"Home Movie Style" vs "Professional Style"

Bismillah ar-Rahmaan ar-Raheem,

Last night I met up with Hani and we were watching the director's cut of El Mariachi during dinner. We started talking about the differences between "Home Movie Style" which is how most of us at home film our home videos vs. "Professional Style" which is using different camera angles, recording the sound effects seperately, and adding extra touches (i.e. music) to enhance the film.

We decided to put ourselves in Robert Rodriquez's shoes and do a quick shot in the parking structure downstairs. We made it challenging by pretending we only had 60 seconds of film to record on. We didn't have any idea what we wanted to film and kinda decided it while we were walking to the parking garage.

So I thought it would be cool to show you the difference between "Home Movie Style" vs "Professional Video Style", so here it is.

The scene is a man walking through the garage door and then entering his car.

CLIP #1 is the "Home Video Style". The cameraman stands in one stationary position and records the scene with just a simple pan. Basically, its all filmed in one shot and the video & audio were recorded at the same time.


CLIP #2 is the "Professional Style". There are a total of 11 different shots (instead of the 1 compared to Clip #1). We recorded the whole thing in silent and then we recorded all the audio separated (folli). Basically, we made all the sound noises and then added it to the silent film so the audio came our clearer and more realistic (you can barely hear the sound from Clip #1). Then we added background music to give it a suspenseful feel to it (the spicy on the cake baby!).


Both clips were compressed because of bandwidth issues. If you want to see a higher quality of the clip, click here.

Some of you may think that the music is the only difference between the two but its not. Here is the same Clip #1 with the music of Clip #2. Yeah, the music makes it more interesting but visually it still dull and the sounds (gate closing, footsteps, keys going into ignition, etc..) are harder to hear and sound very distant.

Now you don't have to film the full scene for every shot but rather just a few seconds of each and then you can put them all together during editing. We were going to put the lens cap when we were recordign the folli but decided not to. Its actually better that we didn't because with the lens cap off, we were able to see what sounds we were making. For example, when the guy was moving his feet, then you know that you were recording the footsteps. Otherwise, you would be looking at a black screen with a bunch of sounds. That would be a headache to cut in the editing room and take up way too much time.

Finally, make sure you record more camera angles than you need. We pretty recorded each camera only once and that was it. Instead of wasting time repeating shots, we used our time filming just a few seconds of a bunch of different camera angles. Then during editing, we decided on the best angles and we used the top 10 angles for clip #2. That's something to keep in mind next time you are storyboarding you film.