Turn your idea into a CINEMATIC masterpiece in 3 EASY steps

since 2006 I've been a graphic designer photographer and music video director and throughout these transitions I've realized regardless of what you do the Creative Journey isn't really that different you start off having the most fun in the world learning the technical skills how to take a good photo how to expose your camera the right way how to make your camera look as good as possible then before you know it you're actually decent or great at what you do then one day you're sitting around and actually realize what the hardest part of this whole creative journey

is is coming up with a good idea and seeing it through to the end you're probably sitting on a go Min of skills right now yet you're paralyzed creatively because either you can't come up with a good idea or you feel like none of your ideas are good enough to act on here's the process I follow to come up with a great idea and turn it into a video product the real kick here is that there's no such thing as a good or a bad idea I like to look at it as an idea that's

it's worth my time or an idea that's not because time is limited when I first started video production I would create any idea that came to my mind I got my first 50mm lens and I thought it would be the coolest thing in the world to go out and film flowers with the blurriest background I can make I was hyp but the longer I do video production the harder it is for me to land on an idea I deem worthy of my time you don't have to tell me I already know this sounds stupid but

here are three reasons why I feel this way the first reason is I've already done it I've been doing this for over a decade which means I've created hundreds of videos it's rare that I land on an idea that I haven't already at least explored before in the past the second reason is I've already seen it the entire first half of my creative Journey was recreating things that I liked from other artists I think that's how we all started but eventually you want to establish your own look and voice as an artist and as this

happens the thought of copying becomes less and less appealing the third reason is it's not as good as the things that inspire me it's been so many times where I've landed on a creative idea that I just thought was genius I'm hype about making it and then I scroll online 3 seconds later and I see something that I think is 20 times better than my idea that I just came up with and now I'm thinking my idea is garbage and knowing that about myself my first step to coming up with the creative idea that I

feel is Worthy is getting offline and doing something absolutely [Music] boring I truly feel that the best idea has come from doing the boring things in life washing the dishes taking out the trash going for a long walk with no media driving with no music media stimulates my mind into not having to think critically I know if I have a Twitter feed or a YouTube homepage in front of me I'm only thinking about passing a time with that being said though it's inspiration in everything I just find that if I'm going to social media for

it I have to be careful to only visit the areas of it that are inspiring to me whenever you're doing boring things it's inevitable that you're at least going to come up with a few ideas and some of them will suck but write them down regardless of what they are I write everything down every idea I get I add it to a list no matter how stupid I think it is I record short voice memos for the majority of ideas I have and just detail them and talk through the idea itself in case I ever

need to revisit the idea you also never know what isn't the good idea today can definitely become the good idea another day but I truly think the best ideas are the answers to simple questions that Intrigue you like why is the sky blue or I want to make somebody levitate in a video how can I do that how do other creative people get over creative block if you think about it the best movie concepts are just interpreted answers from artists about simple questions that they had like what would happen if aliens invaded the Earth the

thing about truly connecting with people is we relate on a simple basis if you've ever seek answers to a question chances are somebody else has also seek it and from here it's just you seeking those answers and taking the viewer on a journey for you to retrieve that information that's really the simplest basis of you taking an idea and turning it into a video product that people love scripting for me is as tight or as Loose as I need it to be sometimes I'm writing out my creative script word for word and other times I'm

not scripting at all I'm just taking a creative idea jotting down the definite things I want to capture creating a mood board and letting it unfold in front of me I always try to have some visual references to refer back to though for me I find that it makes things easier for me when I get to the shooting phase I never let this be the end all be all in the creative project though for creativity a lot of the magic will happen in the moment great things will happen that you could never have accounted for

and you have to let those moments happen when they do when it comes to visual references though one of my main go-to places is shot deck this is not an ad but it's a great library of frames from films that you can search and find inspiration in from angles to lighting to location choices it's a great resource I tend to just read through my script try to match moments with things that come to mind when reading and compile those until I have the visual references I need for every moment now it's time to organize everything

for organization I use Millan note it's a free tool for getting creative projects prepared in a way that makes sense to you it's essentially a digital canvas that allows you to tack up your ideas brainstorm and collaborate when needed for me the magic in mileno is cleanliness if my pre-production is messy chances are my creative project is also going to be messy they have these templet that have things organized and clean replace the information that you need for your creative project delete out the tools that you don't need and add tools that you do need

from the toolbar over here on the left it's really just drag and drop I love these templates though because they make it so hard for me to forget anything I might need if I'm shooting a music video project I tend to start out with the pre-production plan temp spit to make sure I have all location information I need for crew a gear list for prep and a shot list for when we're on set for lucer Creative projects I can work through a concise mood board to make sure I have inspiration and a gear list so

