In Car Camera Mounting Tips
If you have ever tried to shoot video when you are driving your car you will know that it is hard to give any feeling of speed on film.
You were giving it maximum attack but you’re looking at the film and it looks like you were out on a Sunday drive.
This article is a brief guide to how you can get a sense of speed into your in car videos
1. First of all you need to get some side scenery into the shot. If your camera is pointing dead ahead and it does not have a wide-angle lens there is not a lot to give the sense of speed.
To get around this you should offset the camera to one side. Basically the straight ahead should be in the left or right 25% of the field of view. This will enable you to pick up the scenery passing the car which dramatically enhances the sense of speed.
2. The next thing to do is to cut the sky out of your shot. If you have a lot of open sky in the shot it means a lot of the shot is not giving any sense of speed at all. You should aim to have the camera field of view to be below the horizontal even if this means you get a lot of the car’s interior in the shot.
Nothing kills the sense of speed more than sky.
3. Get the road in the shot. You should aim to pick up as much of the road in front of the car as possible this means you need to mount the camera quite high in the car interior.
These are the golden rules for shooting from inside the car. However the sense of speed can be ramped up even more if you mount the camera outside of the car.
Mounting the car low down on the front bumper and low down on the rear bumper probably gives the greatest sense of speed. The same rules for mounting the camera inside the car apply to mounting the camera outside of the car.
So when you mount on the front of the bumper, offset the camera, cut out as much sky from the shot as possible, getting a shot of the road will look after itself.
There are many high quality camera mounts available on the market which will allow you to mount your camera inside and outside of the car.
Hopefully these tips and a half decent camera will give your in-car camera movies a boost.
