 How's it going guys? My name is Kai and today we are going to be going over the five biggest mistakes people are making when filming dance videos. In case you haven't noticed, dance videos have become the thing to create over the past few years. By picking a good song and showcasing your talents, people are now able to amass thousands of followers and create hundreds of opportunities for themselves. And who doesn't want that? However, even with all of these followers and opportunities up for grabs, there are just as many mistakes people are making that are costing them all of these chances they could otherwise be getting. A little background on me, I started dance in high school and started filming dance seven years ago. And since then, I've had the opportunity of working with the top movement brands like STEEZY, KIONI and MARI, KINJAZ, Vibrancy, Stance, and many more. I've learned so much along the way and now I want to share it all with you. This video is here for free as a preview lesson to movement media mentor, an online course that I have designed to teach you all the secrets behind planning, shooting, and editing your own professional level dance videos that will bring you real opportunities, proven using techniques that have been tried and true by both myself and the pros before me. Click the link in the description below after the video to learn more. Mistake number one people make when filming dance videos, they overspend on the wrong things. This doesn't just go for dance creators, but for video creators in general, they think having the most expensive gear is going to do them the best justice. And that is just not the case. Fundamentally, all cameras have the same technology. It doesn't matter if you're using an iPhone or a RED camera. In fact, a majority of successful dance creators are filming on their iPhones and posting to social media. All you really need to get started is your phone. And in fact, most iPhones come with an editing software built in, which is iMovie, which could save you the cost potentially of a computer and an editing software. So don't go dropping all your bills on a nice, nice camera just yet. In fact, if you can figure out how to use the camera you have now at your disposal and get the best image you can out of that through lighting and composition and all of those first building blocks, then it's going to be much, much worth your money and time. So avoid this first trap of overspending on expensive gear by taking the time and resources to learn about the building blocks that create a good image and also improving your dance, right? Or binding a good dancer to put in front of the camera. Mistake number two that people often make when creating dance videos is that they don't go out with a goal in mind. While there's nothing wrong with just going out and having fun and doing whatever, if you want to be a professional and you want higher chances of your videos driving the results that you want, then you have to think about what you're doing it for. It's kind of like going on a road trip, but you don't really have a destination and so basically there's really no direction or cause or rhyme or reason for you to go in any direction and you end up just kind of putting willy nilly and you don't really achieve or have the experience that you want to. It's the same with making videos. If you don't have an objective or something to shoot towards, then everything that you create and all the things that you decide to shoot are most likely not going to lead into a common cause. You can avoid this just by asking yourself some simple questions such as, why are we making this? Who are we making this for? And what purpose are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to make the audience feel? Answering any of these questions is going to lead you down a path that will be more defined and will help you more likely achieve the goals that you wanted to setting out for that video. Common mistake number three to avoid is not doing the right planning and researching. I know a lot of people kind of like to just freestyle this thing because they feel like it's going to take them less time to accomplish, but counterintuitively not taking the time to plan and research properly can end up leading to way more time taken on the entire project versus maybe that extra hour or two that you could have spent planning. If you go onto the field and you want a freestyle dance video, then that's fine, but you may end up running into a ton of problems, including problems with location. Maybe the lighting is not good enough. Maybe it's more crowded than you expected it to be. In fact, maybe you might not even be able to dance there and they'll kick you out. Who knows? Now you do not have to plan every single step along the way. You don't have to get that meticulous. All I'm saying is that each point that you decide to actually look into ahead of time, including what music you're going to shoot, what type of movement or dance are you going to do? Are you going to freestyle? What type of style are you going to do? If you can figure those out, then that way you have a better way to frame your videos. And if you can figure out the location schematics and the details, then you can figure out if you can shoot there or not, if you can even access that place. And if you take the time to look into locations, you'll probably find one that is way more rewarding and it looks way better than it would have if you didn't. Once again, freestyle is completely fine. In fact, a lot of TikTokers and social media content creators do just that. But those that you see who create the videos that you remember and tell a story, those are the ones that took the time to decide to plan and gave that invisible ink under word. So if you want the same for your videos, then it's a very good practice to start getting into this habit of planning and not trying to just avoid that your entire life. This take number four people often make when filming their dance videos is that they don't pay attention to lighting. I know if you look into it, lighting can look like a complex endless journey of learning and just so much technicalities. But at the end of the day, there's really one thing you should have to remember as a beginner. So let me explain a key light to you real quick. That's my camera. This, this right here, what I'm pointing at, that's my key light. This is the light that's allowing most of my face to be lit up and my entire subject. This is what it looks like when my key light is turned off. While it does kind of look pretty cool and moody in this situation, most times