Personal - One Video Project Down

Hi Blog,

Finally, today got to showcase the video production to the school and I am glad the pupils love it. :) I simply soaked myself within their laughter and applause. Throughout the whole video production, I had learned a lot.

In this post, I have to share with you the things that I had learned. Hmm... where should I start?

Let's start with the script.

Credit the talented, creative and funny teacher, Mr S, who wrote the whole script himself; purpose is to make sure the pupils enjoy and learn through this experience. I am thankful that he will help me to contribute some music and sound effect for the video editing production.

But I only had four days to edit the videos. Looking at the tools that I have... I can't use Premiere to snitch the videos easily anymore because I am poor... so I left with Movie Maker which has it's own limitation!

What are the limitations that the Movie Maker has, you may have asked? Based on Mr S's idea on the video, he wanted announcers' voice-over many scenes, a video clip to be played like a news and slow motion etc. But Movie Maker can only have one layer for videos (cannot combine videos together) and one layer for sound (cannot have announcer's voice together with football background ambiance). And have to complete within four days.

So I thought of a plan! I decided to use Powerpoint to accomplish some of the problems like playing multi videos at the same time.

I simply imported the video clips and let them play automatically together, then save it as "mp4" instead of pptx. Powerpoint can help to make a video format presentation, which saves many lives.

Even the title, I used Powerpoint to come out this simple intro.

Back to Movie Maker, I just listed out the scenes which needed voice-over or required to have dual sound/music effects, then exported out them portion by portion. Tedious but it helped me to be organised my thoughts.

Hmm... Oh yes! I forgot one thing. From my previous works, I always used DSLR to capture videos at its best quality but I always have issues with it, the focus point. From the preview scene of DSLR, I can't tell whether I was in focus or not, as It happens too often!

Some of the scenes, I can't focus it well as the actors moved despite I had focused in the beginning. If I set it as auto mode, the annoying of lens focusing sound will be recorded and what made it worse, is that it just CANNOT FOCUS well at all!!! I need to set it as manual mode. EOS 600D can go into the bin!

And plus this football scenes required a lot of movements, if I recorded at manual mode and have to ensure the focus point, will only make my life more miserable. So I decided to record the whole scene with my pathetic iPhone 5s! Thanks goodness that I made such choice because Mr S's script required a scene for slow motion. iPhone has the slow motion video capturing mode but there is a problem with that...

iPhone slow motion can only be viewed on the device itself because if you export/retrieve the file, it will not carry with the slow motion effect. So I asked Mr Google and Miss Youtube, and managed to find a solution myself!

I captured a slow motion video for a sample, click on 'Edit'.	This is how a slow motion mode video on iPhone looks like.
Click on 'Open' (a three dots in a circle), choose 'iMovie'.	You HAVE to choose either one of the tools in iMovie to edit the video.
For me, I just go for trim a bit will do :)	Exporting...

DONE! It fixed

Okay! I got everything done and time to piece them together! Thanks Mr S's contribution some visual videos like football match, science and math videos, and sound effects.

Four days included some time during weekend, I had completed!

The feedback, responses and comments from teachers and pupils are positive, most importantly, they had a great laughter moment. :)

I reflected upon myself... I have this feeling of telling others that it is a hardwork and desire a good pat (appreciation) from them, but I realised it is not a spiritual-healthy expectation and I might grow a bit 'proud' and 'fame-greed' from inside. So I stopped telling others, and grateful Heaven let me see that small 'greed' in me. I will repent and keep it low profile.

So....... here I am. I am proud of myself and give myself a good pat on myself, "Jeff, you did a great work. Well Done!" Okay! time to move on to next project.

Jeff