Executive Summary: I believe I created a successful final project that fulfilled its purpose of providing me with more professional experience with using more advanced video resources while also creating a fun video highlighting life at the DKC. Over the course of this project, I ran into some technological challenges that ultimately impacted my schedule, but did not deter me from creating a video that I am proud of.
Rationale (adapted from Proposal Rationale): The purpose of this project was to elevate my video-editing skills to a more professional level. To accomplish this, I created a video using Adobe Premiere. The footage used was footage shot by me, as opposed to existing footage. I have lots of experience creating fanmade and mashup movie trailers, but not much experience in shooting my own footage. I believe this experience helped prepare for an internship I’ve secure for the spring with a short film/documentary company. I gained some practical experience both with shooting footage and editing it. The theme of the video was essentially a behind-the-scenes look at the DKC.
Risks, Challenges, and Opportunities: The shooting itself went well, as I managed to secure footage of all of the tutors. However, I also lost some footage, most likely due to a faulty codac. This led to me having to do some extensive reshoots during the last week to ensure that I had enough footage to create a substantive video. Initial editing also posed some challenges, as the first Adobe Premiere file I created became unreadable and I lost my initial work. I was also limited by what equipment was available at the HCC front desk. For example, the first time I tried to secure some equipment, all of the rode mics were already checked out. On a smaller note, I also misspelled someone’s name in the published video. If I could do things differently, I might have used the tripod more often to get steadier footage, and perhaps done some more research on optimizing the rode mic. I would also have started editing sooner.
Resources: My main resources included a T5i camera, rode mic, and Adobe Premiere. Other resources included my incredible coworkers at the DKC, who were very gracious as I filmed this project. Potential additional resources could have included other Adobe products, such as Adobe After Effects.
Schedule: I believe I started filming on time, but I underestimated the amount of time it would take to gather the footage I needed, and thus filming ran long. This was compounded by the fact that I lost some footage, which required reshoots that bled into what I had set as the editing stage. I ended up having about a week to work on editing as opposed to three weeks.
Outcome: I was very pleased with my final product. I have some unique and interesting shots (largely static, but the angles and subjects were visually appealing). The purpose of the video is fairly clear, with a nice intro session that sets up the tone and introduces the DKC, followed by a second, more informative section. The transitions and flow are fairly good, especially in regards to the subtitles. All of this demonstrates quality of work and evidence of effort. While I could envision improvements to the video, I was very pleased by this attempt and how it turned out.
