Blog Post #25 - Security Camera Footage

Security Camera footage is a staple in many movies and in different forms of media, it is easily recognizable from certain elements, and gives a scene a certain tone. In my project, I require the impression of a security camera at night time, but how will I give off this impression and sell it to the audience. Security cameras inherently vary a lot in their look, given they're cameras and can be of different quality, but I'm looking for something similar as the picture seen below.


IR Night Vision, from cctvcamerapros.com

This is a photo taken at night from an IR Night Vision camera, which is used to detect the precense of people such as intruders at night, and gives off a more creepy feeling. This type of camera is usually placed around places that need to be monitored, such as outside of a house.


Tips for Outdoor Camera Placement, from emcsecurity.com

After messing around with video editing settings on my phone, I found that increasing contrast, increasing brightness, setting the saturation to zero, increasing definition, and giving the video a vignette effect helped to achieve the "security camera look". Along with this, lowering the video resolution (for me something along the lines of 360p or 240p), allows for a better effect.

Here are before and after pictures of using this strategy to achieve this effect.





I believe that using these strategies in combination in my project will allow for my security camera footage inside of my film to be more convincing to the audience, in order to correctly tell my story. Next I plan to finish my costuming ideas, and what I will purchase for them, in order to soon start the production of my project.



Comments

  1. Dominic MartinFebruary 18, 2025 at 7:42 AM

    You might catch me sneaking into your house through the camera👍

    ReplyDelete

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