For my Adobe Premiere project I created a short documentary in which the main subject of the video discusses his personal account of communal showers. I was inspired to create this film by the Netflix original show, American Vandal created by Jimmy Tatro, which is a comedic documentary. Casey Neistat’s video blogs were also a huge inspiration to me in the way I formatted my video.
While shooting my video footage, I used a tripod to stabilize my phone camera, and the Rule of Thirds to improve my visual composition of my video. I also made sure to be conscious of shooting enough footage, more than I needed, since I could use extra footage as B-Roll.
At the beginning of my design process, I first brainstormed a story I could portray in this project. Once I decided on a documentary about a personal account with communal showers, I then began creating the story board for my project. For me the project was only an outline to inspire me, because the outcome of my video was very different from the story board.
After completing my story board, I began shooting still shots of the communal shower and walkway to it. Keeping in my the 3×3 method, I filmed a variety of wide, medium and close-up shots of the showers to use as establishing shots in my project and to have a variety of B-Roll. I then filmed the interview between me, the narrator, and the main character of the video using two different cameras. I did this to get a variety of angles of the same interview and to get multiple quality talking head shots. I used the rule of thirds while I filmed my subject so the interview didn’t feel uncomfortable to the viewer.
After the interview, I filmed the cutaways of my main character in the shower experience the “odd” encounters. These were not filmed by me, but by a friend of mine, and were quite easy to film as anything could be used as out of the ordinary for this section of my project. After I filmed the ending scene of my project where my friend Sam Highsmith announces he loves group showers and gives the camera a smile.
Once I was satisfied with my footage, I uploaded all the film to my computer and put it into a project folder. Within this folder I created two more folders, imports and exports. All my film and audio would be put in the import folder.
From here, I began placing my video on segments on the story board. Because Adobe Premiere is nondestructive with its video editing, it was easy to get the exact shot from all of my footage. I primarily used the cut tool in Premiere to get the footage length I desired. Cutting and editing film footage in Adobe Premier is similar to cutting and editing audio footage in Adobe Audition and very simple for me to do.
When I was cutting and editing my film, I wanted to use a variety and shots and angles, and I didn’t want one shot to take up more than 10 seconds without changing to a different shot. To achieve this, I used a variety of cutaways during my interview seen and L-cuts to make the overall presentation of the video more visually appealing to the viewer.
Once I was satisfied with the video, I then began adding in the audio and background music. I first began my recording the narration in the opening scene. I recorded myself using my iPhone 7 and used the cut tool to place each section of the narration in line with each scene change. After the narration was in place, I then uploaded the instrumental. Upon uploading the instrumental, I realized I would have to adjust the audio volumes. During the narration, I made the instrumental volume significantly less and then turned up the volume so it was the main audio heard.
When both the audio and video were as I liked, I then began adding effects to finish my project. Adobe Premiere makes it very easy to add video and audio effects by simply dragging them on to the story board. For the video, I added multiple dissolve effects and fade to black effects as transitions for my video. For my audio, I used the constant gain effect and exponential fade for areas where I wanted the audio to be less or completely gone and areas where I wanted the audio to take over.
The last part for creating my video was adding the text at the beginning and end of my project. Doing this was fairly simple. To add the text, I simply used the text tool and clicked on the areas of the project I wanted them to be. I then added effects like I did with the video and audio. Once this was as I like, I then watched my project a couple times to review and make sure it was complete and then I exported the video to YouTube.
During the creation of my project, I experienced very little technical challenges. Anything I was having trouble with could be solved by reviewing the lessons provided in the Com 210 course or on YouTube. However, at first I was confused on how to add text to my video because I thought it would be more complexed to add, but I quickly realized how simple it was after watching informative videos on YouTube.
All the contents of this project were created by me except the instrumental track which can be found below.
Sources and Materials:
Soundtrack: Time’s Flying by Dlay. Retrieved from http://freemusicarchive.org/genre/Downtempo/.
Dawson Dormaier 