For our final project for our Master’s COM561 class we were tasked with creating the final version of our video project. I’d already begun planning out what I wanted when I worked with my audio project because I tend to think very visually and our semester topic has kept me keenly focused on my subject matter of our community and the transition our schools are experiencing. Since I like watching PBS and the History Channel as well as the news, I tried to use a kind of combination approach, giving a snapshot of the community and the issue and then looking at a real family in our community that represents the issue to put a face to the story – a feature news bit, if you will, for the residents of Kitsap County in a series titled Kitsap Connections Snapshot. I thought this would be the most engaging way to share the information and kept the B Roll moving as much as possible with the narrative to keep the pace quick and entertaining.
Thankfully, my critiques from classmates agreed. The edits most suggested on my draft of this project had to do more with adding additional information in the form of titles and making rolling script easier to read by slowing it down than actually editing the video segments themselves. They liked the volume levels. They liked the shots and the transitions.
To begin my project, I transferred my mental images into a paper storyboard so I could make a list for myself of the shots I would need to take. I didn’t spend a great time on it as I just needed a representation of what the shots would be and knew that once I began editing I’d likely find other shots I’d want as well. I did it by hand rather than in a word processing document because of the visual aspect of it that I couldn’t create in Microsoft Word (see end of post for a shot of the final storyboard). I also used information and research gathered the South Kitsap School District website and from interviews with various community members to pull together the information needed for the narrative portion of my video.
All the video was shot using my iPhone 6. The audio of both the voice over and the waves used at the beginning were taken using my Voice Record Pro app (purchased for $2.99) and imported into first my master file for my Adobe Premiere project folder on my computer and then into Adobe Premiere itself. As we learned in tutorials, you are going to shoot more video than you ever use. In fact several shots that were on my original storyboard eventually got cut or replaced because some video looked better in reality than on paper and some did not. For my final draft I shot additional video.
I started the editing process by putting my files into various bins including one for B Roll, one for interviews and another for audio, then I began to pull clips and place them into the order I’d planned on my storyboard. If I found the audio had a gap that needed a corresponding video (such as the one mentioning housing so I went and found a house with a for sale sign out front) I wrote it down on a list of additional shots I needed. I tried making sure that the shots corresponded to what was on the audio. There were only a few places where I had to use the Razor Tool to slice out bits of the interview, otherwise most of the editing was done to each clip using in and out markers to make the clips the correct length in Adobe Premiere I needed before moving the clip into the sequence. Once clips were in the sequence, for the final version I unliked almost all the video and audio and deleted the audio for all the b-roll to make sure there wasn’t any excess noise under the narrative or interviews.
Originally I tried to put transitions in between each clip, but found it very distracting. It took away from the more feature news style I was working toward. Ultimately I ended up using only transitions at the beginning after the animated title page, between the rolling clip over the school district logo, and between the voice over and the interview where I used a cross dissolve and again between the two interviews to make the transition smoother. I tried one at the end, but found no matter how I manipulated it, the fade away from Tyler before he was done speaking didn’t work properly. I wanted to see that goofy, confident grin only a fifth grader can manage. I also slowed down the final credits and added a short clip of my logo and blog url by editing out a section of the video that talked too long about the high school (which wasn’t the focus of the piece). I wanted to make sure that the entire project fit within the three minute time allotment.
For my title pages I used the Title Tool. For the entry title page there were three stacked pages in different video channels to recreate the animated appearance we learned in our tutorials. To create the animation effect I stretched out the first title (Kitsap Connection Spotlight) before the first video clip began, then staggered the starts of the other two titles so they would come in a few seconds later, then used the same cross dissolve on each of them at the end to smoothly fade them out. One suggestion I received from critique was to improve the visibility of them against the background. I had selected white lettering so I could have it appear against the black background prior to the video introduction, so I knew I couldn’t away with darker lettering. Instead I made the title easier to see by using the effects button and editing the title by adding a stroke in black of 10 and a drop shadow of 50% with an angle of 150 (which shows up as (-210 degrees).
For the information layered over the school logo and the end credits I used a rolling title to maximize the smoothness of the transition along with maximizing the information included. The school logo itself was imported from Adobe Illustrator and is a vector graphic. For the titles over the school shots (since there were several all in a row and I wanted to clearly indicate those who didn’t have a good signage shot) I used a crawling left title.
My biggest challenges, once I got the hang of Adobe Premiere, was in making sure the audio and video clips synced together once they were unlinked and I began editing on the draft of the project. Moving one by even a few frames resulted in a weird time delay for the video where they lips were just slightly off sync from the audio. It took awhile to get everything in position and then sync those sections back together.
One other challenge was in bringing in additional material to the draft. I wasn’t aware that if I slid something over, whatever was underneath it would disappear completely and I’d have to go bring it back (audio mostly) from the original clip. It was frustrating the first few times it happened, but I eventually understood what was happening and started using different audio and video channels to bring in material and manipulate the length of it to fit in the slots I needed.
Overall, it’s been a very informative process. I’ve gone from being someone who use to edit with toggle equipment to the digital version. I can definitely see how video has become so much more accessible as a medium to the general public. The only thing I think we need to look at further is now the aspect ratios and realizing that the vertical video is more than likely the wave of the future as people rely more on their hand-held devices.