I don't forget anything this is honestly just scratching the surface though they have tons of templates for whatever you're working on creatively this is where I really dial in my creative process placing my video references my script locations I might have in mind any additional information I might want to revisit while I'm shooting and I can reference my entire project board on my phone when I'm on set to make sure I'm on track creatively before we get into the behind the scenes portion of this video and I show you exactly how I capture all of

the shots I want to give you a really quick rundown on my Mill no board and show you how it help me create this video that you're watching right now so here's a really quick look at the board that I used to create this video you can see everything is concise and neat I made this board right here using the pre-production plan template that I talked about a little bit earlier and everything is concise we have a couple different groups that you can see right here we have a quick description about the film we have

inspiration story filming and also music inspiration for the film now inside of these groups we have a bunch of different tools that you can utilize or edit you also have this tool bar over here on the left side that you can just drag and drop into the project and place wherever you need for whatever you need now I'm going to click into some of my inspiration boards I'm going to click into my ideas this right here just helps me in the editing phase travel from section to section for the entire video we have the intro

finding a good idea the pre-production part that we're into right now and then next we'll get into the behind the scenes which you'll see in a second the next board I want to visit is the mood board now I love this this right here is probably my most used asset when it comes to being on set and being able to reference images and keep me on track while I'm shooting things and if we just skim through this you can see a lot of this inspiration has made it into this video already we have the really

macro close-ups on the screen which I use to tell you through the pre-production part of the video these frames right here kept me on track while I was filming shots of me washing dishes and so on and so forth not everything made into the video but this is just here for inspiration if I'm on said I ever feel stuck I can go back in and reference these shots and I can also check out my notes that I put on the reference shots to figure out what I wanted to take away from them while I was

doing the pre-production if you want to drag in images into your board it's extremely easy over here I have a couple images that didn't make it into the board I'll just click one drag it and drop it into the project and I have a bunch of different options on what I can do with this image I can double click on it and I can draw straight onto the image if I want to say I want to reference this uh contrast ratio another thing you can do is also click on the image and over here on

the left toolbar you can add a caption you can do I love the con contrast ratio here and then when you all set it's going to be easy for you to reference the thing that you wanted to pull from this image in the story section I have my project script that I typed out word for word and then we also have a shot list right here which goes through the different sections and locations that I'm going to be using for the film and then from here I have a couple different really vague shots that I

want to uh capture this is just to keep me on track while I'm on set shooting things and then we also have a gear list right here I love this because whenever I'm heading out to a shoe it's inevitable that I'm going to forget something and this right here makes it so I don't forget things once I pack the things into my car I'm able to just check them off this list and know that when I'm on set I'm good to go and I love referencing music while I'm on set as well because it gives

me a Tempo that I need while I'm filming the shots to make sure that it's going to be on point with the music that I'm going to be using inside of the film so this is exactly how this Millo board helped me achieve this video that you're seeing right now while I was on set shooting I just referenced the images on my phone for my mood board and whatever I liked inside of those images I was able to implement those into the actual video product itself as a creative person if you're not using Millan note

you're missing out on the best tool for compiling creative ideas and collaborating and it's free sign up for Mill note for free right now using the link in the description below now let's get into the shooting [Music] [Music] what's good y'all welcome to this behind the scenes now we're going to be thugging to day off the iPhone because at this particular moment I don't have another camera body and this is really all I can do but I do got a microphone hopefully it sounds good hopefully y'all can see what I'm doing and it'll keep y'all

in tuned enough to want to watch this now for this video sake we're going to start today in the office it's freezing outside which means I'm lacking a little bit of motivation to go out there and do anything and I figure if we can get some decent shots in the office it'll motivate me to wrap this up and push it through to the end right now we're going to go through and do camera setup we're going to do lighting setup we're going to figure out if we're going to be using any other stabilizers like sliders

