This weeks challenge in the Articulate e-Learning Heroes Community was to create an instructional video using only a smartphone. I had done video shoots before, but they involved a green screen, lighting rigs and all sorts of other professional tools. I have been using the camera function on my Samsung Galaxy SII, but never really considered it for videos. So, I was curious to see how the video quality would turn out. First, I looked for a location that had some halfway decent natural light, without a lot of shadows. Shooting outside wasn’t a good option. It was just too bright (and too noisy). I ended up using a work table in my garage of all places. The lighting could have been better, but at least I had some control over the scene. Unfortunately, I couldn’t control the outside noise, and decided against including an audio track in the recording. Since I was both ‘actor’ and camera operator, I had to improvise and fashion a tripod out of a ladder and some clamps. Not a pretty setup but it did the trick and made a big difference compared to a shaky handheld recording.
For the subject of the video, I picked a quick demonstration of the required steps to prepare a Parrot ArDrone for flight. My phone’s recording software doesn’t have any editing functions beyond a handful of lighting options. Once the video was shot, I did some very basic editing with ScreenFlow, a neat screen recording and editing tool for Mac and PC. Finally, I imported the video into Storyline and added some captions to it. The whole project took about an hour to complete.; not too shabby considering I used a four-year old phone with a scratched lens!
The key ingredients for a decent smartphone video are:
- sufficient, even lighting
- some sort of tripod or at least video capture software with a stabilization function
- if you do use audio, low background noise.