Jules Watkins sets up a white background for video filming

Jules Watkins came to my home for the day recently. He set up lights in my home office: 2 lights aimed at 45 degrees and shining on the wall, and one overhead light to light up my face…

I had to move away from the wall towards my new Canon Legria HFM52 camcorder to get the white background effect that Jules and I were looking for. You’ll see the silver reflector angled up at me to remove any shadow from under my chin…

Jules was brilliant: he taught me how to set up the white balance manually and increase the exposure to make the background appear super white.

Below is the resulting video I created. I recorded it very spontaneously once Jules had set up the equipment, so it wasn’t brilliantly structured as it was so off the cuff – but it was good enough. Jules showed me a few tricks in ScreenFlow which I didn’t know about. He and I went for dinner in Woking, and afterwards I did all the editing in ScreenFlow in about 90 to 120 minutes, fumbling my way a bit at first as I got used to using the text tool etc for the first time. If I did another similar video, I am sure I could get all the editing down to about an hour in all.

Anyway, here’s the final video…

Jules and I have spoken a number of times on the phone and in person, and he has asked my advice about his product plans. He kindly recorded a video testimonial for me on the spur of the moment in my home. You can see how skilled he is at speaking off the cuff on the video here.