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York College Students Blog – Making a Masterpiece video creation

I felt as though our interviews went well. We had all our cameras and lighting sorted out with plenty of time before the first interview was scheduled to start and everyone knew what was happening. When someone came in for an interview we made sure they signed the interview form so we had permission to film and post. We also took their emails so that we can send them a sneak peak of the final video to make sure they are happy with everything in the video.

Before we started filming each interview we would check focus and framing were good on the cameras and would also check that sound was working correctly. Holly then gave them a quick run through of the questions they are going to be asked so that there was not anything unexpected for them during the interview so they did not panic too much and could have a little think about what they might say.

I would say majority of the interviews went well and gave something we could use. There were one or two interviews which we could tell at the time of film might not be any use because the people we were interviewing were just messing around while we were filming and interviewing them.

After all the filming was complete, we had to edit it and cut it down. This took around two weeks to finish as we had 70GB of footage to work with. During the filming we recorded the sound separately as we were using a better-quality mic, so my first job was to sync the audio with the footage. I decided to do this as I went along, picking out my favourite interviews, synching the footage, then editing it down into the final piece.

I did this with the top ten interviews we got, cutting it down and adding it to what would eventually become the finished piece. After I finished cutting down those ten interviews the video was around five minutes long. The goal was to make it short and snappy, keeping it both interesting and a little bit comedic, so I wanted to cut it down a bit more. I decided to remove one of the questions we originally asked the interviewees as it wasn’t related to the gallery or the painting as much as the others, and we did not get answers that we were happy with. This took around one minute off the watch time which was actually a pretty big chunk.

When adding all the interviews one by one, I just added all the answers at first and then I could remove the worse answers later on, so it was time to do that. I went through the video several times, first getting rid of the answers that had problems in such as audio, or the camera moving around a bit, then I got down to removing the worse answers. This started off fairly easy as there were some that were obviously worse than others, but once those were gone deciding what did and didn’t make the cut was hard. I had to take into account how many answers a certain question had left, as well as the quality of the answer. This took some time as the decisions were quite difficult, but eventually I got it down to around 2:50 seconds.

Finally, I added the music. Ollie created it especially for this so we knew it works. After this I was finally able to export the video and send it off to people to see what I could improve on. The main advice I received from this was that the sound mixing was off. Different people had different volumes and I never fixed the audio. This took a few hours to fix, but it was pretty simple, so I did that and then reuploaded it. This version was much better and the sound was greatly improved. After letting the rest of the team watch it again, we all agreed that this would be the finished product, and it was time to send it off.