Studio practice

 Leaf person video   

So far this has been the most difficult video I've made, with my other videos I've had a set idea about how it would look finished before I even start filming but this time I didn't, this was many small videos of me sewing that I had to form into a video after rather than just an idea I was showing in video form. For my previous videos I used premiere rush for editing but decided to learn how to use premiere pro for the editing of this video, I've had premiere pro for a while now but when looking at it alone all the options were overwhelming and I couldn't figure out where all the essential tools were, after I had been shown through it by my tutor it was just as easy as rush to navigate but it gives you much more freedom in choice. For the actual filming of the videos I just set my tripod up in the most convenient place each time I was sewing and set it to record me, the cameras varied from my Sony digi cam, the canon DSLR and then the college got a new canon so a few were also shot on that, the varying quality is something I'm fine with and have been trying to highlight in the exhibition presentation. I had many videos and a lot of new editing options so I just played around with all the different transitions and effects until I got a slight idea of what I wanted this video to be. I decided to make all the videos black and white, as I shot in different environments as it jumped to the next the varying colours of the backgrounds was just to distracting, the black and white gives them some uniformity and also links back to my black and white film photographs. One of the close up videos of my hands sewing on the train made a really nice variation to the other videos so I reshot some more close up clips of me sewing to add in. I slowed down the up close sewing videos trying to add some depth and emphasis of the hand making quality compared to the different environments. Id been loosely working on and editing this video for almost the entirety of this project, after looking at the same video for so long I did start to lose a bit of faith in it, with their being no like dramatic point it started to feel boring to me, but I needed to take a step back, get others opinions and view it as a spectator rather than the maker. Doing this I found that there was a catharsis to the subtle repetition of the sewing without dramatic making. The videos I've done in the past have either been true to the sound or silent, Audio is the part of editing where my skills and knowledge lacks slightly but I thought some sound could add more interest to this piece, non of the sounds built into premiere felt fitting so I looked online for a bird loop, it took me a while to find one that felt natural rather than to set up and just added it in. I think the bird sounds work well as audio for this video, the first part starts outside then transitions to the other places like the train and Waterstones and the bird sounds follow, it gives it a peculiar and curious aspect to the pretty normal places, adding this helped me combat the feeling that the video was boring. 

The hardest part of this whole process was getting the video onto a USB so I could show it on the big screen at the exhibition. Despite my USBs being new and empty the video wouldn't transfer over even though logically there was enough space. I struggled with this issue for the whole of half term, it was very frustrating but once back at college Tom helped me sort it out, it was some kind of formatting issue. When I was struggling over the holidays a friend sent me an article on video formatting to try and helped, I read it but just couldn't get my head round it really, but I know for next time.