Recently, my dad was honored at a famous local delly in Annapolis. Chick and Ruth's Delly has a pretty extensive menu named after local politicians and now my dad, who's the first reporter to grace their grill. My pops is a semi-retired TV reporter, who worked all over the country in local in national news. He covered Vietnam and the Israeli Six day war for NBC, worked for WMAR in Baltimore for 30 years and is now working part-time at Maryland Public Television. Of course, I had to bring my camera and start shooting.

Being a quick event in a really small, loud space, it was hard to handle the audio. I ended up just using the rode videomic, attached to the shoe of my camera. It's a shotgun mike, so it does a pretty good job of focusing on the sound directly in front of it. It's still not ideal, I'd have preferred to have something even more directional, but it worked well.

Lighting was another issue. The GH3 handles low level light really well and extra lighting was not necessary. News cameras were there and every time I'd get the camera set up, another news photographer  would set up their light and I'd have to play around with the settings. It got tough during the speeches, where I didn't have time to fix the settings and just had to wing it. I guess that's the hard part about having a camera that handles natural light so well in a news setting.

It was a great being a part of it, it was a blast shooting and it was a fun piece to edit.

So you've decided you want a video, what's next? What takes your video and turns it into something people will want to watch? How do you keep them interested and engaged? There's a simple answer (besides quality audio). It's character and emotion. A good character can take a few basic facts and turn them into a story. A good character can take a boring business profile and turn it into a mini-web documentary about your company. Showing who you are and why you do what you do is important to connect you with your customers and entice them to work with you. The audience should hear from you and should hear from your customers, through interview soundbites.

A few months ago, I had to shoot a video with the Governor's office about an event announcing Maryland's Central Business Licensing. Instead of just going to the event and shooting there, I did some preproduction, found someone who would benefit and worked them into the video. I think it made for a more compelling, interesting video. When you think about putting together your next promotional video, you should think about who it affects and how you can use that to connect with your audience.

As I've grown into a professional videographer, I've started to feel strongly about only using royalty free music. Someone poured hours into creating that piece of art that I'm going to use in my piece of art and they should be compensated, especially if I'm going to make money off of it. I've seen too many videos done for clients, using commercial music, which could end in lawsuits. It's illegal and there's so many options out there, it's a shame people don't use or pay for royalty free music. Here are some resources I've found that work really well.