefore it's super important to shoot at the right time and use the sun to your advantage. So diving into the commercial, the first shot is our talent walking through this pathway of trees. And I picked this spot because the trees act as a nice diffusion for the sunlight so that we can have an even light on her. But there's also pockets of light that come through as she's walking to make the shot look interesting. There's no extra equipment that I'm using to brighten or soften the light. I'm just using the natural surrounding and available light to try and make it look good. Now I'm using my Canon C200, which is a cinema camera, and it does have a bit more dynamic range than your average DSLR or mirrorless camera. And therefore you'll see that the background isn't super blown out. Now, if you are actually using a DSLR or a mirrorless camera that doesn't have as much dynamic range, you want to find a spot that has a darker background if possible to keep stuff from blowing out. Moving on, these next couple of scenes are good examples of backlight and sidelighting. In the wide shot here in the vineyard, the sun is clearly behind our talent and it's relatively high in the sky. You don't see it in my shot here. And it's very crucial to try and shoot at the right time because when the sun is higher in the sky, you can avoid a huge blotch of that blown out sky that you know, like, you know how, like when you shoot directly into the sun and you have to balance for your talent, it just blows out the sky completely. And there's always like a little hotspot. There's always a hotspot there where the sun is. So in my wide shot here, because the sun is so high out of the frame, you can see that it's relatively easy to balance to the sky perfectly without having my talent or the surrounding areas right here to be completely in shadow. Again, I am shooting on a cinema camera, but on a mirrorless camera, it won't look that much different. In this medium shot here, I'm sidelighting so that we can shoot on the shadow side of the talent. And we do this because we can get all of this little interesting shadow pattern, and then we can get her lit pretty evenly. And we also get a great rim light from the sun around her. I also like this closeup of the wine bottle as she sets it down because we get this really good pattern of light wine glass, dark wine bottle, and then another light wine glass. It's a nice way to break up the frame and get your audience's eye to look at one thing. And then in this next medium shot of my talent enjoying that glass of wine, I'm using sidelighting as well. And it just looks good. You know, the sky isn't blown out because we don't really see the sky too much. The talent is mostly evenly lit. You have some edge light on the skin, and I love that little reflection of sunlight as she's raising the wine glass. Don't be afraid to reorient or rearrange your talent so that he or she is facing the light at the right angle. Again, I'm shooting all of this stuff with zero lighting equipment. I don't have any balance, no diffusion. We're moving fast. We're shooting outdoors, and there's not really much time to set up C-stands with diffusion and flagging off the light, even though I really want to. But if the stuff that you're shooting allows you to have a lot of time to set up stuff, definitely go do that. Don't skip out on setting up lights and making everything look pretty. It's only if you don't have the time or the luxury to set everything up or having a crew around you to make things go faster. Only then do I not really care about shaping light and all that kind of fun stuff. Now, one last scene that I want to look at here is the one with the beautiful lounge chair. And this is probably my favorite scene out of the entire video. It's just really fun to shoot. And when we shot this, the sun was now lower in the sky and you can tell from the longer shadows in the pool and you can kind of see more of that golden hour look. And it's not exactly golden hour, but it's getting there because the sun is setting and shooting at the right time definitely helps with getting this look. You get these nice shadows on the lounge chair and a great edge light on the left side right there. And there's a lot of interesting patterns going on in the pool. You can place the talent either on the left side of the chair in the shadow or on the right side where the light is as well. Either way, honestly could work for me. Now, the best part of the shot is definitely the composition. I love like the chair. It's just looks like an eyeball for some reason. And we use this chair specifically because of its unique shape. To no surprise, I didn't use any lighting equipment here. And especially since I don't have anything big enough to completely soften up the light on that wide shot on the left side there. And honestly, I probably wouldn't want to either since I really like the shadow patterning that's going on on the chair. Maybe I would have maybe flagged off some of the light. But to me, it looks really good natural. But that's about it. All the other shots were pulled from a bunch of past shoots that we did. But we're still using that same backlighting and same sidelighting concept that I explained here in this video. Like if you look at the flat light of this food right here, we're still somewhat sidelighting. You can tell from the shadow that it's going off to the right down here. And also in the shot of the two cocktails, everything is also backlit. The sun is not shining directly onto whatever we're shooting, which is the two glass cups. And we're always trying to shoot on the shadow side of the subject just because it gives you the most amount of contrast and the most interesting look to your shot. And that pretty much wraps up this video. Let me know if you have any other questions in the comments down below. If you'd like this video, if you found it helpful at all, I would appreciate it if you hit that like button and subscribe and hit the bell to get notified of every video that I post. It really helps me as a small creator here on YouTube to just grow this channel and this community. But until the next one, my name is Alex Chung and I'll see you later. Bye!