5 Amateur Filmmaking Mistakes I Should Have Learned Sooner

If you want to be known as a great filmmaker, then you need to continually hone your craft and enhance your skills. But even so, if you don't know your making mistakes, then it becomes pretty difficult to improve. And there are a few mistakes in filmmaking that instantly signal to the audience that the creator is still in amateur territory. And that is not where we want to be. As a self-taught filmmaker myself, I had to learn all of these lessons and so many others the hard way by constantly making these mistakes over and over in my own work. Eventually, I began to recognize them as amateur mistakes and worked to eradicate them on my next project. The ability to level up from amateur to professional takes a lot of work, and sometimes most of all, awareness. It's one of the biggest skills you can develop as a filmmaker or cinematographer, to look at your own work as objectively as possible and see where you can actually improve. I know quite a few people who do not have this skill, and as a result, continue to make quite a few of these mistakes even years into their careers. Don't make that mistake. Let's go through this collection of mistakes that instantly signal to the audience that you're an amateur, and then how to fix them. If you're new here, my name is Karian Sheldon, and I am an ASC award-winning cinematographer and Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning filmmaker. My main gig is as a documentary filmmaker, and I have sold two films to Netflix and shot films that have been acquired by HBO, Netflix, PBS, and The New York Times. I started this channel to help other filmmakers enhance their own work and tell incredible stories, all while still being a full-time working professional. I am currently working on a large collection of doc cinematography and doc lighting videos and courses, so subscribe to my newsletter below or to this channel to see those coming out very soon. Alright, let's get back to amateur mistake number one. I think a lot of cinematographers, especially those in the professional world, are anti-autofocus. I am not one of those people. I believe that autofocus is an incredible tool, and it's amazing how useful it can be in certain situations. However, I am very anti-focus hunting and anti-misfocus, two things that still happen quite a bit when using autofocus, even in the best autofocus cameras from Sony or Canon. When you are watching a film and suddenly the focus jumps off the main subject to the background and back again, it instantly feels amateur. Even if the lighting is great, the framing perfect, and the story compelling, the focus jumping around is one of the biggest beginner mistakes to avoid. So how do you fix it? Well, the first and easiest way is just manually focus your lenses. It is way less noticeable when you are pulling focus manually if the focus isn't tack sharp right away, or if you are out of focus by just a few inches or for just a moment while you find focus. In some scenarios, it's even a nice effect and feels natural and human. The other way to avoid big focus jumps is to use built-in assist tools in your camera. For Canon cameras, I love their face-only autofocus function while filming a person, so I know that even if the autofocus loses my face, it's not going to jump around to the background, like this. And finally, the easiest way to not show your autofocus jumping and hunting is to… not show them. Meaning, edit them out. I use autofocus now and again, especially when using a gimbal. And sometimes it does let me down, but I make sure to either capture the moment again while I can, so do another shot, or I just edit them out in post-production so the viewer never knows my autofocus failed me. In photography or video as a filmmaker, we only show about 5-10% of the images we shoot, so make sure you edit out your bad focus hunting. Alright, next up is… can you see it? Yes. Visible lavaliers. Now my shirt's all crinkly. Alright, visible lavs. Now, I will say, in certain contexts, a visible lav isn't the end of the world. For example, when talking directly to a camera or doing a tutorial, hiding the lavalier isn't always 100% necessary. The viewer understands that you are speaking directly to them, and therefore assume you need to record your voice. With that said, the smallest and least intrusive lav is definitely still welcome. And please, don't do this. It looks dumb, and frankly, it sounds terrible. So there are some contexts where a visible lav isn't the end of the world. But in actual films, whether they are fiction films, news reports, documentaries of any kind, a visible lav is a sure-fire sign of amateur filmmaking. Films should be a way to take the viewer on an emotional journey, to put them in a different world, and potentially state of mind. And showing production gear at any point immediately signals to the viewer that they are watching a fabrication, and not true reality. And that takes them out of the story. I so dislike visible lavs in film that we almost didn't use a powerful scene in our Netflix film, Heroin, because the local news guy was also filming an event and put a giant ugly lav on one of our characters. Ultimately, we decided the scene was too good and too important to not include. But we did make sure we showed the local news team in the scene to explain the giant ugly lavalier. It wasn't ideal, but it worked. So if you want your films to look professional, hide your lavs. This is not okay for professional work. Staying on the audio vibe, the next sign of amateur filmmaking is to have great visuals, but bad or no audio. If you're making a real or a fun YouTube video or a music video, then sure, go ahead and pump some music and show some great visuals. But if you're aiming to make a film, whether it's a short documentary, fiction film, or anything else, then having bad audio or no natural sound in your film is another sign of amateur filmmaking. I've said it before on this channel, but the audience will always forgive poor cinematography if the story is compelling enough, but they will never forgive bad sound. For fiction films, this means crisp dialogue and great ambient sounds. For documentaries, it means being able to lav your subjects, hide them, or get as close to the action as possible to capture great audio, while also enhancing the film with great natural sound. If your film just goes from shot to shot and scene to scene with no natural sound or only camera audio, it makes the film feel empty and like it doesn't have a solid engine pushing it forward. Ultimately, film is an audio-visual experience, not a visual-visual experience. So you can fix this amateur mistake by putting as much attention to your audio as you do your visuals. Along the same line, another amateur mistake is to have wall-to-wall music. And by that, I mean that the film opens with music and ends with music and has music everywhere in between. Wall-to-wall. Music in film is used to trigger the audience to feel something in companionship with the scene they are watching. But if your film has music throughout the entire thing, then the audience may not know what they should be feeling or when. The music starts to lose its intended effect right away. Put simply, music is often used as a crutch by beginner filmmakers. They are not confident enough in their story, their characters, their style, or their editing to not use music the entire time. So instead of focusing on pumping up music to make their films feel more compelling, beginners should focus on creating compelling stories, finding compelling characters, and working with natural sound to enhance their films, rather than just relying on Artlist to do it for them. For any cinematographer or gaffer or anyone who wants to understand lighting more, there is no better lesson to learn early on than reverse key lighting, and to avoid broadside lighting of your subjects. I am working on a mini-course about the 10 aspects of great interview lighting that will be available soon, and the technique of reverse key is one of the core components to great-looking interview setups. As filmmakers, we often have to light and film the human face. That's pretty much the entire job, so being able to find available light or use artificial lights to do so in the most compelling way possible is important. When you're just starting out, it feels smart, even necessary, to light your subjects with a light on the same side as your camera. After all, it's natural to want to see something better, and adding light right in front of your eyes is the best way to do that. But in the world of film, our goal isn't always necessarily to see something better, but to be drawn into what we are seeing. And for that, we need to create contrast and shadows and intrigue. And so, we place the light on the opposite side of our subject compared to where our camera is placed, so the shadow falls across your subject's face, resulting in a more compelling image. Yes, there are times when you can use broadside lighting, and it works just fine. But one of the quickest ways to go from amateur lighting to making professional-looking images is to put the reverse key technique into your repertoire and use it whenever you need something to fall back on. Well, there you go. Five big mistakes that you should avoid as you level up in your career. There are thousands of decisions to be made while making a film, and obviously, this is not an exhaustive list of potential mistakes. But these are some of the most prominent for beginners. I would also add things like overusing lights, or focusing on style over substance, or focusing more on gear than technique, and so many other things that we've been naming. But hey, we have to leave some talking points for future videos. And I'll see you there.