Video Production
The lockdown opened up a time warp whereby time drags on interminably, yet seems to fly by faster than ever, both at the same time.
But it’s given me time to focus on tasks that have long been pushed to the backburner. The first was the development of my own website, and the second was to increase content production for posting on various platforms.
Both are geared towards increasing visibility of me personally, in order to raise the profile of my businesses.
And both caused me considerable discomfort. I don’t enjoy the spotlight.
For the videos, I was fortunate that a friend, who returned to Germany for the lockdown, had left a ring light in Cebu that I could borrow. I dug up my unused tripod, installed a teleprompter app on my iPad, and got writing.
My set up looks very professional doesn’t it! The cardboard boxes especially. At one point I had the three legs of my tripod each standing on a can of tomatoes, but was later able to refine my setup to eliminate the extra complexity.
My first day of “production” started with completely unrealistic expectations. I aimed to make 12 videos, each from 2-7 minutes. I planned 3 costume changes and 4 locations to make it look like they had been done across a broader span of time. This was because I didn’t want to have to do my hair and makeup multiple times!
6 hours later, I had zero decent videos for my efforts. The setup changes were time consuming. I was hot under the light, my makeup was melting and my neat, straightened hair was slowly crinkling into its normal unruly state. One perfect take later proved to be out of focus. A cat wandered into another one, and a delivery truck another. I did actually generate 3 versions each of 4 videos (not the intended 12), but none of them were usable.
A month passed before I was prepared to try again. This time I kept it simple and set up in my guest bedroom – just one location, with the air con at a crisp 18 degrees C. I recorded 3 videos x 2 times, took a break to review them, did another 2 takes. This time it was 4 hours effort and it yielded 2 videos.
On my third attempt, I played around with green screens. I didn’t have a proper one, but found a green blanket in the cupboard and draped that on the wall. It wasn’t perfect, but it got rid of some background visuals that I didn’t like. This time I got two good videos, and as I was more relaxed than the previous week, I scrapped the earlier efforts completely.
The time consuming video setup and recording was nothing compared to the post production. It took hours in the evening in front of the TV, first lining up the video and audio; the former was recorded on my camera, with the audio recording on my mic-ed up phone in my pocket. Trying to caption the videos with iMovie was too hard and did not yield great results so then I downloaded and learned Adobe Rush. Both apps have features that the others lack, so to get the videos lightened, captioned and green-screened, I had to go back and forth between the two of them.
After 6 weeks of elapsed time, and probably 100 hours, I had two usable videos and it was time to share!
This is my first output, posted on Linked IN.
