Video Production

Link to the Mobile phone video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0OeCOjgLHE&t=87s

Link to the X70 video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4d8XopWTUo&feature=youtu.be

Introduction

The topic summarised in both of the videos is about different diet menu options with meat facts and food at the university of Roehampton.

Our mobile phone video is about 4 minutes long and my role in the video is to: -interview people, -shoot landscape scenes. My partners role is to: -shoot the interviews, -shoot landscape scenes. In the editing process of this video we worked together by deciding the order of the clips and we split the interview questions and put the different answers together to keep the video not too long and boring. We included a voiceover in the scene to clarify what is going on as we process in the video.

Our X70 is about 7 minutes long as it is about different diet menu options and facts about meat. In this video I was behind the camera to record the interviews of people in the university which were being conducted by my partner as the main idea was to cover the interviewees and the interviewer in the same frame. In this video my partner had solo talking to the camera and walking scenes and my role was to film her. For the introduction we used the tripod to record the scene talking about some facts regarding meat. The main inspiration behind the video was the concept of different diets raising awareness to meat eaters about meat and what do people who go to the university of Roehampton think about it.

Concept behind the videos

The main concept of the mobile phone video which has been shot on an iPhone carries the main concept of what do the people who go to the university of Roehampton including staff and students who eat in the canteen their think of the options they have in the menu and how they feel about the pricing and quality of the food. The main reason behind this topic was to document the food the university provides and the places available to have good quality meals. The video shot on the X70 is more focused on the diets of people, different diet menu options the university provides the staff and students and ask their opinion if the menu is suitable for people who are vegetarian or vegan. This topic was chosen to raise more awareness about the negative factors meat can lead to one of them being the increase in mortality rate because of too much consumption of red meat. (BBC News, 2019).

Pre-production process

Pre-production is an important step since all the planning and logistics happen in this phase. (Single Grain, 2019).

The main phases of our pre-production process included:

 

  • Audience- the people these videos are aimed to are people who are curious about the food life at the university of Roehampton and for people who are seeking information on opinions of students/staff who frequently eat meat and give them with facts about cons of meat.
  • Purpose/message in the video- the aim is to raise awareness about the negative factors that affect the meat and inform about the menu options in the canteen at the university giving a close inside look by interviewing the students who eat there.
  • The script- Me and my partner prepared short scripts which we had to recite in front of the camera for our duo/solo scenes. This was quite challenging for us and required many retakes. Our script was mainly for the introduction where we introduce the topic of the video and the a few more scripts for voiceovers to certain scenes.
  • Interviews- we prepared a list of questions we planned to ask the people for our interviews.
  • Timings of the intros- we tried to keep the introduction clips short and straight to the point because for the human “the average attention span is just 8.5 seconds” (Single Grain, 2019).
  • The video lengths- Our planned video length for the mobile phone video was :4-5 minutes and for the Sony was 6-7 minutes.
  • Authenticity of the video- we planned to make our video original showing authenticity and not looking fake. We tried to keep as natural as possible and make it look like a normal day experience for the viewer to engage them more.
  • Our story-Board- for the iPhone video our plan was to start the video with an introduction telling the viewers what the video is going to be about and then go to the canteen and document the food and the place interviewing the people who are present there and are willing to talk to the camera. For the X70 video our plan was to go to Richmond park and try to film nice landscape scenes for our intro and outro using a tripod. The main part of the video are the interviews of the staff and students and their opinions on meat; we asked them about their diets while filming the places to eat around the university.

 

Recording process

It was quite difficult to record freely because people around the university found it odd. Finding people who were willing to give interviews was quite difficult since many people found awkward being filmed. It took some time to get enough people to interview for our videos since we spent 3 whole days trying to have enough clips and interviews, mainly because we had to in hours there were not many people to avoid creating uncomfortable situations for the people there. The weather had been an important factor to take into consideration too.

Another difficulty faced was the audio quality since we only had one speaker and it was attached to the camera so if people were being interviewed outside there was sound disruption and the voice was not clear enough. Finding good light was quite challenging and we had to try different angles to try get it as clear as possible. Another challenge faced was how to talk to the camera ad engage the viewer. We had to retake many scenes because it was quite difficult to follow the script and say the right phrases correctly in one go. The image quality in some scenes of the X70 is not great because the camera kept going out of focus while recording and that created some problems.

Post-production process

We used Adobe premier Pro to edit our videos and to be fair it was quite challenging to use since it is a complicated application with a big variety of tools and features. (Wake, 2019).

The steps needed to edit our video were:

  • Importing our clips- this was done by uploading them on one drive so we do not lose them and import them to premier pro.
  • Edited the shots to get the best shots where the lighting is at its best;
  • Set them to scale size so they would not be zoomed in
  • Un-detached the audio in some to mute since there is too much background noise and include background music.
  • Trimmed our videos;
  • Added music in the background where there is no talking
  • Do the credits at the end
  • Export the project.

 

While editing the video we encountered some issues. We used acrobat premier pro as the editing software and not all the macs had this software. There was a really little number of macs with the software installed on them. The program kept glitching while editing the videos which created issues for us since it wasted a lot of our time trying to load the clips and play them when we needed to edit them and the program kept freezing.

Screenshot of the glitch

Acrobat premier pro has been a challenging program to use. It took us at least 3 hours to learn the basics about it. At first the main problem that we encountered was the screen size of the clips which automatically was zoomed in cutting the whole frame; in order to adjust that we had to experiment with the different options provided and manged to fix that problem.

The alignment and deciding the order of the clips has been quite challenging too and required some time to get it right but it’s still not as smoothly flowing as we would have liked it to be. Some scenes turned out blurry because of the X70 lens focus. I personally feel like we could have filmed the scenes and kept the camera more still which requires more practice, overall the purpose of the videos was fulfilled and we learnt how to use Adobe premiere pro very accurately which is a very useful skill.

 

Bibliography

 

Single Grain. (2019). 20 Pre-Production Steps to Successful Video Content. [online] Available at: https://www.singlegrain.com/video-marketing/20-pre-production-steps-to-video-content/ [Accessed 14 April  2019].

 

Wake, L. (2019). 7 essential steps for editing professional videos. [online] Digital communications team blog. Available at: http://digitalcommunications.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/2016/03/30/7-essential-steps-for-editing-professional-videos/ [Accessed 14 April 2019].

 

BBC News. (2019). How safe is eating meat?. [online] Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-28797106 [Accessed 14 April 2019].

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