CR 30 🤓3 Essential Things You Must Know About Choosing Video Backgrounds

Camera Ready with Val Brown

We've all watched lots of videos where the background seems out of synch with the person speaking or there is so much going on you are focused on that and not the speaker.

And that’s completely avoidable. In today's episode I’m going to cover a simple checklist to make sure your background is appropriate for the video you are shooting, no matter how much time you have to prepare.

I’m pretty sensitive to backgrounds and a lot of that is probably due to a some of the mistakes I’ve made in my career. I’ll never forget I landed an interview with a well respected elected official and got the okay to shoot in his office. I was thrilled, because it was a really BIG deal.

We shot the interview and when I went back to the edit bay to review the tape, I was horrified. In my hurry, I had missed the fact that there was an object hanging on the wall that appeared to protrude from his head. There were no words. He looked like My Favorite Martian. Back then, painting out an object was not as easy as it today. And reshooting the interview was not an option.

From then on, I always took the time to make sure the shot I saw in my head was achievable in the time and space I had available and that there were no distractions in the background.

Learn the three essential things you need to pay attention to when you are choosing a background for your next video:

• Does it support your brand and topic?
• Do you have enough light?
• Are there any distractions?

In this episode I cover a simple checklist you can go over to make sure your background is appropriate for the video you are shooting, no matter how much time you have to prepare.

Reference: Episodes: 7, 19, 20

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