My First Video

I have finally gone and done it. Here is my first little movie I have written, filmed, and edited. I hope for it to be the first of many.



I had the concept of using a Glidecam to stabilize my soda so it wouldn't go flat on the bumpy forest roads. Then about a week later I heard about a contest through B&H Photo/Video. The idea was to use high tech piece of equipment in a low tech way. Well I already had an idea so I decided to enter! Problem was the submission deadline was in three days but I was unavailable the last day so I had two days to film and edit. I ended up filming Friday night and Saturday morning then editing Saturday afternoon.

I had a big problem when it came down to editing... my computer is super SLOW! This means it cannot handle any of the editing software, not even Windows Movie Maker (I also do not have the budget to buy the programs anyway). So my wife and I headed to my universities campus to use their computers. However this was between semester breaks so the media lab was shut down and so were most of the other computer labs. We ended up searching for a computer for about a half an hour. I had about given up hope but we finally found a computer that had Adobe Premiere on it.

I sat down to get cranking and the computer did not have an SD card reader! I didn't have anything else available to me but my laptop (I guess it came in handy for something). I had to transfer my clips from the SD card to a flash drive (432 MB) using my laptop then from the flash drive to the computer I was using. I had to go through this process four times and each batch took about 20 minutes because of the extremely slow write speed. At this time I was getting uncomfortably close to when we had to leave for our evening plans.

I have been watching tutorials on Lynda.com on how to use Premiere Pro. That is all the experience I had to work with. My inexperience really slowed me down which means I wasn't able to do everything to the video I wanted to. I basically only had time to throw together a story and try and at least get good cuts and sequencing between clips. Oh, finding music took forever as well. I was able to put it together and submit it before I had to leave for the weekend and before the submission deadline.

The next day I went to go see my entry in the contest and found out they had extended the deadline over a week! So I stressed about getting everything together in time when I actually had another week. I think the total time spent on the video was about 8 hours. Oh well... at least I can say I finally did it and learned a lot.

Here is to learning and growing and following dreams!