Kyle Kingson has it all — looks, intelligence, wealth and opportunity — and a wicked cruel streak. Prone to mocking and humiliating “aggressively unattractive” classmates, he zeroes in on Goth classmate Kendra, inviting her to the school’s extravagant environmental bash. Kendra accepts, and, true to form, Kyle blows her off in a particularly savage fashion. She retaliates by casting a spell that physically transforms him into everything he despises. Enraged by his horrible and unrecognizable appearance he confronts Kendra and learns that the only solution to the curse is to find someone that will love him as he is — a task he considers impossible. Repulsed by his appearance, Kyle’s callous father banishes him to Brooklyn with a sympathetic housekeeper and blind tutor. As Kyle ponders how to overcome the curse and get his old life back, he chances upon a drug addict in the act of killing a threatening dealer. Seizing the opportunity, Kyle promises the addict freedom and safety for his daughter, Lindy, if she will consent to live in Kyle’s Brooklyn home. Thus begins Kyle’s journey to discover true love in this hyper-modern retelling of the classic “Beauty and the Beast” story.

You should generally cut on action, especially if you are cutting from a wide shot of a subject to a tighter shot of the same subject on the same visual axis. Cutting on action means that you cut from one shot to another just as an action is performed, such as an actor taking his hat off. When you join the shots, you use the first part of the motion in the wide shot and the second part of the motion in the tighter shot (you have to experiment to find out exactly where to cut for the smoothest results – it depends on the shots).

If you do not cut on action and the two shots are along the same visual axis, the result is a jump cut. Jump cuts are jarring and disconcerting, and pretty much unacceptable, unless that is the effect you want for narrative reasons. Steven Spielberg sometimes uses jump cuts to punctuate the drama of a scene, and he always uses the technique masterfully. An example is the scene in which Carl Hanratty sees Frank Abagnale’s photo in the school yearbook in “Catch me if you can.” Another example is the gas station scene in “Duel.”

Jump cuts can also be used to compress time (Spielberg used this technique in “Schindler’s List,” in the scene in which Schindler is choosing his future secretary while his new office is being painted), but again, it is a very specific look and the director must plan the scene very deliberately to make it work.

There will not be a jump cut if you:

a)  cut on action, or

b)  cut from one angle to another angle that is rotationally at least 20 degrees away from the first one, or

c)  cut to another shot and then back to the first shot, or a shot of something else.

The middle shot in (c) is known as a cutaway. You should shoot plenty of cutaways, especially for interviews and documentaries, where you are not able to direct things precisely and need more insurance shots for post-production. Cutaways can be a shot of the interviewer nodding, or a shot of a glass of water; anything that you can cut to. Cutaways are also known as B-roll shots.

More on jump cuts: bear in mind that they don’t only happen when cutting along a visual axis without action; if you cut from one shot to another shot that is perpendicular to it and in which the subject is framed in excatly the same way, that’s a jump cut – perhaps an even more irritating one than when you cut from a wide shot to a close-up with no action. For example, if you cut from a frontal medium shot to a medium shot that is framed from the actor’s side, that’s a jump cut, even though there is an angular difference of more than 20 degrees between the two shots (see [b] above). Avoid it like tha plague unless you are seeking a specific effect and are sure of how the audience will perceive it, which is not always easy to predict.

Remember that jump cuts are perfectly acceptable in music videos. The human brain seems not to find jump cuts disconcerting in music videos, which is pretty interesting.

You should also bear in mind that it takes approximately 2 film frames (1/12th of a second) for the human gaze to switch from one side of the screen to the other. You should allow for this when cutting your project.

When editing sound and picture, you should stagger the cuts. This means NOT aligning the video and audio cuts – they should be separated by at least a second. If the cuts are aligned, the change in background noise when you cut from one sound clip to the other will be simultaneous with the visual cut; this breaks the illusion of continuity and will make your project look amateurish.

Shooting a variety of angles and editing them together smoothly enhances the cinematic illusion, an effect known as “superior continuity.”

The big implication here is that you must take all of these editing issues into account when you produce your shot list. A director’s weaknesses become grindingly obvious when the time comes to cut the movie together smoothly.

It is good practice to use the Steadicam only when you cannot achieve the same shot with a dolly; due to tight shooting schedules, even high-end TV shows are sometimes guilty of using the Steadicam when a dolly would have produced better results.

James Cameron uses the Steadicam judiciously and to great effect. The Steadicam was also used masterfully by Terrence Malick in his masterpiece “The Thin Red Line”.

Remember that tracking in on a subject produces a radically different look to zooming in on it.

When you zoom in, you are optically magnifying the subject; when you track in, the perspective changes (the subject increases in size faster than the background, as it is closer to the camera than the background is).

