Looking back, Blog 3

I recently finished my video project with Ian Murphey. I learned a few things along the way as I created this piece.

Shooting and editing are the easy parts of this assignment. It was the planning and following through that was difficult. My partner did not make things easy on me either.

If I had the chance to do it over again with Ian, I would. There are several things I would've done differently.

-Planning: I am a journalism major at Hunter College and can ask most people a few basic questions to get a feel for them. My goal for the video was to show what Ian was doing with his life and what are his long term goals and ambitions. Unfortunately most of the questions I asked were greeted with one word answers or repetition of what I had asked him. This resulted in a 9+ minute interview being boiled down to 3 minutes.
To circumvent this I would have done the interview as normal and push him more to talk about certain things. I could then ask him to explain certain things more thoroughly after the playback. Then I would have taken the recording, made a transcript for him to read, and then rerecord the audio.

-Shooting: I definitely would have taken more stock footage of Ian doing everyday things as filler material. Also, I would have liked to have recorded audio/video together so to show Ian himself answering the questions.

-Editing: I would have used iMovie. Final Cut is frustrating and time consuming. I have created similar short video projects before using iMovie and it'll take maybe an hour to compile everything and make a 5 minute movie. You get the same result without the headaches.

Overall I'm unhappy with the final outcome of this project which has been nothing but headaches due to either equipment malfunctions, the idiosyncrasies of my partner, or small mistakes that I didn't notice until after I uploaded it.

The audio piece was frustrating because after I edited out all of his one word answers and the times when he'd repeat the question back as a statement, I was left with a more incoherent mess then when I started with. I then edited it and rearranged about half a dozen times until it became as good as I could've made it. Having Ian, or myself, prepare a script for him beforehand would have helped immensely.

The video was frustrating. Once the camera's memory card decided to corrupt the file archives preventing me from uploading my original footage. We had to reshoot another day with less time to do so. This footage was also partially corrupted where it decided to blend in different shots in the same file with some overlap.
During editing I noticed that I didn't have as much stock footage of Ian as I wanted to use as some filler during the interview. After I submitted it and I played it back, I noticed an editing continuity error from me inserting the wrong part of a clip into the piece.

I have a lot more appreciation for those who do story boards and planning after this experience.