Race Video Tips & Ideas
1080 Media TV is a multi-award-winning company and is the Host Broadcaster for the ORCi European Championships, producing a 25-minute TV show of the race, news and highlights.
Many crew will be shooting videos during the race, and we would like to offer a few suggestions about what we are looking for help with, and how to get the best results.
What are WE looking for in the TV show?
We would like any video of the race you can shoot. Interviews about what is happening, where you are in the race, how your team is doing. We’d love to see your on-board action, sail changes, mark rounding’s, looking forward towards the bow, looking back from the bow aft.
If you don’t have a camera – we have some GoPro cameras we can lend you for a race that you can film with, or we can fix to somewhere on the yacht. Please let us know through the Race Office or email us – info@1080media.org
Tech tips & advice
Holding the camera – Firstly, for the TV programme and daily videos, please film in landscape/horizontal mode as below. TV screens and computers are 16 x 9 ratio format; if you shoot with the camera in an upright/vertical mode, you will have thick black borders down the sides when we use the images. The Media Team WOULD like some videos for Facebook and Instagram/TickTock and other social media. So please do film a few videos in Vertical mode for social media, but for our TV show or YouTube it is HORIZONTAL….
Holding the camera 2 – keep it steady! Simple tips:
Keep your horizon level. It’s so easy to film the yacht heeling, and forget the horizon is also at 45
degrees…! Keeping the horizon level shows the heel better, as people can relate to it with a level horizon. That is perhaps the most basic ‘rule’….
Wobbly cameras – a shaking camera is simply hard to watch. Brace yourself against something and try and keep it still using 2 hands if it is safe to do so.
Don’t keep panning and zooming! If you have a zoom on your camera, please forget you have one….!! People often zoom in and out the whole time, making the shot pretty unusable. Hold a shot for 5 seconds before you move to be safe. Similarly, panning left and right quickly, or constantly makes people nauseous, and we wouldn’t use it. Be steady and smooth. If you pan left, for example, pan for maybe 3-4 seconds, and then stop and hold for another 5 seconds. That’s a usable shot!
Interviews – if you are filming someone as in an interview – golden rules are
A) Get something behind the person that shows you are on a yacht. A bobbing head, swaying around against a sky could be anywhere in the world. Show the rigging, backstay, halyards, anything behind them! You can also film below deck to show what is happening.
B) Head and shoulders in view; ideally get them to look ‘off camera’ not at the camera; and alternate with people being on the right side and left side of the camera. Looking at the camera is great for ‘in the moment’ comments and when things are happening, but not for interviews.
Keeping lenses clean from spray is a major issue too, plenty of soft dry cloth, kept in a sealable plastic bag…and think about some extra batteries for the camera perhaps too.
Long Offshore race – yes, we would use video filmed at night, in fact we would love to have some video of what happens on the night race, anything you can get us please. If you have a torch perhaps, or some kind of light, even shots of the lights on the instrument panel is good, or your navigators device…
DRONES – we are aware some teams have a drone. Please DO NOT fly this in the race start area. WE have a drone, and we are concerned about interference. If you fly a drone on the race course, or in practise, please share your footage with us.
If we use your footage in the TV show, we’ll also give you a camera operators name check in the credits at the end of the show.
How do we get your footage? Either we can copy it when you get ashore, or upload to this Google folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1b2ROpRDH4VWFpumAehiPj96OZhqdP_sb
Make sure to add your boat name to your files.
Pleased to answer questions you may have about this. Email us at info@1080media.org and we’ll get back to you. Thanks. www.1080media.org
