How To Shoot Quick & Easy Video with a Phone

This shop has been compensated by Collective Bias, Inc. and its advertiser. All opinions are mine alone. #CollectiveBias This post shows you how to shoot quick & easy video with a phone.

I love to shoot video. I do it with my camcorder, my iPhone and my Panasonic Lumix bridge camera. I take impromptu videos with the kids on a family day out and also more considered video where I’m trying to demonstrate a recipe or a beauty tutorial, but the one thing all my videos have in common is that my family and I enjoy watching them back for years after the moment or event has passed.

I meet bloggers all the time who say that they want to do more video or are not sure what equipment they need or where to start, so I have created this short movie to demonstrate how you can easily film video on a phone. Someone like my mother would find this information useful too! She has got a smartphone now (for years she refused, preferring her old clunky phone for texting as she knew how to use it!) But now she is starting to learn about how to use a laptop to send and receive emails from her friends so they can all share their holiday photos! Her next step is getting to grips with video, so if you are a complete beginner like her, you can see how it is done here:

It’s so quick and easy to shoot video with your phone, the beauty of it being that we always have our phones with us. However the feature of my phone that I use the most has to be the camera – for photos. My phone manufacturer is Apple, I’ve had an iPhone for years, but you can use any brand of mobile phone as long as it has a camera/ video function.

Because I’m always on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, I’m constantly taking photos of what I’m doing to upload to these networks! I tend to share family related stuff on Facebook as this is where I have most personal connections, but on Twitter and Instagram I’m building my blog brand though posting a great photograph alongside links to my latest blog post.

Have a look at this screenshot. It shows me recording video footage for this blog post and I asked my daughter to take the shot you see with my phone! She got both me and the camcorder in the frame and it makes an interesting picture for social media. I shared this on Instagram to promote that I was doing a blog post about shooting video!

I believe the the future of social media sharing will include more photography and video in increasing amounts. We used to just Tweet words, but now Twitter has more and more photos in the timeline and studies show that Tweets containing a picture are more likely to be re-Tweeted. The latest development around video comes from Twitter who launched their Periscope app in March 2015 which allows livestreaming of your broadcast in real time and your followers can interact directly with you during the film.

This means that you could take on board viewers comments about what they’d like to see during the filming process and give them what they want, in real time. The quality at the moment isn’t brilliant and there are connectivity problems during broadcasts at times, but it is another step forward in the way we can interact socially. Here is a screenshot of my phone with the Periscope app in the top left corner.

Drumroll please……. and this was my first ever livestream via Periscope – filmed using my phone!

The Periscope app keeps the videos streamed for 24 hours afterwards then they are deleted but you can always save the broadcast to your phone and upload it to YouTube like I have done, if you want to keep the content.

So do you think you could use your phone to record video? Let me know in the comments if there are any tutorials you’d like me to cover!