Like a sticker on a wall
Most phone shots feel flat for one reason.
Everything sits at the same distance. You, the wall, the room — all pressed onto one layer, like a sticker on a wall. Technically fine. Completely lifeless.
The fix is depth, and it's free.
A shot feels deep and alive when it has layers. Something close to the camera. Your subject in the middle. Something far behind. Your eye reads those layers as a real space it could step into, instead of a flat picture it slides right past.
And the easiest way to get it is a foreground.
Shoot through something. A doorway. Some leaves. A railing, a shoulder, the coffee cup already sitting on the table. Let it sit soft and close to the lens while your subject stays sharp behind it.
Suddenly the same boring spot has three layers — front, middle, back — and the frame has room to breathe. It stops looking like a phone snap and starts looking like a scene.
(If this sounds familiar, good. Way back in the vertical video email I told you layers create dimension and dimension creates interest. This is that idea, grown up: you don't find depth, you build it.)
Because here's the thing:
Depth is not a lens you buy. It's a decision to put something between you and your subject.
Which — you may have noticed — is the theme of everything I teach. The eye follows difference: a decision. Colour carries feeling: a decision. Shadow gives shape: a decision. Good videos aren't made of gear. They're made of about a dozen decisions like this one, stacked on purpose.
That stack is literally what the mini-course is. The filming module alone is nothing but these decisions — foreground, light, colour, settings, lens or no lens — laid out as one system so you stop discovering them one accident at a time. The first-cohort door for readers is still open, still €29:
https://vaxa.cc/vidos/p/mini-course-exlusive
But course or no course, do today's homework, because it's the fastest win I've given you yet:
Take the most boring spot in your home. Film one shot straight on. Then find something — anything — to shoot through, and film it again. Watch them side by side.
One is a sticker. The other is a place.
Warmly, AL.
P.S. I want to see what you shot through — comments are open, weird choices encouraged. Whoever films through the most ridiculous household object wins my respect and possibly a feature next week.