21 Daysof making things

Forces you to find compositions instead of walking to them. You will run out of obvious shots around number eight — everything after that is the actual exercise.

Shot size is the first thing on almost every cinematography syllabus, because it is how you control what the viewer knows and feels at each moment.

The rule of thirds says put important things about a third of the way across the frame. Doing the extreme version teaches it faster than reading it.

A low angle tends to make a subject look powerful, a high angle weaker. It is the cheapest storytelling tool you have and costs nothing but bending your knees.

Aperture, shutter speed and ISO are taught as the foundation of photography the way addition and subtraction are the foundation of maths. You will see depth of field and motion blur appear on purpose for the first time.

This is the first assignment in a classic film-school progression, deliberately before video: you learn composition and shot selection without sound or movement to hide behind.

A checklist beats taste when you are starting out, because it catches the specific thing that is wrong instead of leaving you with a vague sense that the photo is bad.

Establish where we are, then who, then how they feel. Almost every scene ever cut is built on this.

Cutting while something is moving hides the join. This is the trick that makes edits feel invisible, and it is a formal film-school assignment for that reason.

Cross the line and the two people suddenly appear to swap sides and stop looking at each other. Accidentally crossing the line is described as one of the most common editing-room nightmares — seeing it break once teaches it permanently.

Less than about 30 degrees and the cut looks like a glitch rather than a new shot. This plus yesterday's line is basically how every dialogue scene is filmed.

Hard light makes sharp shadows and drama; soft light is forgiving. Learning to notice where light already comes from beats buying any lighting kit.

Distance to the microphone matters more than any setting. That 30 seconds of “silence” is room tone: cut a word out later and the background hiss vanishes with it, leaving a hole only room tone can patch.

Six shots is enough to force you to use shot size and angle to build tension rather than just pointing the camera at it. The published version of this exercise asks for fifteen; six gets you the same lesson in a lunch break.

Almost everyone stalls at 'open the editor'. Today exists only to beat that, so the software is already familiar when you actually need it tomorrow.

Trimming and cutting on movement do most of the work of making an edit feel professional. Two clips is enough to practise both.

This is what B-roll is actually for: deleting the boring middle of a sentence without a visible jump. Beauty is a side effect.

Montage compresses a long process into a few seconds. Fifteen seconds is enough to feel how the pacing works without becoming an afternoon's job.

One technique, two directions. Sound arriving early feels like anticipation; sound lingering feels like continuity. It is most of what 'smooth' means.

Phone apps put their own buttons on top of your picture. Text that looks perfect in the editor gets covered by the Like button.

Every other day was twenty minutes and one idea. This one is deliberately bigger, because the point of the twenty days before it was to make this afternoon possible. Publishing is what makes the rest real.