arlof creative

My First Video Project is Complete posted on March 5, 2009

The Concept

After spending the last four weeks of my life planning, gathering assets, writing, shooting around the weather (fast, before the snow melted), other people's schedules, the passing of my grandfather, editing and mixing all the audio on the last day, my little 2 minute video is finally finished. Please, take two minutes and give it a watch.

For those of you who don't know already, the parent company of the apartment complex I live in (J.C. Hart) held a video contest with a grand prize of one year's worth of free rent. That's a pretty good deal, ideally saving us near $10,000 over the course of twelve months. The object of the contest was to somehow showcase either your apartment or complex community in a creative way. I wanted to do something a little different instead of a tv ad style "i love my apartment because of these reasons" approach, something that felt more like a movie, or at least a movie trailer, which happened to partially take place at my apartment complex.

At the start of February our area received a lot of snow so I decided to set the video against a winter background combined with a Road Warrior style post-catastrophe world.

Pre-production

The collection of footage began by looking for good photos of snowy places, hopefully with abandoned or run down buildings, to sell the idea of desolation. Winter is generally a harsher environment which mixed well with the kind of world I was striving to build.

Production

After getting a some nice shots (though only a few appear in the actual video), we, Amandine and myself, went out into our snow covered city, drove around, shot some run down areas of town, shot the car driving here and there (the one car shot on the highway was tough to get, and it still needed a lot of post-shooting work). Later, I asked a couple friends to help out as actors and getting time with them while the snow was here turned out to be tough. Trying to get all your shots with (crucial) melting snow and a sinking sun was super stressful!

Even though we have an older Panasonic Palmcorder DV video camera, I decided to shoot everything with compact Canon point-and-shoot digital cameras in their 'video' mode. Taking this route was both good and bad as it allowed for custom white balancing (good!) and each take being stored to a separate video file on the SD media cards (good!). The downsides were the cameras' light weight (very shaky shots) and being limited to the built in microphones (lots of background noise).

To remedy these problems, I used closed tripods as makeshift steadicam mounts and later just locked down the shots (placed the tripods on the ground or in a car). Getting around the dialogue recording proved to be more complicated. I needed to buy new microphones (two!) and record directly into my computer as the mics had very low pickup volume, so recording into something more compact like a minidisc recorder was out. Thankfully, with Amandine on hand, syncing the video and sound recording was manageable.

Post-production

Before I could begin the editing process, reinforcing the look I had to be done and meant turning to specialized software as much of our footage had objects (cars, etc) that needed to be removed otherwise the illusion of desolation would be broken. For this task (and later coloring the footage to match, which Amandine did half of those shots), I had to crash-course my learning of Adobe's After Effects (thanks a ton, videocopilot.net!) for removing cars, adding a (flipped over) car, removing backgrounds during the in-car dialogue portions (that was very tedious, use a green background next time!) and adding snow storms and motion to photos.

Interlude...

Right at the end of February, I had to leave town for three days when my grandfather passed away. Missing his funeral was not an option, as he was a tremendous man and will be sorely missed. Getting back late on Friday night (Feb. 29!) meant we had two days to finish everything and at this point, no audio had been prepared outside of the raw recording. Ah!

Visual Effects (post-production continued)

There were a few additional elements I needed that couldn't be shot at all. These included the frozen Earth at the beginning and the car driving into the boarded up town. Fortunately, I had help in that area from my friend Brandon, who supplied the Earth animation and computer generated car animation. Using the elements he created, I composed these into the existing footage once again in After Effects.

Editing

With all the visual elements ready, the editing process began in Apple's iMovie '08, another application I'd never used before. The initial rough cut took several days to prepare, finding a good flow of the video while arranging the clips and continuously cutting clips, scenes, shots and down to frames just to get under the 2 minute maximum length. The complete video was the exported from iMovie (sans sound) to a huge video file.

Scoring the Video

Having never done anything with sound before except clipping the 'hidden' portion off the occasional MP3, I was terrified to do this part. Added to this, was the writing and recording of the radio message, all in the last day of before the deadline. Since I had recorded all the dialogue and sound effects into Apple's Garageband, that's what I decided to use for soundtracking the video. iMovie 08+ doesn't have a separate audio track anymore, it only handles sound within the video files. This was a no-go for me because I had to throw out all the sound recorded by our Canon cameras due to the poor quality and abundant background noise.

Garageband turned out to be great for editing multiple sound tracks to the video. I had trouble finding the exact takes where each clip was from, even though we named each recording with an incremental name. Sigh. A new experience was trying to match the dialogue recording to the video as actors were speaking, which meant move it slightly, listen and watch, move slightly, listen and watch,.. rinse, repeat.

Building the Broadcast

The last part was to build and ‘dirty up’ the radio message. Thankfully, a few filters and adjustments made that fairly simple (aside from the whole convert the mono sound to stereo sound part). The idea of having a second message in French (of which Amandine is fluent) was an idea from both her and me. We think it adds a neat little extra to the broadcasted message.

Averting Disaster

Finally, the movie editing was done, now just export, upload and relax,.. right? Wrong. The first upload to YouTube (my first ever) was totally messed up. Terror struck. Would I make the deadline? Could I? The clock was running down,.. less than 5 minutes until midnight. Exported it again, upload again. Better, sound was still off, a little hard to hear. Fast, tweak the sound, hurry, it’s getting later. Export again, upload........it’s good! Just in time! Relax,.. have a drink. At this point, I'm totally fried.

The Aftermath

Despite all of the scheduling pressure, creative compromises and near-meltdown at the end, this project turned out to be a lot of fun and I have learned quite a bit about filmmaking (with no budget!) in these short weeks. I'm looking forward to starting my next project but I need to wait for the outcome of this contest,.. I'm so excited!!

What The Future May Bring

There's a strong possibility I'll be attending the E3 Game Conference with my friend Rocco, who hosts the gaming blog Horny Melon. After seeing my video, he asked me to come and shoot footage of E3 and interviews for his upcoming podcast (starting in April!). Sounds like fun, here's to the beginning of an exciting (though sometimes crazy) new path.

Be sure to visit the credits page where I list the people who made this video possible.
Thank you for all your help, I couldn’t have done it without you.

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