Ideas for filming in your garden?

Ok, thought I'd start the ball rolling.

 

Gardens are the perfect place to start perfecting your camera skills, but rather than ending up with a few random clips it would be great to create short videos with a theme or topic.

 

Would love to hear any ideas or suggestions you may have?

Tags: Garden, film, filmmaking, video, wildlife

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Permalink Reply by Kate MacRae on February 4, 2010 at 17:10
This is what I want to do with the kids at school.... with the aim that they create a diary of our journey to attract and learn more about the wildlife in our school grounds. I am hoping to get them to take pictures, little video clips etc as we install cameras and set everything up. They will then use Windows Moviemaker to create little filmed 'episodes' which we will broadcast on our website!..... that's the plan anyway!
Permalink Reply by Peter Naylor on March 11, 2010 at 20:29
why not give short briefs every other week or so, in the form of one word titles. For example "Hidden" then at the end of the two week block we see the results, whoever chose the word picks a winner and then they repeat the process.
I ran a very similar thing on a flickr group i created and it seemed to go down very well?
Permalink Reply by Doug Collins on December 9, 2010 at 19:16
Parks are also great. Indianapolis IN has one of the largest city parks in the U.S.. A large lake, smaller ponds, trails, lots of woods and some open areas as well. Even smaller parks can be interesting places to shoot. (I keep meaning to use the Macro function on the camera and find a good sized ant hill.)
Permalink Reply by Marcus on December 9, 2010 at 22:28
I think at this time of year a few patio heaters would be helpful!

;-)
Permalink Reply by Yusuf Akhtar on January 1, 2011 at 21:10
what im doing at the moment both to pracice filming and editing is making a series of vids under the series name garden birds: then the birds name. im currently on no.1 the blue tit
Permalink Reply by stephen cummings on January 12, 2011 at 20:54

Content is king!

Unlike still photos, video has to tell a story, and that story has to entertain an audience. With natural history stuff, the piece should  also inform or educate. If these two criteria aren't met, then you have a bit of a non-starter.

So pick a subject, any subject, and write down about a dozen interesting things about it. If you are struggling to find enough points with which to build an interesting story, choose another subject............or do more research.

Good films don't start with nice pictures, they start with the printed word, and the printed word comes from researching the subject.

Once you have written the story, then you can start thinking about what pictures you need to tell that story.

So study your garden well.

Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?

Who/what is in it, on it, under it? What is there all the time? Who are just visitors? Where in the garden are they? When are they there? Why are they there? What is their relationship with the other inhabitants? How does this relationship work? Look for these relationships, for cause and effect and the reasons that explain what can be seen.

Wildlife film-making is more about having an understanding of the subject that you are filming, and passing that knowledge on to the viewer via the content of the piece.

Most of all -Have fun. Enjoy

Permalink Reply by shirl on February 20, 2011 at 19:50

Well said, Stephen :-)

 

I have been doing this for four years, sharing it too - see http://blog.shirlsgardenwatch.co.uk/. I've gone from plant watcher to bird and wildife watcher :-D

Permalink Reply by Danny Gibson on March 15, 2011 at 15:37
I'm looking forward to videoing the many hover flies that frequent my garden in the warmer weather, and the ichneuman wasps using a 35mm macro lens on my oly E5 dslr.  Never done it before so well looking forward to it!
Permalink Reply by Gill on April 1, 2011 at 0:41

Hi Danny - wow that sounds brilliant, and I would be very interested to hear how you get on.  I tried to film a Bee fly the other day - completely useless :-)

 

 

Permalink Reply by Linda Penney on December 27, 2011 at 15:45

At present untill i can afford a proper wildlife cam to do live streaming i have tried my web cam this afternoon and i was inpressed as i found the hd filmimng button . might up load it later plus it makes recording the birds easy to write down

while i am looking out on them  plus if you get a rare one it's easy to send to some to help tell you what it is

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