WHAT YOU’RE FILMING

Driving

EXPERT: Ben Joiner, director of photography, Top

Gear and The Grand Tour STRATEGY: If you’ve got only one camera, don’t just mount it in one place. Be strategic. Think, Lap one, a forward-facing shot. Lap two, facing the driver. Lap three, looking down the side of the car. Lap four, get a friend to jump in and do handheld shots. You come away with a selection that can create a narrative arc.

With larger cameras, use multiple anchor points. Buy a hotshoe mount for the top of the camera, along with the bottom mount. That will make your shots much more stable, so you get less jelly-like effects.

Dedicate a bit of your day to recording sound.

When you’re shooting from the inside of a hairpin bend, study the first pass. If the wheels lift or the tyres smoke, jump up to 120 frames per second to get slow-mo of that detail. Next take, use a wide-angle lens and get the camera down low, close to the car. This will accentuate the turn.

In your edit, you can start with a wide shot that shows the whole scene, punch in tight to the tyre tearing itself to pieces, smoke pouring off. Then, as it exits the corner, cut back to further up the road. Those shots tell the story of that corner, and what it’s like to be near those cars.

Marques Brownlee uses the he RED Weapon 8K S35 [9] (R975 000). “RED cameras s have super-high resolution, n, amazing colour science and nd range. They make it feel as realistic as possible,” he says. The 8K resolution “means my footage will look good as Youtube evolves”.

One other camera to know about is from Hasselblad. Till now, Hasselblad cameras have not been best for video. They shoot only 30 frames per second, and max out at 1080p. But that will all change later this year, when the renowned Swedish company plans to release some worthy competition.