Tips for Shooting Your Home

Hey guys!

Thank you so much for your interest in submitting a video to us. We’ve had people from all over the world get in touch!

I know it can be intimidating to shoot your own video. I’ve shot hundreds of videos and still screw up, am unhappy with the results, and am unsure of what to do. Some have asked about what to shoot or how to go about doing it, so here are a few tips on how shoot a video showing off your living room (as seen in our request video here).

After you read these tips and instructions, the form for submitting your video is at the bottom.

Thanks everyone! I’m looking forward to seeing living rooms around the world! 

Deadline: June 18th, 2016

The room

  • Some people have more than one room that could be considered a living room, like a dining room, entertainment room, family room, or play room. It’s cool to show the different rooms and what they’re used for.
  • Some people may have a single multipurpose room, like in Japan, which usually has a LDK room (which means living room / dining room / kitchen). It’s okay to show a single multipurpose room if you don’t have a dedicated living room.

Shooting style

  • If you want to move around while shooting, that’s okay, or if you want to sit down or stand in front of a camera, that’s also okay. If you can manage to get someone to shoot you, that’s the easiest, as they can worry about how the shot looks like and how you sound, while you can focus on presenting. Also, you can simply be off-camera reading something.
  • The videos should have 1-3 still shots, meaning you just hold the camera steady for 10 seconds, not moving it.
  • The videos shouldn’t be 1-5 minutes (but if it’s really interesting, sure, do longer if you like).

What to Say

You don’t have to be in front of the camera, but if you can manage it, it would be nice if you get in front of the camera and tell us your your name, as well as the city and country you live in. For example:

  • “Hi, I’m Greg. I live in Tokyo, Japan, and this is what my living room is like.”

Let us know 3-5 points about your living room that you think are interesting, like:

  1. “There’s usually no separation between a living and dining room. They’re in the same space and I find it tends to be a lot smaller than what you’d find in Canadian and American homes.”
  2. “It’s not uncommon to have no couches or chairs, although it’s becoming more and more standard to have them. I’ve been to places where there’s a large coffee table that people sit around and eat their meals. Most people nowadays to tend to buy small couches, but a kitchen or dining table is not as popular as couches.”
  3. “For lighting, having a single light or two attached from the ceiling is the most common. You don’t often see lamps that you’d plug into a wall socket, like the one’s a lot of people buy from Ikea.”
  4. “Sometimes the floor is made from a tatami mat. In older places, it was very common to have tatami floors, while in newer, big places, some houses will have a special tatami room that’s separate from the main living room (usually separated by sliding doors).”
  5. “In really old Japanese homes, they would have a kind of fire pit in the middle to cook food with. But, I’ve never seen a Japanese homes with a fireplace and a chimney that is built into a wall.”

Editing

  • I’ll be editing the videos together, so there’s no need to edit with music. But you can definitely feel free to cut out any bad takes / scenes and combine all the footage into a single video to send.
  • We shoot in 4K, but obviously don’t expect that quality of footage. Just send whatever’s the best resolution you can, and if you have to encode/render the footage from editing software, just make sure to export quite high quality footage.

Submitting

  • Put the video in Google Drive and share it with us. If that’s not possible, any file sharing service such as Dropbox is ok, just share the link with us. We’re trying to avoid downloading the video’s from YouTube since the quality is not as high. There’s a form below that you can use to submit everything.

What will happen with the videos

Unfortunately, there’s no way to include everyone’s living room for a significant amount of time. The plan is to pick 5-10 countries (depending on the uniqueness of the rooms) and feature a room (or maybe 2) per country. However, since there are so many people interested, I want to offer this: If you make and post your own edited video on your own YouTube Channel, if you give us the link (via the form below), we can put it on the lifewhereimfrom.com site. So please feel free to publish an edited video on your own YouTube channel, whether or not your living rooms gets featured in the published LWIF video.

Another thing I’d like to point out, is that as interesting as your place may be, we can only show a minute or two of any one place. But, you may have 10 minutes worth of interesting content to show the world. So even though I’m looking to only use so much footage in the LWIF video, by publishing your own video on your channel, you can make the video whatever length you want!

If collab videos like this are a success, we’d consider collaborating with a single person on a full length video, providing the style is similar to what we do at LWIF. I’d be quite cool to help somebody launch or build up their own channel and maybe doing a few videos with us can help.

Questions

If you have any questions, just leave a comment below. Don’t be worried about making a mistake in the video or in submitting the form. I’m new to this too, so am fully expecting all of us to make stuff, break stuff, and learn 🙂

Please use the form below to submit your videos