Editing Project | antran's Blog

Finally, I completed my final project which also was the most difficult one throughout this course with all of my effort. I did not remember how many times I wanted to stop doing. However, I am really proud of myself now because I have done it and felt happy with my final result. I have gone through many steps and challenges in order to achieve this task.

Brainstorming idea

I was completely stuck on the idea of how could I combine my previous assignments in terms of single shot video, photography and audio to create a story by editing them. Besides, the hardest question I had to answer first was how could I find a link to unite them despite the fact that they did not relate to each other at all. Therefore, one of mistakes that I wished I could change was having a similar theme for all of my works.

My 3 previous projects presented 3 different stories such as hanging poster (video), putting an egg in a bottle (photography) and cooking (audio). Fortunately, my instructor did give me a hint. He showed me an interesting effect I could use to play with my image that had a phone’s screen by using the crop effect in Premiere Pro as well as finding ideas that linked to cooking theme to apply on my video. Thus, my plan was trying to put all of my materials together on Premier Pro to see what were they look like and searched for supporting footages from free sources such as archive.org and others that I was introduced from Industrial Media.

Pre Production

I aimed to find cooking shows footages on archive.org but it was really tricky to search for because most of characters were women. However, after searching for a long time, I found one video that I could use by checking their thumbnails. This footage I think was one of the most important ones because I also planned to use my audio records for it.

At first, I only had some ideas which was a man watching some random Youtube videos for some of my first scenes. Then, I had no idea for the middle and the end because the lack of footages and it was so messy when I started working on Premier Pro. I needed more footages, scripts, sound effects etc. finding a different ways to combine them together to make them become meaningful. Therefore, I chose to stop working and rethinking again. I did not prefer using many Internet footages because I wanted to challenge myself, this challenge might happen in workplace. Then, I came up with the idea that I will retell my egg story again in different way with comedy genre. My video will present the whole story of the man in my photography assignment but it will have different details and ending.

I got over 290 photos for my photography exercise so I decide it would be my main source for my video. I did used 5 main pictures as well as the ones I did not submit to support my video. The single shot video would be cropped inside the phone’s screen photo. I also had to find one more video to describe he was watching some videos. It was hard to find that one because most videos I found on archive.org reviewed about mobile functions. They did not have that typical footage so I had to keep changing keywords to find and thanks to my patience, it was there. It was not good as I expected but I could use it.

Besides, I needed some funny images to support my genre so I tried to look for images that allowed people to use with specific creativity common license on Flickr. I decided to use background music to reduce unwanted noises and sound gaps. Besides, I also reused some parts of my audios when the man cut vegetables and himself.

Post Production

I spent most of my working time for this huge stage because of many things. Firstly, I have not gain enough necessary skills and only can used what I learned from the other course to produce this video. I also did not edit or remix any videos before.

In this stage, I thought cutting videos and trimming process were harder than the others. I could not remember how many times I had to fix the duration times for video, images, scripts etc. to achieve final result. Also, it was because most of my videos were inside photos so I had to make it match to each other as well as my audios. Besides, to create slow motion effect for 5 continuous shots, the duration time also was important, I had tried to test many times to know how many seconds are suitable for this effect.

In addition, to create smooth flow, I did use both of transition effects for my sounds and footages. I also applied key frame to change my sound volume. However, it thought I could not achieve to make my audios for cooking scene clearer when combining them with the background music although I increased to max level. Opacity was another tools I used to create fresh angle for my video and I thought I did it quite well. To make both videos and images appeared beautifully, I tried to use three-way color corrector but I was able to change simple things such as saturation and master levels.

Besides, I relied on some notes in editing flip lecture as my guideline to achieve in editing my story:

For narrative purpose

Creating a sense of drama of tension: I used materials that help to support my narrative and show comedy genre.
Pace, rhythm, flow: happy and joyful music background and sound effects
“Gear changes”, momentum shifts: the man cut himself then joyful moments and back to dramatic when the eagle destroyed the egg.
Telling a story: I mentioned above
Cutting out the “bad” or “boring” bit: I only kept the key interesting part of videos and audios for my video.

Overall, I am really happy when I can defeat my own fear, myself to complete all of tasks in this course. It believe that will be my own successful story that I proudly produced. Besides, I really appreciate valuable things that my instructor has provided me through this course. Although my skills have not perfect yet, but the course really helps me build up my confident in telling story with various kinds of gears and using techniques as well as software to reproduce the story again.