The manual iris on your camera is the aperture that lets light through the lens and determines the exposure of your film. You may feel most comfortable with the auto-iris, but there will be many instances where using the manual iris will give you more control over how your subject appears. To use the manual iris correctly, you first must know what a good exposure looks like. Find an evenly lit area and look at it through the viewfinder using auto-iris. Once you know what that looks like, play around with the manual iris and try to make it appear the same through the viewfinder. The more you practice with the iris, the more comfortable you’ll be and the better the film will look when lighting conditions aren’t ideal.

The goal of editing is to convey a story smoothly without drawing too much attention to the cuts. Of course, fast-paced editing or cartoon-inspired wipes are designed to stand out, and that’s absolutely fine. But when you just want to tell a story, you generally want your cuts to be seamless. The best way to achieve this is by ensuring that the content (what happens in the video) motivates the cut. For instance, if you hear a door open and a character turns his head, you expect to see a cut to the door. That’s seamless editing.

A focus pull, also known as a “rack focus,” is a technique for changing focus midway through a shot, often from an object in the background to one in the foreground (or vice versa). The point of racking focus is to shift attention from one object to another. For instance, if your character is in focus in the foreground as he opens the door to his apartment and there is a man standing inside unexpectedly, you might rack focus from your character to the man in the background to slowly reveal who it is.

At this early stage of web video’s development, you don’t see too many successful videos over 7 or 8 minutes. The production quality usually isn’t good enough for the big screen, and few people want to sit through a 30 minute video on their laptop. That’s why it’s essential for you to get your point across as concisely as possible and not go off on too many tangents. Keep in mind that the web video medium is different than TV and film, and simplicity is usually best. Remember the Bard: “Brevity is the soul of wit.”

While you can get away with odd or just plain bad lighting for shots of settings, how you light a person is of vital importance. The reason is that the way you light a person determines your audience’s emotional reaction to the character (much more than you think). Generally, your best bet is to soften your light source. Harsh light (like the sun) is not particularly flattering. It leaves a person’s face with sharp contrast lines and magnifies wrinkles and scars. Use a scrim to diffuse a strong light on a subject, and make certain to fill in shadows with a reflector or fill light.