I want you to focus on me. And so right now there is no key that is helping you focus on me. That is the power of the key light. And while lighting doesn't have to be that expensive and buying a few lights can actually help you immensely when filming videos, especially at night, you still don't really technically need to buy a light to understand how to use a key light. In fact, we have the most powerful source of light that's free pretty much all the time, as long as it's daytime and you're outside, which is the sun. And the sun is going to be your best friend when filming dance videos, especially without lights. Only thing about the sun is that you can't position it exactly where you want it to be. You are at the bidding of the sun. That is why it's important to plan people plan for the right time of day. And so we're going to go over it just very briefly here. Okay. If the sun is right overhead and it's really bright out that day, it's going to cast rights on top of your subject. And it's going to give them raccoon eyes. And it's going to look very intense, which can be a look you're going for. But most of the time, if we want a subject to look flattering, we do want diffused lights, which is what this light source right here is doing. And ways you can get diffused light is either you go into shade and you make sure that you find a background or a whole shot that is shaded or indoors, or you can wait until dawn or dusk, which we refer to during Lee as golden hour. This is when the sun is right below the horizon. The sky turns a different color, but the light from the sun is diffused throughout the entire sky. And every single angle you get of your subject is nice and soft and flattering. Some of the most common mistakes I see beginners make when filming dance videos is that one part of the frame is super dark and one part of the frame is super light. And unless your camera's dynamic range is high enough, which even if it was, you still wouldn't really want to push it like that because the image won't probably look as great. What's going to happen is your brighter areas either going to be overexposed or your darker areas going to be underexposed, which means it's too dark to see anything or it's too bright to see some stuff. Like you can see that most of my face is starting to get white and like not natural. That's because the light is blowing out my face right now. And once you see too many of these in shots, it's a dead giveaway that you made a mistake and that either it's going to make audiences feel a little bit more comfortable or professionals are going to see it and immediately know that you may not know what you're doing. So it's very important to understand these fundamentals. Last but not least, one of the most common but critical mistakes I see people making when filming dance videos is skipping video fundamentals. If you're a dancer and you're watching this, you probably understand by now that there are fundamentals to your style. And if you decide to skip all that and learn the crazy stuff first, then you are not going to have a good foundation and it's going to show. It's kind of like trying to put on all these fancy and nice pretty clothes, but you don't even have a skeleton. So yeah, you can imagine how that looks. You're just a blob and everyone can see it. It's the same thing when you don't have your video fundamentals. If you haven't taken at least a little time to learn about things like lighting, camera settings, shutter speed, frame rates, ISO, aperture and all these other things, then it's going to show. And I know it's a lot of things to crash. And that's why I don't really blame people for not knowing this stuff. You can always do what I did when you go on YouTube and you spend hundreds of hours sifting through a bunch of videos, which you don't know which ones are the good ones and which ones are the bad ones. And then you learn incrementally slowly over the years. The thing is not everyone has the time for that or the patience for that. And I don't blame you. On the other end, you can go to school for it. You can spend thousands, if not tens of thousand dollars on a tuition and they will teach you the right ways. I did both of these and honestly, my film education, I feel like I learned more from YouTube. So I'm just putting that out there. There's better ways to spend your money, especially if you're trying to get into filmmaking. And also I want to give you guys props for just being here until the end of this video because it shows that you're looking to learn. And I know it goes deep. There's a lot more stuff here that I haven't covered. This is the tip of the iceberg people. And if you were like me, someone who sometimes just can't wait to achieve their goals as fast and efficiently as possible using the smartest routes, then I really, really think that you should check out Movement Media Mentor. This is something I've created out of frustration of just thousands of hours of trial and error, blood, sweat, and tears. And honestly, if something like this had existed earlier, I probably wouldn't have had to go to college for film. Because in this course, I have packed the fundamentals and the secrets that I've been wanting to learn for so long and was finally able to learn from the people that I've looked up to all these years. I've now had the opportunity to work with all of them and learn so much from them. And now I'm looking to democratize this information so that anybody who has a dream to make amazing videos and grow their platform specifically in the dance and movement sector can now do it in this one course. So check out the link in the description below. And if you are a dancer or movement artist looking to take their videos and platform to the next level, I promise you will not regret it. And either way, if you finished this video, great job, because you've already learned about the mistakes that I had to make and a lot of other beginners had to make. And you will be able to just level up way faster because of this. Like the video if you've learned something and leave a comment below, actually, of a dream project you have always wanted to work on. Who knows? Maybe in a year or two, you'll come back and it'll have happened. You'll have spoke it into existence. If you want to continue your movement media journey, then go ahead and subscribe. And I'll definitely be doing more work, whether it's with the pv drone or with other awesome dancers and movement artists. You're going to see it all here and you're going to learn and we're going to level up together. Thanks guys, and I'll see you in the next one. Peace.