How Should I Select My Scenes?

Deciding what scenes make the final cut can be a difficult decision. Even though you’ve planned with your storyboard you may have had some last-minute obstacles. These may have changed your original plan. The key now is to make sure your story gets across in an understandable way. You want to select the best scenes for Instagram and YouTube (as well as LinkedIn, TikTok and Facebook). But it’s not just for Social Media but relevant for training and educational content.

Angles Can Change Everything

Keep in mind that when selecting scenes taken from different angles, each scene will have different lighting. When making your selection decisions make sure you choose scenes with the highest light, sound, and composition quality. This makes it easier for you to maintain consistency with light and colour when you edit the clips together.

Low-Quality Footage

Ideally, we want to avoid using bad quality footage. Avoid shaky video, poor audio, badly framed scenes and poor lighting. If the sound is key to make an impact then we want the quality to be smooth and clear. Being mic’d up would help this, click here to read the importance of audio!

Getting the Right Angles

When shooting in different angles the light source may be different, which means the light will highlight objects in a scene in a different way – giving a different appearance to each scene. This means you may need to colour correct, to help even out the light and colour across the clips in the video.

If you aren’t good with colour correction try to find the clips that appear close together in terms of light and colour, so you can reduce the amount of colour correction work to make each scene blend.

If My Clips are Bad, What do I do?

It may be that all your clips are of poor quality. It’s unfortunate but this happens, especially, if you are new to video production. The best thing to do on these occasions is to find a clip that contains your key message and work to enhance this by adding text and b roll to convey things which are missing from the clip. Your main focus should be to convey a particular message without confusing the viewer, and this can still be achieved by creatively selecting some key custom footage and finding b roll, other images, and/or text, to support this message.

If you’re lucky then all the clips in your series will be good and useable. This means you need to decide what to do based on your own creative judgement and how you wish your story to be shown.

To find out in-depth on how to select the correct scenes as well as how to avoid getting bad footage watch our other ProTips here

You can also see how we managed to save bad quality footage in our before and after video here.