or anything like that so let's let's get into it man the thing that I'm not liking about this iPhone that I'm already like dreading is not being able to see what's going on so it might be ultra wide shots it might be super grainy but bear with me all right we going to figure it out we gonna get it done all right let's do it I haven't run a full rig setup in so long like pretty much since I got the a7c Mark II I've just been using it body lens no sort of monitoring at

all and it's been fine slog 2 is a great tool to be able to get a good exposure for your color grade but I've just recently been realizing that my exposure levels on my lighting that I've been adding into my scenes tend to be way hotter than I want it to be and I can't really monitor it through the screen on the a7c the majority of the time I get it close enough but it's just not as good as I would like it to be and so for that reason I just want to try out

the monitor today just to try out false color see if I'm missing out on anything see if I should go back to just using a body um because there is a true convenience in that Simplicity works the majority of the time especially when I'm not using EX external lighting then it's not really anything that I can do to adjust the levels of lighting anyways but since we're going to be adding in some lighting I want to test this out and see if I've been missing out anything let me break down this setup for y'all really

quick I'm using the Sony a7c Mark II which is my main driver right now lens wise I'm using the Sony 24 to70 G Master 2 love this lens very versatile on the back I'm using the small rig VB 99 Pro uh this is powering my small HD 502 bright monitor I really want to get a brand new monitor but I feel like I couldn't even justify it this is still a great Monitor and it still does what I need to do perfectly fine the shots that I'm about to start with are shots of me filming

the screen I want to get almost macro looking shots of me typing certain things into my project planner just so I can throw into that section as well as whenever I'm typing out the script for the actual video that we're watching this is very trippy because I'm showing you how I'm making the video that you brought watched so that's always super weird to me but um I'm going to be doing that on the 24 to70 G Master Mark I like I said one really cool thing about the a7c Mark I is that I can switch

this over into Super 35 mode so this will help me get closer onto the screen to uh get those shots of the very intricate things that I'm doing on the computer and I even want that effect where it looks like it's pixelated you know I want it to look like we're obviously filming a screen I think that that looks super dope inside of projects [Music] I meant to do behind the scenes for these kind of like night and terot shots in my office but desk was happening really fast and I knew I wanted that uh

blue light that was coming through the window which is gone now I know I wasn't going to have time to be able to continue to move the behind the scenes camera around but I did want to show you the lighting setup so you can kind of get a gist to what I did to achieve the shots within that look so um I have my lamp over here I have like a RGB bulb inside of it I'm able to change the temperature cool to warm green blue whatever it's like RGB uh this was like my practical

that I had within the shot and then I rub at the look of that light with uh this tube light right here this is the amaran pt4 C and um I have a nanite grid on it I had these grids that I had for my nanl P tubes and uh they work for this as well so I really just ran one of these grids to stop the spill from hitting this back wall and then the blue light that I had coming in from the desk I was able to uh give me a nice Rim light

using this amaran 100x that I have mounted up here in the corner in my office and that was basically it I just bounced around my camera same a7c Mark I um with a 24 to70 uh f2.8 G Master Mark I just bounced around the office on the tripod got some really cool looks and um tried to replicate a lot of the looks that I pulled from different frames within the pre-production for this actual video they help me a lot for these shots and I got all of them displayed in my midle noteboard obviously which I'll

link down in the description below if any of yall want to check it out day two of production I switched over to the DJI action 5 Pro the iPhone was a lot man especially when you got notifications and me not being able to see myself a framing is just always a task to use the iPhone for behind the scenes so I figured I'd switch it over to this I got a pair with the microphone so hopefully the audio sounds good hopefully now a lot of the shots are going to be on this floor in my

house and if you can't tell it's extremely bright I even got a window a curtain knocked down because kids are nuisances but having a whole lot of light is lowkey more difficult than having no light because you got to figure out how to control the light and for me that's low-key one of the hardest tasks when it comes to cinematography all right so what I'm thinking is I might bring in a lighting fixture and add a spotlight Mount to it just to kind of give us the look of like a light coming through through a