Zooming in can produce an eerie look, and this effect was masterfully used by Ridley Scott in Hannibal; tracking in on the actor tends to produce a warm, dynamic, “you are there” kind of feel. Steven Spielberg is probably the master of such tracking shots, with many fine examples in every one of his movies.

Of course, tracking in on the subject means that you will have to follow focus. With a wide aperture and a medium focal length, even a 1/3″ CCD camcorder will require this if the final framing is a tight close-up. If the actor’s eyes are not pin-sharp throughout the shot, you may as well not have a tracking shot at all, because I guarantee that all the audience will be thinking about is your failure to pull focus correctly.

If the depth of field is very shallow, such as might be the case with 16mm or 35mm, you may want to put numbered marks on the floor that correspond to numbered focus marks on the follow-focus knob, and have an assistant call the numbers to aid the focus puller during the shot. This works like a charm.

Cranes are used to achieve vertical camera movement and can add a lot of production value to your project if used in the right context. I got excellent results in the past by using Cobra Crane II. It only needs one person to be operated and works beautifully (there are some Cobra Crane shots in my videographer reel).

As with all camera movement, crane shots work best when you have foreground objects parallaxing in the frame. Parallax is the visual phenomenon in which objects that are closer to the camera move across the field of view faster than objects that are further away.

The secret to making an awesome YouTube video is VALUE. Videos become successful or go viral because they offer a lot of value to their viewers. The opposite of this is videos that are dull, self-indulgent and pointless. Offer value to your viewers and you will be rewarded with traffic and favorable comments.

How will your YouTube video offer value? There are two main ways to do this: entertainment and information. Everyone browsing the Internet is looking for one or both of these things. All YouTube videos that get a lot of traffic provide at least one of these things, usually both. The key is to find out what YOU are good at. Is there something you know how to do that most people do not? Are you genuinely interesting or funny? Do you have access to information that is both desirable and hard to get hold of? These are all ways of offering value. People who do this on YouTube are rewarded with thousands of views and hundreds of positive comments.

Those who are able to do so consistently develop their own channel, which is an excellent way of getting regular visitors and building a community. That’s when you can start to draw some practical benefits from all that traffic, such as selling a product or diverting traffic to your website. There are several YouTube channels that are incredibly informative and authoritative.

And now, for some practical examples of how to do all of the above!

Video blogs

There are lots of video blogs on YouTube. Most fall into the “pointless and self-indulgent” category. A few of these video blogs are exceptionally informative and provide information and insights that cannot be obtained elsewhere. These tend to be individuals who are experts in their field and have access to valuable information. Their insights are valuable by virtue of their expertise.

There is something else worth mentioning about video blogs – although the most successful ones all provide highly valuable information direct from the horse’s mouth, they have one more thing in common: they are also very entertaining. This is not because the bloggers are cracking jokes while simultaneously disclosing information, but because they’re fascinating characters and just hearing them speak and get hot over the issues that are close to their heart is in itself entertaining. There are undoubtedly some very useful video blogs out there that get little traffic and will never break out. This is because, although the bloggers disclose useful information, they are not good communicators, so their video blog never gains traction.

If you have valuable information to share AND are fascinating to listen to, your video blog will almost certainly become a hit over time. Very few people have both attributes, but if you do, this is a surefire hit.

“How to” videos

Again, there are thousands of these, but only a handful become truly popular. The key is to make it genuinely useful and niche-oriented. Sticking to an obscure niche is probably the way to go, as it ensures both low competition and a dedicated audience. You can make a video about how to mix a dirty martini if you want to, but the competition is intense.

The “how to” video niche is probably a growing segment, because although almost everything has been covered on the Internet in writing, I very much doubt that the same applies to videos, and many people simply do not like reading and much prefer to watch a video of whatever they are interested in learning. Hence there is a significant segment of the population that is as yet unsatisfied, because the topic of interest has been covered in writing but not on video. Stick to what you know and like and you will find an audience.

Viral videos

Viral videos are the holy grail of the Internet. They are very tricky to make because although it is possible to rationalize a viral video’s success retrospectively, it is almost impossible to apply that same analysis to the production of a new viral video. You can take all the concepts that we can glean from past successes and use them to make a new video, and you will find that it will probably never go viral. The “viral” phenomenon is truly elusive.

A recent scam perpetrated by professional advertising agencies is to make a staged video of an unusual event and pass it off as a home video. The first few attempts did indeed go viral, but like all scams, this will soon burn out for good, and good riddance.

Tour videos

You can make a video in which you show something you truly love. This could be a coin collection, a vintage car, or pretty much anything else that you are passionate about. If you make a good video of something you love, the niche followers will come out of the woodwork and find your video. I have seen many excellent examples of such videos, which managed to attract tens of thousands of views and lively discussion in the comments section. These videos were not made by professional videomakers; they just showed something that the maker is truly passionate about and everything else to care of itself.