Shooting video for the iPod & other small screens: the value of a close-up
Ian David Aronson
Oct. 18, 2005 07:27 AM
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The recent release of an iPod that plays video creates a new world of opportunities for the independent producer — to get an idea of the scale, think how podcasting has changed the distribution of audio programs in the past year alone. DVDs and online streaming have long enabled people to make and distribute professional quality video with commonly available prosumer equipment: podcasting your video now enables you to reach an even broader audience.
The translation from creating images for a TV or computer display to working in the medium of an iPod’s 2.5 inch LCD screen, however, may take some getting used to. The place to start is by considering the size of the images in your frame. Just as the shift from theatrical viewing to home viewing (via DVD, VHS, and cable TV) changed the way cinematographers frame their work, the opportunities created by the very small screens of the iPod and other portable devices demand a different type of screen composition.
Wide shots, such as landscapes, look great in a theater, but don’t always hold up as well on a TV screen. Close-ups, especially of people’s faces, look great even on smaller TVs, which is why you may notice newer films feature more close-up shots and fewer dramatic widescreen vistas. As I wrote in my soon to be published O’Reilly book DV Filmmaking: From Start to Finish if the focus of your shot fills your frame it will retain its impact, even at a smaller size.
Case in point, the sandwich shown below:
This image is shown at 320 x 240 pixels, which is a frame size the iPod accommodates — see the iPod tech specs page. A frame of DV is 720 pixels wide, more than twice the size of the image here. Even at this size, the sandwich still retains its visual power (positive or negative depending on your feelings about pastrami and/or the consumption of beef) due to the extreme close-up framing. This image of a sandwich from the world famous Katz's deli appears in chapter 3, Composing a Shot to Fit Your Output Medium, which covers shot types and screen size in detail. I photographed the sandwich from so many angles (to make sure I got exactly the right composition) that the waiter came over and asked me if I wanted him to take a picture of me and the sandwich together.
If you have a wider framing, and feel the focus of your shot gets lost when you reduce the frame size you can always crop your video. Many video editing and compression programs offer a crop feature that lets you decide which parts of a shot you’d like to retain and which you’d like to leave on the cutting room floor. Cropping your video may do a disservice to your original composition, for example I like the plastic squeeze-bottles of mustard and the assortment of pickles that appear in the background of the image above — if I cropped the shot differently they might not appear in my revised image. At the same time, cropping is a great way to highlight a specific detail and draw attention to a particular element in your shot. I considered cropping the original image of the sandwich from full size down to 320 x 240 so only a detail of the pastrami remained in a super tight extreme close-up, but decided not to because I didn’t want to turn off all the vegetarian members of my potential audience.
Once you’ve got your video composed to fit your target screen size, the next step is encoding it to an iPod compatible format. I’ll save that for another posting.
Stay tuned, and bon appetit.
Ian David Aronson
is a media producer and scholar who lives in New York City. He is also the author of DV Filmmaking: From Start to Finish.
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