window if that makes sense just to break up the scene and make it not look so onedimensional when it comes to lighting also PL to bring in some sort of negative feel I got a huge like black blanket that I can just hang up on two lightstands and place it on one side just to give me some contrast in the scene because it's so much light bouncing around in here but um a lot of this is just going to be experimentation it might look terrible that's what happens when you try cinematography you got these big

bright ideas you turn the camera on your idea and then it looks like complete and then you got to figure out how to figure it out so uh that's what we going to do now man let's bring this gear in here and figure it out all right let me show you what's going on with this uh lighting setup y can kind of already see right there that the light is kind of like breaking up on me it looks like the this looks like maybe the sun is shining through a tree or something that is because

we got the spotlight Mount right here I'm actually using my old school aperture 120d Mark I that I have in my garage just because I don't f like going to get another light but I think that's going to kind of bite me in a butt a little bit because it's not by color and the light that's coming through the rest of uh the scene is not the same daylight tone but I'm going probably just switch my white balance up to a super warm tone anyways but this is kind of how it looks just me and

the scene you can see it kind of breaks the scene up in a an interesting way it looks like the sun might be coming through a window or something like that um I'm still trying to really figure out the gist of what the scene is is going to be I know I'm going to be washing dishes right here in this and then from here I guess we'll flip the light to whatever we need to flip it to so that's where we at I might actually change the direction of the light it looks like the light

is on that side of the house so I might move this light to come from this way and then over here on this left side of the scene I might add negative fill just to emphasize the darkness over here but I don't know I got to set up a camera this is why help on set is invaluable because if I had somebody to go adjust this light I can just look at the frame and then I wouldn't have to do this back and fourth thing a negative feel would make this so much better I just

got to figure out how I'm going to do it though I don't think I got no more light stands uh I don't know I'll figure it out I'mma fill my wide um my establishing shot as is with no negative feel and then on the close-ups so the detail shots I'm going bring in the negative feel um which I'll show you in a second this is a flag kit I bought a couple years ago and I've honestly probably used this thing like three times since I bought it flags are one of those things that make your

footage look so freaking good but when you're working by yourself it takes up all the time in the world and the difference is like barely noticeable for the majority of things but uh we here we here the quality of this kit is okay I'll say it works but over the past you know Years with me being in music video production and having access to pretty much any gear that I need rental wise and those sorts of Productions and then using something like this you can tell that this quality is just not quite there but for

the price it works it modifies your lights it comes with some really nice diffusion as well I think this negative feel inside of here is garbage but you know it is what it is the fact that I have it on hand and the fact that I'm just feeling inspired to pull it out I'm going just go with it and see what I get this is that black flag all the way built out this is a pretty nice size I'm not specifically sure what size it is but I'll put it up on the screen but you

can see you can get like some really good negative feel with uh flag this size so this just slides into a grip head on a c stand or whatever sort of stand you're using and you could just modify it to block off whatever light you don't want this is the setup I landed on so we got obviously the light coming from the other side then we got the flag over here and then um yeah this is what the setup looks like through the camera because I'm actually recording which I didn't even know I was uh

you can see on this on this side of my face is just black and it just looks good good it has a good amount of contrast I'm able to kind of weave in and out with the um you know the light here that is kind of being broken up inside the scene and it looks good this is a very very simple lighting setup it just looks dope I think it looks I think it looks cool as hell [Music] things are not going how I wanted them to go with the timing of the project but uh

basically what I'm doing right now is I'm just bouncing around my living room and I'm utilizing the natural light that's coming through the window before dcoms and I'm really just bouncing around with this negative fill I'm keeping it on one side just to keep one side of me shadowed and the shots are turning out really dope I got some cool shots of me sitting down some shots of me scrolling my phone and I'm just bouncing around right now um I think I'm going head out for Dusk to get a couple of shots but I'm just

trying to utilize this little bit of light that I have inside of the house right now so I'm just doing Simple lighting setups though I'm not really bringing in no additional light I'm just using natural light a window is your best friend if you can block off the light on the opposite side of it and get some contrast and some Shadows your shot's going to look good regardless don't eat all this fancy stuff all right just get you a flag or like a black blanket or something that you can hang on a light standand or

