Visga Custom Painting · Field guide
Interior job, shot on a phone.
Most painters film the finished wall. Every finished wall looks the same. What a Franklin homeowner is actually buying is the certainty that her house won't get wrecked — so the tape, the drop cloths, the covered furniture and the clean edges are the footage that sells the job. Shoot the prep like it's the product, because it is.
The "before" shots exist for about five minutes. The moment the first drop cloth goes down, they're gone for good and no amount of shooting later gets them back. Walk every room with the camera before you unload the truck.
Footage from inside someone's home can't run in an ad without their yes. Get it before you shoot, not after — and get it in writing, because a text thread is a record and a nod in a hallway isn't.
Set the phone up right one time and everything after it is usable. Get these wrong and you'll have forty shots you can't do anything with.
Use 1x. The 0.5x ultra-wide bows every straight line, and this job is nothing but straight lines.
Wipe the camera lens. Overspray and dust are invisible on a phone and obvious on a big screen.
Turn the camera grid on and keep door frames and trim truly vertical. A leaning wall reads as sloppy work.
Tap the wall, then press and hold until AE/AF LOCK shows. Stops the picture hunting mid-shot.
All lamps on, or all lamps off with daylight. Never mixed — mixed light makes the paint color read wrong.
Put windows behind you. Shooting toward one turns the wall into a silhouette.
Five to ten seconds each. Hold dead still for three seconds at the start and end of every clip.
Move half as fast as feels right. Two hands, elbows in, heel to toe. Never zoom while recording.
Shoot every hero moment vertical, then again horizontal. Ten extra seconds, four times the usable formats.
Clear the shot first — bottles, cups, phones, lunch bags, cords. Ten seconds of tidying doubles the shot.
Empty rooms, nothing covered, nothing touched. This is the half of the before-and-after you can't reshoot.
Nobody else in this market films their prep. It's the single thing that separates you from a two-guys-and-a-ladder quote, and it's the answer to the fear she actually has: strangers making a mess of her house.
Craft close-ups. Shoot the hands, not the room. Crew in branded shirts only, and only crew who've said they're fine being filmed.
The payoff. One of these shots is worth more than everything else combined, and it's not the finished wall.
Two shots and a note. The note is what makes the footage usable six months from now instead of a folder of anonymous walls.
Fill this in on site while it's fresh. It creates a dated folder in the Visga Drive and drops the photos, the video, and the job card into it — nothing to email, nothing to remember later.