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Investigation 3/14 - THON Skit Reflections

Over the past week I worked with members of Mini-THON to film a skit that will be shown at the elementary schools. The focus of the skit was to teach the story of the Four Diamonds in a way that was both entertaining and easy for kids to understand. As the Technology Chair, my duty for this project was to serve as both the cinematographer and editor while other chairpersons acted and directed. The following is some of my thoughts about working on this project.

Shooting

Due to myself acting within my previous film, I haven't had the opportunity in a while to solely serve as a project's cinematographer. However, due to one of the Mini-THON Overalls taking charge as the director for this skit, my only duty was to be the one behind the camera. The amount of time we had to produce this skit was very limited, so when I arrived at the school on Friday to film, the only amount of preparation work that we had was a script. Despite this, I worked with the director to come up with ways to frame the shots that she had wanted for each scene. Actually shooting the skit went fairly well, with us having a "run & gun" approach to it. We began with filming all of our interior scenes at the start, in order to best make use of time and the space that we had. Following that, we relocated outside and spent the rest of the time running around the school and getting shots in different locations to create different settings within the skit, despite just filming on school property. The final product looks decent visually, with some standout shots being our few tracking shots and an attempt of forced perspective.

Editing

Editing the skit was a pretty fun process. Most of the more recent videos that I've worked on have had a more professional and serious feel to them. With the target audience being elementary school students, the skit ended up with a fun and childlike feel. The actual process of editing was easy but tedious. Putting each clip into the timeline and lining it up with the relevant narration was simple but the challenge lied within putting the polish on the video. Denoising and color grading took a good amount on each clip to make sure that it was right but the most annoying part was dealing with audio. Recently, I've gotten into the habit of recording audio from an external microphone on the left audio channel and using the camera's built in microphone as scratch audio on the right audio channel. I mainly due this in order to have an emergency back-up track in case there would be any issues with the external microphone. So far, I haven't had any issues but implementing this change into my editing workflow was definitely annoying as I now had to be sure to put a "Fill Right With Left" effect on all of my audio tracks. This paired with having to denoise most tracks and having to try to negate some wind sounds made editing audio not very fun. My favorite part of editing was probably adding music to accompany the skit as I feel it really pulls the video together.

The skit can be found here on google drive: Link To Skit On Google Drive

Work Log

  • 3/8 - Script changes
  • 3/9 - Misc prep for film
  • 3/10 - Filmed THON videos
  • 3/11 - Eagle Scout Board of Review (No Work)
  • 3/12 - Filmed skit
  • 3/13 - Scheduled shooting dates
  • 3/14 - Edited various THON videos
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