What You'll Learn


Our goal is to take a small group of serious amateur video shooters like you to a beautiful and inspiring location, bring you together as a team and show you how to use professional documentary techniques to produce videos that will elicit 'oohs' and 'aahs' from family and friends.  Video that informs, entertains and excites viewers online, as well as the people you work with. 

In a nutshell, our goal is to inspire people like you to tell extraordinary stories with the video you shoot, even if it’s just the story of your vacation. 

Planning to Shoot with the Result in Mind
Professional videographers get paid to produce specific results.  We teach you how to think in terms of the result you want to achieve whenever you pick up your camcorder.  Sounds simple, but you will be amazed how much learning to do that simple thing will improve your results.

Developing a Documentary Story-Line
Since very few of us amateur videographers set out to make dramatic movies or tell fictional tales, Rannoch has adopted the documentary as our paradigm.  But, that doesn’t mean that there is no story involved in what we do.  On the contrary, one of the most important things you will have an opportunity to learn is how major documentary producers develop a “narrative arc” for each show or episode they produce.  And, we will show you how that simple technique can be applied to everyday projects.

Shooting Better Quality Footage
Today’s newest pro-sumer and even professional camcorders offer an array of automated functions that make getting acceptable footage much easier.  But, there are some situations where the automated settings are almost guaranteed to be wrong or not as good as you can achieve with some simple adjustments.  And, there are other situations, such as how to frame a shot, the best angle for a shot and how to smoothly pan the camera through a shot, where automation really can’t help you much at all.  We will cover a broad range of topics aimed at taking everyone to a higher level of camera techniques.

Using Audio in Your Video
Many of today’s camcorders are equipped with very good built-in microphones.  But, if you’ve watched a lot of video on YouTube, you know that the sound in a lot of videos is not very good – well below what you expect in a professional production.  There are several reasons for that, so we will show you some techniques for capturing good sound and what some options are for mixing natural sounds from the camera microphones with voices recorded from an external microphone and perhaps music to create a finished, pro-quality video.  We will also discuss how to avoid running into copyright problems when you place your videos on public sites such as YouTube.  

Some Basic HD Technology
There has also been a certain amount of complexity and confusion among video formats and technologies, but with HD, the buzz-word generators have been working overtime.  The result is a forest of jargon that confuses even professional shooters and editors.  The emphasis in our Documentary Expeditions will not be on explaining a lot of technicalities.  These are, after all, travel programs and vacation/holiday activities.  So, the emphasis will be on being on seeing, shooting and enjoying.  But we will take time during odd moments to explain which technical points you should pay attention to, and which ones are just part of the marketing fog.

What Editing Can Do for You
A time-honored saying among documentary professionals is “Shoot for Post!”  That saying brings us back to the idea that you should always shoot video with some idea in mind of what the end result should be.  “Post” in this case means post-production, which is mostly editing the raw video to produce your final result.  Our Expedition Leader will always be a competent editor, and will actually combine the shots, help the group select the shots to use and actually do the editing required to produce the expedition video.  Learning to use any but the most simplistic video editing software takes some time, and is beyond the scope of what we want to achieve in our expedition format.  However, you may watch as much of the “cake being baked” as you wish to develop a better understanding of how a really good editing suite can enhance a final video product. 

How to Safely Store All That Video
As mentioned elsewhere, we capture video to solid state flash cards, and not to tape.  Therefore, during an expedition we don’t build up a collection of tapes.  We transfer the video collected each day to hard drives, in duplicate, to make sure we don’t lose our precious cargo of footage if a hard-drive suddenly goes bad or somebody hits the Delete key at the wrong time.  We will show you how the pros are handling this issue in today’s increasingly tapeless world.

Using the Workflow Concept
Even a modest documentary shoot may produce fifty to a hundred hours of video for a final product lasting one-hour or less.  And, that footage may come from multiple cameras, with two or more cameras sometimes shooting the same subject simultaneously, but from different angles.  Then in editing, short segments of video called cuts, typically each just a few seconds in length, will be assembled from all of the footage to make up the work product.  Even in producing a short video for the web, there is a lot of footage, a lot of shots and a lot of final cuts to keep track of.  How we do that with flash cards and hard drives is part of what we will be showing you.  It’s called in the trade “Workflow.”