Week 4 for this project brought interesting challenges even more interesting solutions. My goal for week 4 was to get all of pre-production finished, conduct the interviews that I had scheduled and film my intro and outro segments for each episode on camera.
I knew when first planning this project out in Asana that post – production was going to be a lot of work because their was a lot of animations and graphic creation so my goal has been to get pre – production and production done on the earlier side so I leave myself ample time to edit. At this rate I am on track to completely finish production in the next day or so and then I’ll jump right into post. The last thing in production that I wasn’t able to complete this past week was recording my narration tracks. I was called into work way more hours then I thought I was going to be so I wasn’t left with as much time as I wanted, but this upcoming week has a lot more free time in so I’m excited to get another big chunk of the project completed.
Another issue I encountered this week was when I was thinking about how I wanted my on camera intros and outros to look. I wanted to give that like news anchor look, as if I was actually on a real set to film it. The whole topic of the 3 part series is silly and fun so I wanted my persona to have a lot of fun to. But even after I came up with what I wanted it to look like I still had to actually figure out a way to create it.
The first issue was space. Most rooms in my house are filled with furniture that can’t really be moved, so the only available room to use was my sister’s since she has the most room and the least furniture. I then had to style a fold up table to look like a cute desk, then I dragged my desk chair over to her room and put up an old boy band poster I had and put the shows logo into a frame and thought great I’m all ready to go. So I set uo the camera and mic, and used my sister’s LED lights natural window light to make sure there were no ugly shadows, but when I looked through the view finder on the camera it still looked blank. So I got to searching for things and in the deepest darkest part of my closet I found all of my sister and mine old boy band merchandise. I took my bed side table shelf, propped it up on two storage boxes and decorated it took look nice. Added a couple more pieces to the desk and was content.
Then I needed an outfit, I realized I still owned one boy band shirt that would still fit, my Jonas Brothers one from last November’s tour and threw on my favorite blazer. Finally I was ready to start recording. And that’s when I hit the next challenge. I knew I was going to be alone to film, so I figured I would let my audio and video run for as long as it took for me to get a full take of each section, but what I didn’t realize was that I was going to need a teleprompter in order to remember everything I had written. So this resulted in me using my iPad and propping it up right under the camera lens using an old wooden table and 4 of my sister’s text books. With that all set, I was ready to go. It took a whole but after a few hours I had recorded each section for all 3 episodes.
Now you might be thinking that’s all the issues for this week, well you’d be wrong. Each interview I had this week created it’s own little struggle. My first one was over Zoom and I wanted to make sure since I might be in the interview because Zoom records both screens that I look the same as I did for the intros and outros so I had to get in the same outfit and because my room faces my bed and I thought that was widely inappropriate I had to user my sisters again. Then my second interviewee was only able to do a phone interview so I used a Zoom recorder from work to record the phone audio as clear as it can. This also made me realize that I’ll have to shift the way I make the interview interesting during the video. The final interview was in person, so I set my camera and mic and conducted a normal interview.
Overall, this week was crazy, but also kind of fun just trying to solve problems in the moment, with out having to buy anything new or having to push things back. It made me further understand why pre-planning is super important and that even when you do plan things are always going to change on the spot.
If you want to check out all the tasks I completed this week and how long each one took click on my production journal below.
taylorsniffen.com 