Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Maybe making videos just isn't my thing

Well, I had thought that I would make more videos for this contest I've entered. If my chances of winning something with one video are good, then the odds of me winning something with two videos are twice as good, and three or four or five videos would be even better. And while my first video was rather complicated (for me, as neither of us had tried working with video before), the others I had planned were things that I thought would be easier. The editing and working with the voiceover bit took a lot longer than I thought on the first one, so the second one I had planned wasn't supposed to use the voiceover at all and very little editing. I thought I would do that yesterday, and have the whole thing finished before lunch.

Of course I thought that. I always think that.

So I set up the camera. I put some things on the table and focused the camera on a chair, turned the camera on, and went and sat in the chair. Now, I knew that sometimes I would screw up something that I had to say, and stuff like that would be edited out and done over again, but I actually thought that I would record about five minutes of me saying what I had to say, and then maybe saying parts of it over again if I messed up anything, and then I would have two additional shots that I would need help with, go and edit out a few seconds here and there when I wasn't saying anything, and that would be that.

I really did plan it that way.

First off, I was speaking very slowly when talking to the camera. So what I thought was about three minutes turned out to be about twice as long. The second problem was that I too far away from the camera for the sound to be any good.

And the third thing was that I looked just awful. The video was about knitting, and while I wasn't planning to actually do a lot of knitting during the video, I did do some knitting, and of course when I knit I look down a bit so that I can actually see what I'm doing. And every time I look down, I look really bad.

Not that I looked really good to start with.

So now I don't look good, and I'll have to do the voiceover thing again. And I can't just do the voiceover some parts and keep the original sound in other parts. For one thing, the volume on the camera is really low, while the microphone voiceover is quite loud. And I wouldn't be able to get the voiceover to match what I was saying on the video, so it would just look like a bad foreign film. So I kept this one little part where I didn't even try to match the voiceover to what I was actually saying, and it probably does look like a bad foreign film. I shot a bunch of other stuff to add to it, and did voiceover, and that pretty much took all day (though I did take a break to watch True Blood).

So I could make three more videos, but now I'm wondering if it would be worth the effort. Especially now that I know that the whole just look at the camera and talk thing isn't going to work out.

The video about scarves has been uploaded. And I was able to put it on my account instead of my husbands. The last video was put on his account, cause I couldn't remember my password or something.

At least there aren't any misspelled words on this one.

1 comment:

Ananda girl said...

Sounds like an active learning experience. I hope you are enjoying it.