You’ve seen them. You may have even cringed at them. I’m talking about YouTube videos shot in a car where the subject is either hand-holding the camera or is constantly looking at the screen to make sure it’s framed correctly.
We banned texting-and-driving for a reason, and that’s no different for shooting a driving-and-talking social media video. Do yourself and fellow drivers a big favor and fix the camera before you roll out onto the road. It’s a lot easier — and cheaper — than you think.
All you need is a cheap GPS car mount affixed to your windshield. A good universal mount makes a great vehicular tripod for your Flip-style video camera. I’ve had a great amount of success with the generic universal mount sold on Monoprice.com for less than four dollars. It provides an exceptionally-strong bond to your windsheild with a suction cup, and it’s two pivot points tighten in place to fix your camera at the right angle.
All you have to do is mount the camera to the passenger side of the windshield, lock the camera in the grip of the GPS mount and watch the screen as you frame the drivers side of the car. This may take a little bit of back and forth the first time you set it up. The nice thing about using a cheap mount like this is you can set it and leave it in place, and all you have to do is pop the camera in and out each time you want to record.
In this instance, I would also recommend using an external lapel microphone as the road noise and the distance from the camera may drown out your speech. I’ve used this method with a Kodak Zi8, the Audio-Technica ATR-3350 lapel mic and the aforementioned Monoprice mount, and the results were fantastic!
I’ve even seen instances where a full three-camera “road trip” style shoot was accomplished in a car using Flip-cameras and GPS mounts. One camera was mounted on each side shooting across each other at the driver and passenger, and a third was mounted in the center of the rear window, shooting forward over both subjects’ shoulders. It was then cut together with an editing program later.
But above all, make sure the vast majority of your attention is focused on the road at all times! I don’t want to meet you on the highway veering into my lane because you were too focused on rambling into a video camera.
