When I first was introduced to the video camera and extra equipment needed for Comm. 465, I admittedly was a bit intimidated. The camera was easily one of the more modern ones that I had seen and I really hadn’t had too much experience with professional equipment like this before. Even so, I was excited and ready to get out and film for project one, it truly was a great learning experience.
One of the main things I learned from this project is that timing is everything in setting up a shot and that you always have to be aware of the numerous settings on the camera to avoid having distorted color, or white balance in the footage. We went out and filmed on a freezing cold day in State College, which in itself was a bit difficult lugging around the equipment in 30-degree weather. While out, we filmed numerous scenes, which in part were because the script had already been written. Personally, I think we could have had more b-roll footage because one knock on our final project might have been that we did not have enough shots of downtown State College along Allen Street and Beaver Avenue and could have had more interaction with people walking in our scenes.
The editing part of the project was personally my favorite. I learned the Adobe Premier Pro program pretty quickly and it soon became very easy to use. I started diving into a lot of the features and even looking up how to do other features from YouTube tutorials. I edited everything from the contrast, shadows and sharpness on our clips to even creating our own custom title banners for me and the student we interviewed. Once the entire project came together on Adobe Premier, I felt extremely satisfied that we had done a great job.
Overall, this project was an eye-opening experience. I personally am interested to get involved with some type of sports media and with my San Diego sports talk radio internship this past summer I only had minimal experience using an actual video camera (downtown interviewing fans for MLB All-Star festivities). Other than that, I really had never done anything similar before other than taking pictures which I like to think I have an eye for creativity. The most important thing that I took out of this project is that you have to be open to experimenting with different angles and abstract types of shots which you may not think are all that cool when you are out filming. Everyone has their own idea and style of what they like and it was very interesting seeing that play out when all the projects were shown in class last Thursday. I am ready and excited to continue gaining experience with the camera and off to project two.
