Okay, so you’re a full-time filmmaker who’s not used to working from home. With gigs cancelling left, right, and center, you need to adjust and fall back on more commercial videography like you swore you wouldn’t do. There’s no question that finding work will be difficult, but if you want to stay competitive, you have to keep making content. Even with businesses closing their doors, companies with an online presence will still be looking for video and photos to use as marketing material.
It’s time to figure out how to be a Videographer in the Age of Coronavirus. So here’s a guide to shooting beautiful commercial products from home, and everything you’ll need to make it happen.
Visit Newegg’s Work From Home Portal for a full selection of hardware and more tips.
Setting up your home filming space
First, we need a space to shoot in. Some of you might already have the luxury of a personal studio, but for most of us, our apartment will have to do. Find a table (or countertop) where you want to shoot, and clean it with those handy Lysol wipes you’ve been using every day. Make sure the table is at least 5 feet away from the wall behind it, so you can get the background out of focus. At this point, you can get funky with it and put a tablecloth on the table and another on the wall, to change up the color of your set.
After this, the most important part here is to black out the room to get it ready for lighting. Of course, you are free to use natural light (sunlight through the window) but this may be a problem later on when you don’t have control over the shape or intensity of light. So let’s make the room as dark as possible. If you have blackout curtains, you’re done. If not, you’ll have to tape black garbage bags to the window.
Photography backdrop with stand and carrying case
Lighting your home studio
As it turns out, the most important part about all of this is the lighting. Sure the camera choice is a significant consideration, but if you want beautiful product shots, the lighting is going to be what makes or breaks your image.
As everyone knows, 3-point lighting is the standard lighting setup for simple talking head interviews. It’s no different here. Use three lights to light your set, making sure to use one as a Key, a Fill and a Rim Light. Neewer has a great LED lighting package that comes with built-in app functionality so you can control the lights remotely; this is a HUGE timesaver when working alone (which I gather is the smart thing to do in the age of Coronavirus).
Now if you really want to get professional product shots while working from home, you need two more lights: a light to illuminate and/or color your backdrop, and an extra light to brighten the product, if necessary. For these two additional lights, you can get small Mini LEDs. The Boling P1 was the hottest RGB Mini LED on the market last year (BUT there are less versatile and cheaper options).
Picking a camera
Now of course you’re going to need a camera for all of this. We’re assuming you have one already, but in case you’re in the market for a state-of-the-art 4K camera, you’ll probably have to drop at least $1500 (on just the camera body).
You can go cheaper and start with a basic Canon Rebel Kit, but the kit lenses these days are not great, and a DSLR has the most limited capabilities, since it’s designed for photography and not video. A SONY a7s, however, is probably your best bet for the situation seeing as its low light sensitivity can get up to 409,600 ISO (!!!!), which is absolutely crazy (and you’ll literally never need that). But this high sensitivity is good for the lights mentioned above, because they’re no brighter than a 1K equivalent studio Fresnel.
If you have a camera and lens package, you’ll still need to invest in a tripod and slider. You can get fancy and splurge on a motorized slider, but with all this free time on your hands, practice smooth movements on your own. You don’t need a robot to help you!
As a bonus: use any HDMI compatible TV and you’ve got yourself a home monitor. You might need an adapter (mini HDMI to HDMI for the Sony a7s), but using a monitor is sure to speed up your workflow.
Video editing software and apps
For the first time in your life, you might have to edit your own footage. It’s not as difficult as it sounds. One good thing about the current situation is that Adobe Creative Cloud (proprietor of such classics as Premiere Pro and After Effects) is offering 2 Months FREE. Adobe even offers tutorials that make it easy for anybody to learn.
Once you’ve got your edit, you can send your footage via Frame.io to your clients for edit reviews, and you can use WeTransfer.com for final delivery. That’s right: you can do it all without a single face-to-face interaction.
Power: Surge protectors and extension cords
Our final consideration is power. When working from home you’ll need surge protectors and extension cords to pull power to your light sources and computer setup. You might also want a UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supply) which will safeguard your work in case you have rolling blackouts at home; this will come in handy when offloading footage or rendering your work.
APC surge protector power strip
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Now that you have all that covered, you’re good to go! Use Craigslist, Mandy.com, Staffmeup, and even Facebook to find work that you can do while working from home. In this market, clients may not be seeking videographers and if they are, the working pros already know about it. So cold call local businesses and solicit clients the old fashioned way!
Plus, you could also practice social distancing by running into the mountains and capturing some beautiful stock footage. According to Cameranerd on reddit, you can make $1000/month from stock footage sales.
Good luck. It’s a new world.
Visit Newegg’s Work From Home Portal for a full selection of hardware and more tips.
