What You’ll Need

The essentials for a home movie are pretty basic: something to document, a camcorder to record it, and the desire to tell a story. Most boring home movies are that way only because they don’t tell a story well. Truth is, everything has a story line; you just have to be willing to look for it. Take, for example, bathing a dog. Is there a story in there somewhere? It may not be a terribly complicated story—perhaps not quite the classic hero’s story, with a sweeping crescendo, a fallen compatriot, and a false resolution before the final frames—but there is a story in it. To illustrate this concept, we will use a hypothetical story line about Nina’s dog Monk—it’s called “Monk’s Bath Time.”
Before we get too deep into finding the inner story, let’s talk about the practical stuff. For a home movie, you’ll generally want to be mobile, so of all the equipment we talked about in Chapter 2, you’re going to go at it a little lean in this case. Most likely you’ll be dealing with a lot of the stuff that’s either part of your camera or attached to it. Because you’re on the move, you probably can’t clip a microphone to your subjects, and you’ll most likely deal with natural light, room light, or perhaps a camera-mounted key light. Any more than that and you’re probably straying from nonfiction. Of course, the on-the-go nature of home video shooting means you’ll likely want to have extra batteries and tapes on hand, as you’ll be “in the wild” and may not have access to AC power or battery chargers.