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During this bi-weekly article professional video producer Leon Circuit recommends keeping it short.

Have you got hours of video footage of your holidays and children that you would love to show to friends and family, but every time you bring the subject up eyes glaze over, excuses are made and the living room is cleared? Do you watch your own videos back with the remote in your hands and a finger on the fast forward button? I am sure you do, we all do, but there is an alternative. Planning.

As a video producer I plan every shot of the video, then every hour of the day, as everything is then edited it saves an awful lot of frustrating work. We will go into more depth about editing at a later date but in the meantime you should be thinking about in- camera editing. This can only be done well if the planning or pre-production has been done beforehand.

You are going on a trip and have decided to take the video camera with you, the next thing to do is work out what you are going to be doing each day and try to predict what moments will be worth capturing. You may think that this is impossible but even the most unpredictable fly on the wall documentaries are carefully scripted before hand. Every thing might change when you start shooting but the basis is there and if you try to stick to that, the finished programme will have a structure, be interesting and hopefully not to long.

If you are going to edit in camera, start with an establishing shot of your house. Then have some short shots inside, packing bags and picking up tickets. Stand at the end of the road and film the car driving past, let the car drive out of shot. Carry on in this vein building a picture on paper, keep the shots short, do not move the camera to much, never zoom in and out during the same shot and think at least two shots ahead.

You should be at your destination within a minute and to keep the film interesting your two weeks on holiday should last no more than half an hour on tape, maybe 45 minutes if you had a very interesting holiday. There is no harm is taking another tape to use when filming a boat race or similar long event but unless you were there or someone capsizes most viewers would be bored after a minute.

I recently had a job transferring about 5 hours of 20 year old 8mm film to VHS tape. Most of the film was animals and scenery at a safari park and very little of the family. It struck me straight away that the animals and scenery would look just the same today, but the people, now they really were interesting, all 10 minutes of them.

So to recap, plan ahead and keep it short, video people not hills, this way you will have fun making the film, also family and friends just might enjoy the end product, but do not bank on it!

Don't forget you can email me with any camcorder or video queries at leon@circuitproductions.com or write to Circuit Productions, 1 Grimsby Road, Louth, LN11 0ED.

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