A Beginner's Guide to Shooting Video on a Smartphone

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of watching St. Vincent perform at Carriageworks. We had an unbelievable view, straight through the screen of a smartphone 3 feet in front of my face, shooting one minute vertical videos of the concert. It was like I was really there in person!

For most of us, our phones are drowning in gigabytes of shaky, blurry, slanted video, the few gems forever buried in our devices. It’s time for a few tips and tricks to take your camera game from Funniest Home Videos to Spielberg.

Also, did you know the recently launched Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra is an excellent phone for taking some great videos? It's got some great features like Nightography that allow you to capture great quality content even in low light.

Image credit: Hello Lovely / Getty Images

The most crucial thing to think about when shooting any video is what exactly are you shooting? Is it envy-inducing travel footage of the French Riviera? Sweet shots of your dog doing rollerblade tricks? Soon to be viral footage of the first UFO touching down in the outback?

Thinking about the subject helps solve this problem. Shooting a clip of your friend standing in front of a huge redwood tree is going to look better vertically, but Mardi Gras or a huge parade? We want to turn the phone horizontal, so we can see all the activity going on down the street.

Platform is also important. For instance, if you’re planning on sharing it on Instagram Stories or Snapchat, vertical’s almost always the best. For anything else, horizontal works way better – Youtube and Vimeo are catching up with custom players for vertical video, but take a look around the rest of the screens in your house. They’re all horizontal.

Finally, a few rapid tips for early success:

• Don’t shoot too much, you’ll never go through it all.
• Don’t cover the microphone with your hand.
• Aim away from wind and breeze.
• Hold your phone with two hands! No one wants to get seasick from your footage.

Image credit: Verity Jane Smith / Getty Images

Okay, we’ve got the basics down, we’re shooting without our thumbs over the lens. Great work. Time to get more specific.

The most effective way to improve your footage is to think about the lighting conditions. Lighting is everything but it’s also tricky. While bright midday sunshine is the best condition for your smartphone (it loves light and is really great at auto-exposing in these settings), it’s the least flattering time for people. And cool neon seen in a dark setting at night? The phone’s going to want to either expose for all the shadows (making everything too bright and grainy) OR expose for the bright neon (making everything darker than that basically invisible).

You need to guide your phone to find the best balance in all of these options, and that means thinking about your surroundings. If you can, take your subject out of the bright sun to a lightly shaded area that still gets plenty of light. Everything will look nice and even around there. And the same goes for a dark situation – have a look for ways to balance the lighting, either by moving closer to a bright source or holding your finger down on the area of the screen that you want properly exposed for. You might be looking for a shot where you can see someone’s face clearly or it might be more about a silhouette kind of vibe.

The next step for control? Ditch the built-in app and get something with full control. The most well-known app for this is FilmicPro, available on iOS and Android, and used to shoot feature films such as Tangerine and Unsane. We could spill a lot more ink on all the advanced features available through this and other apps, but the main idea is to introduce you to controlling your image and sparking new ideas to improve your creativity. You’ll be able to control the focus, exposure and white balance to make sure things look exactly the way you want them to.

Image credit: Aliyev Alexei Sergeevich / Getty Images

Just like a tree falling unheard in a lonely forest, all that video stashed on your phone doesn’t mean anything unless you edit it into something others can watch. While you could send all the footage to your computer and cut it in professional editing software, let’s keep this phone-centric: there are now countless apps that will allow you to edit and export a finished video all from your phone.

We've already touched on FilmicPro, whichh has editing options. iOS users can also use a slightly streamlined version of iMovie, which comes packed with presets for titles, themes, and graphics. Finally, there’s a host of apps that will ‘auto-edit’ video for you from preselected clips and themes, the foremost of these being Magisto. But now you know how to take great video and edit it, what would be the fun in that?