Final Project: Accomplished

So I'm finally done with this semester! And my prize project is this final project for Digital Video Production.

Our assignment was to make a promo video for some organization in the community. I chose FLAG Camp, which you can learn about in a minute ;)

The process was actually pretty simple. I went out with them on two separate Saturdays, lugging my tripod and borrowed camera. The first day was GORGEOUS. Lots of sun and perfect temperature. The second day was completely overcast and freezing, which is usually good because of the diffused lighting. But in my case, it was not giving me continuity from my first shoot, and the clouds would sometimes part and the sun would kind of shine, which messed up my white balance constantly. Luckily, I had gotten a lot of what I needed the first day, but I still used some of the shots from the second, pumping up the brightness so no one (hopefully) would notice the contrast in color temperature and intensity of light.

Between those main days of shooting, I pre-interviewed and then shot the interviews of three of the main directors of FLAG Camp. The pre-interviewing was really just out of necessity for me because we were required to turn in a script a week before the final video was due. I didn't have time to set up a shoot for them, so I just downloaded a voice recording app on my Droid X and talked to them for like 45 minutes. I then transcribed the quotes I liked and arranged them into an order I liked for my script. And when it came to editing, I was really happy I had a script to follow. It took the work of deciding what it was going to look like off of my shoulders. I already knew. (Thanks Ruf!) I also have a habit of labeling my clips when I go through them for the first time, so that keeps things organized and the clips easily accessible (provided I can remember what I named them!).

Editing is my favorite part, and it went really well--except for a minor scare when the server decided to play hide-and-seek-the-project and mess with my adrenal glands and tear ducts. Ruf saved the day, and all was well with the world. Anyway, the first parts to go in were the sound bites that I had planned out in order. Then it was music-picking time! Annalisa was hanging out with me that day, and we headed to OmniMusic.com, typed in the ridiculous password that Southern chose (to keep everyone from getting their hands on vast-quantities of stock music...?), and started looking for fun songs. We pretty much knew it was the one when we found it. We played with a few, but that one just sounded so fresh, so upbeat.

Then it was intro time! I had a couple clips in mind already, including the opening shot which I had planned as soon as I saw they were wearing their special t-shirts. After the intro came together, it was really pretty simple. Something I had also consciously planned, was matching the words from the sound bites to the images. It may be like a DUH thing to some people, but I guess it was a lesson I realized from this class. So I dug up the images that I thought expressed what they were saying and dropped them in my timeline.

Pretty much all that was left was volume management and color correction. And then I was done! It was probably about ten hours of editing, give or take an hour or two. And maybe 12 hours of shooting, counting set-up and take-down.

So, without further ado, here is my final project.

Things I learned from this project:

1. Kids are hard to shoot! Especially many, many young children.
(A) They do not ask for permission to manhandle your equipment, or they ask and manhandle it anyway. They also like to try to steal tripods and yell into the microphone.
(B) They also move really quickly. Sometimes I felt like I was just throwing the camera in their direction trying to catch something cute.
(C) I don't know how to interview children. The young ones freeze up and don't know how to comprehend English suddenly, and the older ones talk over each other and can't stand still. And I just don't know how to get good answers out of children.

2. Lighting is not my strong point, but I think the main concepts are finally starting to stick to my brain. The lighting for my shoot took forever to set up, because after I set it all up the night before (thanks Michael!), someone walked off with my key light the next morning. Soft-box and all. So I was scrambling and grabbing random people to help me decide if I should just shoot with two or try to finagle a third diffused light somehow. Ruf finally came to the rescue again, and helped me set up another light. Something about it never seemed right, and when I looked at the footage later I didn't like how you can really tell that it's a sheet hanging in the background. Next time I would like to fix that. I think it's decent though, just not super professional-looking.

3. I really enjoy editing :)