even a chair next to you you're going to get some amazing looking shots just off that alone I should probably pull the microphone out I'm really like chancing it right now that this audio and assuming that it's going to sound good I've arrived though this is the spot I always come to if I need a quick Sunset shot it's right by my house it looks good it's flat and the sunsets here just go crazy I wish the sky was a little a little bit more lit it's just blue as y'all can see in the background

there's no clouds out here it is freezing too man I am like lowkey upset because I left my gloves at the crib that was the one thing I meant to get out of my car before I left yo and I did not get them so I'm about to be suffering the first couple shots I'm going to be getting inside of the car anyways though I'm going set the camera up outside shoot into the car uh I just want to get some Bolling me kind of writing in my notebook so uh probably be the first couple

shots I get let's do it setup is lowkey already fire for real I don't really know what the exposure is looking like but this might already be it for real for real I'm not going to lie to you okay so this shot currently that I'm filming through the car window I'm using this little slit of window to kind of break the frame up if you look at the frame it's just kind of like I don't know it splits the frame the frame really nice without it it's boring it needs that foreground and the uh the

way the window was splitting it is is doing a good job of [Music] that yo we back for BTS I've actually been shooting some today and I didn't pull the BTS camera out but it's just because it's so cold but I was like you know what I got to bring yall along for the ride I can't I can't let y'all miss out on these moments you know what I mean I need to look back at these moments myself but we're in the back of a convenience store I like this wall right here though so I'm

about to film some shots of me kind of just poed up on it writing I like it it's big I think that uh it adds some Dimension I don't know why I'm doing it the biggest reason I could think of is because it looks cool and sometimes that's reason enough to do it as long as it looks cool and you like it just go with it so that's what I'm doing right now this is also a reference to one of the frames that I had pulled within the references and the planner part of this video

and uh you know obviously I referenced that on my phone using Millan note because Millan note is the goat that's one of the biggest things that I do really like about Millan not though like whenever I do go to sets I haven't shot a music video in a while but back when I would play my music videos and I would go to sets I would make my board at home obviously when I'm doing my pre-production but while I'm on set if I ever need to reference anything I could just pull it up on my phone

I could bring an app pad to set have it bigger a bigger like uh view of what I'm doing or what I want to do and I can also reference any sort of note notes and stuff like that Miller note is the goat and it's coming through right now as well but let's get these shots before it gets dark man let's do it right now I'm determining what the frame looks like it it looks good right now but for real for real I got a negative feel in my car and I swear ever since I

used that negative feel yesterday I like have been rethinking my cinematography choices for the past couple of years like why haven't I always been using negative f so I lowkey might pull this negative f off my car and set it on this side of this Frame I think it would add YOLO let's do it let's do it we going to make it look extra we might as well make it look all the way extra right [Music] all right we at the back of the video I want to chat it up with y'all before we leave

out because I got a couple things to say about the production of this video now there were moments throughout the video where I didn't do behind the scenes but a lot of those shots were fairly simple it was just me using the same setup out I wasn't using any sort of modifiers I was just getting creative angles because it was freaking freezing man it's also a lot of other things that I wanted to do for this project that I just couldn't get to but as creative people with schedules and life Just Happening that happens man

I want y'all to know that it's okay it's cool man I get it I've been a person who like has gotten extremely discouraged shooting creative projects because I don't get them dialed in exactly how I want them to be but at the end of the day once again is to either a client or an audience or whoever you're trying to present it to they don't even know that if I hadn't told yall this y probably wouldn't have thought anything about this video so just look at it from that context people don't know what you didn't

get people only know what you did get so whatever you do get try to make it as best as possible all in all though I had a lot of fun shooting this project and if you look at my references that I pulled for this video a lot of those actually did show up in the video in some form or fashion maybe it was a location maybe it was an angle and I was all possible because miloe I had it on my phone and I was able to pull up those references while I was on set

just to keep me on track make sure y'all download mote it's going to be a link down in the description below it's free it's like why not you know what I mean you don't even have to spend no money to use Millan note it's such a dope platform if you're not using it creatively you just missing out if you enjoyed this video make sure to drop it a like do me that solid also head down to the comment section below and let me know what was your favorite look in this video all right I appreciate

all y'all but with that being said I'm out y'all peace [Music]