Filmmaking While Traveling

How to Shoot Films During a Trip

In this article, I’ll share a method for casually capturing film footage during a sightseeing trip. While professional filmmakers might scoff, exclaiming, “You can’t make a film on the fly! That’s not real filmmaking!”—I’m not particularly concerned with their criticism.

When I say “filmmaking during travel,” I’m not referring to filming actors’ performances at tourist attractions. Rather, I’m suggesting shooting background footage specifically for “green screen films,” an approach I often advocate.

Green screen films—my term—are movies created entirely by combining actor footage shot against a green screen with separately captured background visuals.

Why Tourist Spots Make Great Backgrounds

Tourist attractions are naturally scenic, making them perfect as film backdrops. However, filming actual scenes at such locations is often impractical. Even with proper permits, the presence of unrelated tourists would create significant disruptions. Additionally, it’s common for shooting just two or three minutes of footage at such sites to take hours.

Given these costs and inconveniences, conventional methods of filming at tourist spots are rarely realistic.

But what if you recorded only the background footage, leaving the actors out of the equation?

With practice, you can capture a scene’s background in just ten minutes.

Take a waterfall-viewing spot, for example. Imagine the scene:

• The characters stand in a specific spot, gazing at the waterfall while conversing.

With this simple premise in mind, break the scene into its essential visual components:

• A wide shot showing the characters and the waterfall.
• A close-up of the waterfall.
• A close-up of Character A’s face as they look up at the waterfall.
• A close-up of Character B’s face doing the same.
• A two-shot with Character A in the foreground.
• A two-shot with Character B in the foreground.

By combining these six types of shots, most conversation scenes can be constructed.

To shoot, visualize the characters’ placements and plan camera angles accordingly. Then, use a video camera or smartphone to record each shot. The sequence doesn’t matter.

Efficient Background Capture

Because the dialogue isn’t predetermined, the duration of each shot doesn’t need to be exact. In most films, single cuts range from just a few to about 10 seconds. With that in mind, 20 seconds per clip should suffice.

Capturing the six example shots listed above takes approximately two minutes of raw footage. Factoring in time to scout angles and move to the best vantage points, you can still complete the task in just a few minutes.

Pausing briefly during your trip to capture scenes you think could “work for a film” shouldn’t interfere too much with sightseeing.

Building a Library of Stock Footage

What’s the point of filming without a story in mind? Simply put, you’re creating a stock of background footage for future use. Organizing and archiving these clips allows you to draw on them later when producing a film. For instance:

• “I have stock footage of a waterfall, so let’s set this conversation scene in front of it.”

Similarly, you can build a library of clips featuring:

• The ocean.
• Forests.
• Inside a bullet train.
• Taxi interiors.

Gradually collecting such footage speeds up production for future projects.

Benefits of Stock Backgrounds for Green Screen Films

When making green screen films, actors can be filmed in one location, often wrapping up in just a single day—even for footage that would traditionally require five days to shoot. Having a stockpile of background footage eliminates the need to revisit locations, boosting efficiency.

Moreover, stock footage can be reused across entirely different projects.

If you have like-minded collaborators creating films with similar methods, sharing each other’s stock footage further expands the range of scene possibilities.

Sometimes, just watching stock footage can inspire a new scene or story.

Rethinking the Filmmaking Process

Most films begin with a story and proceed to filming. But what if you reversed the order? What if you gathered stock footage first and then crafted a story around it?

There’s certainly room for such an approach in filmmaking.

Thank you for reading! I hope you found this insightful.