SVSF - Hawk Quarterly
Every year, our school is given the task to create a sort of promotional video portraying all the grants that our school foundation gives to the schools in the district, and the way that they are put to use. This year ArcticHeat--Josh Helzerman and myself--chose to make a video on Chief Kanim's Hawk Quarterly. Hawk Quarterly is a quarterly magazine that is written, edited, and managed by the students,
for the students of Chief Kanim. They all seemed to be hard at work and very passionate about what they were producing. Even our first day of shooting, without the teacher there, the students seemed to have little to no problem with managing their time and getting as much done as they could with little direction. This, of course, was great news for us because it made getting B-roll very, very easy. The more complicated part was getting the interviews. We got great answers in the end, that wasn't the problem. The problem was that the kids seemed stiff. Nervous. We tried to break this barrier by engaging in casual conversation and cracking jokes, but it was obvious that the sight of a student
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much older than themselves made them nervous. That, combined with two cameras pointed at their faces, made it really hard for them to think of answers to our questions on the spot.
Looking back on it, there were a lot of things that we didn't do that would have made all of the post-production easier. Some easy examples are: -having them restate the question in their response -having them write a speech/answer for the questions we were going to ask. These two very simply things would have made the entire process of editing a lot easier by cutting down on the amount of time spent watching their responses over, and over again to try to |
find what they are answering and when. I also personally felt like we did not get enough b-roll. I found myself struggling to find pieces of b-roll to fill in gaps and make the video less boring, but it all looked similar, and it all looked bland. Not that we had a lot to work with--it was a room full of middle school students looking at computer monitors. If I had had the time I probably would have had the students act a few things out just to make it look more interesting, however this also goes back to them being really shy around us, which would have made that difficult.
Post-production was the part that took the longest. There wasn't much pre-production that we could have done for this, due to the |
fact that we couldn't write a script, and it was going to be shot on the spot. Filming was fast, in fact we got all of out footage in less than an hour--we went into the classroom twice, for 30 minutes. Post-production, however took hours and hours of clipping, reviewing, reclipping, adding b-roll, cutting down the unnecessary parts of their responses, etc..
In the end, I wasn't really satisfied with the result of my work. I did the best I could using everything I had, but I felt like I could have done more. Whether it be in production, or in post, something made me feel like it just wasn't as good as I could have made it, and that's never a good feeling. I don't think I would have changed much, however, even if I was given the chance. We did what we |
could and we produced a good interview. Furthermore, it was a great learning experience that really taught us to communicate and get things done fast and effectively. Until this point, our videos had never been limited by a due date, so we had had a lot more freedom with the way we did things, and we had the chance to try to make things as perfect as possible. That wasn't the case with this video, and it definitely prepared us for all the projects that we later went on to producing.
Completion date - ____
Completion date - ____