1. When panning, tilting or zooming, start shooting with your camera still and HOLD on that image for at least 5 seconds, then pan, tilt or zoom in one fluid motion, coming to rest on your end image and HOLD on that image for another 5 seconds. Count to 10, that should be about 5 seconds when you're shooting.

2. Sometimes it's good to let a person leave the frame, you don't always have to follow them. Consider when you're shooting someone walking, that it might be useful to see them leave the frame, leave the room, etc. and then hold on the image of the empty frame.

3. [!] When you are shooting a conversation between two or more people, make sure that you aren't always shooting the speaker, or you won't have any cutaways and you won't be able to edit the conversation. Do NOT shoot the entire conversation in a 2-shot. As long as we can hear the speaker, it is important that you get reaction shots from the person listening. A scene is much richer when you not only hear what someone is saying, but you understand how the person listening feels about hearing whatever is being said. This is also especially important when you're shooting someone speaking before an audience. It's important to get audience reaction shots. Not all wide shot audience reaction shots, close-ups and 2-shots of people reacting.

4. Try, when possible, to get cutaways of the environment. Get an exterior. Get multiple types of shots within a scene—WS, MS, CU. If you are in someone's house and there are pictures on the walls of people who are relevant to the story you are telling, get some shots of those photos. You might be able to get those photos to re-shoot them again in the future if you need to, but you might only have one shot at it. It's frequently good to get interviews with people in their own homes, because their environment provides us with a lot of information about them.

5. ALWAYS LISTEN to what is being said. This will give you important clues as to what and who you should be shooting. (See item #3.) If someone is relating something surprising or something that might anger the listener, make sure you're shooting the listener, for example. But YOU have to be listening to understand the emotional dynamics of what is going on. DON'T TURN OFF THE CAMERA WHEN YOU'RE REFRAMING—you may lose important sound.

6. Look at your framing. If there's a big stuffed animal sticking up behind a person's head and that animal is not relevant to what that person is talking about, it may prove to be a distraction for the viewer. If your interviewee is talking about something really sad and there's a big purple stuffed animal in the background, that might be a problem. Please feel empowered to respectfully and gently ask if you can move things around a bit when you're shooting to get distracting or just plain ugly things out of the frame.

7. Make sure someone is wearing headphones and can tell if sound is getting to the camera. Editors can frequently cut a scene without the perfect video if they have the audio. But, frequently, if you don't have the audio, you don't have the scene. Invest in a good lav and use it.

8. When you're shooting someone walking, following them and just shooting the back of their heads is not as good as getting in front of them and shooting them coming toward the camera so we can see their faces. Sometimes the back of a person's head can be fine. But at least try to get their faces whenever possible.

9. When you're shooting a couple of people around a table having a conversation, try to pull up a chair and shoot them on the same level they are, as opposed to shooting them from standing height. The viewer can enter the conversation more easily if they feel that they are also sitting at that same table. (BONUS: if you've got several people gathered together to interview them about something, DON'T line them up like a police line-up. Also, if you can get people talking to each other about a subject rather than just responding to your questions, you've got a potentially much better scene—an actual scene instead of an interview.)

10. When you're shooting an interview, don't shoot people's hands unless they're really using their hands in a purposeful way, unless it adds something for the audience to see that person's hands doing what they're doing, if what they're doing with their hands tells us something important about that person. Cutting to a person's hands as b-roll for an interview is just wallpaper.

11. Think of b-roll as just as important as primary footage, not just a means of covering a potential jump cut. A great cutaway expands a scene and adds to its depth and complexity. Try to be thinking of what good b-roll would be whenever you're shooting a scene.

12. If you are interviewing someone who is a main character in your film, and you're shooting a verite-type film, try to also get that person doing something that they would normally be doing in their own life. If they need to fix their skateboard, shoot them fixing it. If they're hanging out on their front porch with friends, try to get them to let you shoot them hanging on their front porch with friends.

13. Don't be afraid of close-ups. And don't be afraid of wide-shots. A good balance of each gives you a lot more flexibility in your edit. But whatever you do, don't shoot an entire scene in medium shot or wide shot. You'll never be able to cut it well.

14. If you're shooting someone in a car, expose for their face, not to make sure you get what's outside the window. Go ahead and let the window blow out if need be. It's easier to cut that way. Unless they're actually talking about what's outside the window, in which case you should specifically be shooting that.

15. When you're driving around with someone, make sure to get shots out the windshield so that we can get a sense of where we are going and have an opportunity to get into a scene more smoothly. If you shoot out the windshield, hold the shot for 10 seconds, or at least count to 10.

16. Whether you are driving with someone or just walking with them or whatever, try to get them doing things when they ARE NOT talking. If you only have footage of people talking, you can't use that as b-roll (aka associative footage).

17. In general, count to 10 whenever you are shooting something so that the camera isn't bouncing around all over the frame. Challenge yourself. If you reframe something, you don't start counting to 10 until you are done reframing.

18. When you are shooting someone doing something like cooking and they are looking into the pan, it's good to sometimes take a moment to show us what is in the pan, so that we can see what our subject is actually looking at. If you can't get it in the moment, try to get it later. It can be maddening, especially when two people are looking at something and talking about it or noticing it and we never see what they're seeing.

Shared with permission by Leslie Simmer and