Tips for Skype Author Visit: Be Prepared
Before I did my first Skype Author Visit today, with a school in Arlington, VA, I went through several fine-tunings of my setup. These are all small tweaks, but I felt like they were important to let me relax and enjoy the presentation.
Turn Your Office into a Video Studio
Lighting. My office is a dark attic, perfect for writing, but not good at all for a video studio. Looking around for tutorials on lighting for video shoots, I saw that it was important to have three types of lights.
Main light at about 2 o’clock to light one side of the face. It needs to be strong enough to light up your face without glare. Because I have an attic office, I just use a shop light and bounce it off the nearby ceiling.
The main light is about 2 o'clock from my face, bouncing off the ceiling.
Second, you need a bounce lighting or a smaller light that adds shadows and depth to the opposite cheek. I just used a piece of foam core.
The secondary light just bounced light onto the opposite cheek.
My normal overhead lighting is pretty high because of the attic space, so it worked as a great back-light on the top of my head; this light is important because it will separate you from the background better. Some tutorials recommended 3x or 4 x the normal lighting.
Camera. With the lights in place check the camera settings.
- Tilt. Is it capturing your full face? I also position the screen showing small shot of myself as near the camera as possible, so I am mostly looking at the camera.
- Reverse Image. I also found it better to reverse or flip the image that I’m seeing of myself. That way, if I reach up to touch my hair, it looks right to me.
- Zoom. Zoom in or out until you get a shoulder shot. I like it zoomed out enough so you can easily see my gestures, because I talk a lot with my hands. It also gives a small window into my office and sometimes, I got questions about my unabridged dictionary which is on a book shelf behind me.
- Color balance.
- Set the white balance first.
Click on Auto-focus on the white balance. Hold your foam core or other white object about where you’ll be seated. Let the auto-settings work. Then, click OFF the auto-focus, forcing it to stay at that setting. My office has windows, so I do this check each time I do a video, to allow for differences in light coming from the windows. - Then set brightness, contrast and color balance to your liking. I like to balance the color closer to the b/w side, so it’s not glaring.
- Set the white balance first.
Turn Yourself into a Movie Star
Make-up. With 3-4x the light, you’ll need makeup. I’m a m
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