Things I Learned While Filming Interviews

I've spent six weeks this summer filming short promotional videos for a school. This is my first time putting together coherent and finished promotional videos. Here's a list of things I've learned that are obvious things to my now but were stupid mistakes I made in the beginning.

• Decide on your script before you film, then get shots that fit the script. If needed, you can add more to the script later. (B-roll is filmed second!)
• Keep the camera rolling: shoot wide angles, mid, and close-up, the entire time keeping it recording so that you're picking up audio the entire time. You never know when you're going to record something and use the audio, also, you might need your audio to extend past your single shot.
• Always be looking for 4 shots: wide establishing, mid shot (torso up, with the context of the background), closeup (facial reactions, hands, two people talking, etc), extreme closeup (great depth of field shots of pencils writing, close-ups on objects, water droplets, etc).
• Jumpcut between different angles. Shoot a wide shot, then without moving the camera, get a closeup. These shots are great to edit together, it adds continuity.
• Turn every light on. Even when the image captured on the small camera screen looks good, on a larger screen you will see the static caused by low light. So turn on every light. You can always darken in the post, but you can't always brighten.
• Get a memory card that can handle large video. I had to hunt around to get a memory card that had enough capacity for recording video but was also fast enough to handle recording for more than a minute at a time. This means getting a card with a higher access speed, otherwise, my camera would automatically stop recording.
• Use external audio recorders. The camera doesn't do a good job of picking up audio unless its right next to it, otherwise you get a lot of staticky background noise. I used an external mic and that improved my audio quality by a lot. 
• Export your iMovie library. I keep all my video on an external drive (which is velcroed to my laptop). I edit on my mac, but my iMovie library is actually stored on my external drive so that it doesn't stuff up my laptop. This makes sharing video projects mid-edit easier too,  cause they can edit on any device so long as they have my external drive