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About First Take Guide
A small independent editorial desk writing plainly about how short video projects actually get made — and where first-timers lose the most time.
Why this site exists
First Take Guide publishes craft guides for people who are somewhere between owning a camera and knowing what to do with it. Most of us learned this the slow way: on borrowed equipment, in rooms that were never meant to be sets, discovering on the third project what somebody could have explained in one afternoon. This site is that afternoon, written down.
Our subject is the process of making moving pictures rather than the equipment catalogue. What to settle before a shoot day. How to turn an idea into a shot list somebody else can follow. Which camera controls genuinely change whether footage is usable. How to record dialogue that survives an edit on a budget that does not exist. How to direct people who have never acted. And how to organise, assemble and finish, rather than abandoning a project at the rough-cut stage.
How we write
- Plain language first. Technical terms get defined the first time they appear, and we skip jargon whenever an ordinary word does the job.
- Process over gear. We are far more interested in what a decision does to a scene than in which manufacturer made the device you happen to own.
- Honest limits. Where an answer depends on your camera, your room, your city or your collaborators, we say so instead of promising a result.
- Hedged claims. We do not publish invented statistics, and where we quote a figure like a loudness target or a shutter convention, we say what it is a convention for.
- General information. Our articles are educational. They are not personalised technical advice for your particular production, and nothing here is legal advice.
What we do not do
We do not run paid placements dressed up as editorial. We do not publish fabricated testimonials or invented numbers. We do not make claims about outcomes, income or audience growth, because nobody can honestly make them on your behalf. If an article ever involves a commercial relationship of any kind, it will say so in plain sight at the top of the page before you read a word of it.
First Take Guide is published by Miami Video Productions from Miami, Florida. The editorial content is written by us; the publisher's postal address, phone number and email are in the footer and on our contact page.
Corrections
If something on this site is wrong, out of date, or stated with more confidence than the evidence supports, we would genuinely like to know. Corrections are made on the page itself rather than quietly, and we note when a guide has been substantially revised.
Get in touch
Questions, corrections and suggestions for future guides are all welcome. Write to hello@firsttakeguide.com, call +1 (305) 305-3430, or use the full details on our contact page.