Semester 2, Blog #3: Video Production Notes

When we were first presented with the video project assignment, the task of coming up with some kind of short story on the fly seemed daunting. But I've learned that to make it easier on yourself, it's best just to take your first instinct and run with it. I suggested (to my partner Ayako) the idea of a chase scene in which a person is chased by a stranger around the campus and thinks her pursuer means to harm her. Their chase increases pace as it covers various locations around the school. However, it turns out that the pursuer just picked up her metro card that she dropped back at the subway station, and wanted to return it. After much discussion, we settled on this story, realizing of course the circumstances of the story would seem unrealistic (given the fact that there are tons of people around on campus, not to mention the pursuer could simply have yelled out to her in the first place, etc...).

Since the editing was the primary purpose of the project, I thought that the chase scene would present an interesting editing challenge because it would require putting lots of pieces together from different angles and locales. However, I also knew it would be very difficult to shoot the scene in the limited time we were given. Ayako and I drew up a sketchy storyboard, scouted out some locales around campus where we wanted to film the chase, and also tried to determine ahead of time what order in which we would film these parts, all in order to make the filming process move as quickly as possible. We also needed another actor, since I would be behind the camera, and thank goodness Ayako got her friend Ken to help us out and act as the pursuer character.

The filming process was rather hectic indeed, but still enjoyable. We rushed from place to place around campus filming the shots in as few takes as possible. I did my best to direct Ayako and Ken in a way that would bring to life the "vision" of our storyboards. My lack of camera experience, along with the rushed atmosphere of our shoot caused my camerawork to be shakier than I would like. However, I did want some shots to be shaky since it evokes a frantic mood for the chase sequence. That shakiness went further than I intended, but I'm an amateur, so I shouldn't expect perfect work on my first video project. The shoot went better than I expected overall, since we managed to finish in time to get back to the lab and save our clips to the computer. Much of the credit goes to Ayako and Ken for staying on their toes and performing with both haste and style.

The editing process was challenging, but also the most interesting to me. Ayako and I had no previous experience with Final Cut, and we only had the limited exposure to it that the class lectures gave us, so neither our process nor the end result was anything too advanced. We had to figure out a lot of things on our own. And if we couldn't figure out how to make something flow better, we basically defaulted to a crossfade, whether it was video or sound. The crossfade was our trusty fallback, especially when it came to softening the audio transitions from one shot to another. That's probably an amateurish shortcut, but it worked. Everything else was a matter of clipping shots, deciding which take to use, and putting everything in a logical order that would result in a mostly continuous story with instances of montage cutting. I feel like we did a pretty good job for beginners, even if everyone else's video projects were much more impressive. In fact, I was so impressed by the other students' projects, it made me feel rather crappy about myself. Looks like I'm the only real beginner here.

Click here to view "The Chase," the completed video project by Sean (me) and Ayako.