By “alone” Darious Britt is referring to the crew—one person handling script, location scouting, lighting, direction, sound, and editing. His main tip is “keep it simple.” This means a short movie with a cast of just two or three, set in only a couple of locations, and without car chases or other big actions. But in this 19-minute tutorial Darious does get into the weeds. He covers such tasks as storyboarding, camera angles, close-ups, focus, framing, dialogue, wild sound, and dubbing. Including his own one-person crew films to illustrate techniques adds authenticity to the presentation, plus the micro-movies are entertaining.

Although Darious uses a Canon 60D, just about all the ideas will work with smartphones. And he does include a nifty way of using a smartphone to record dialogue.