For my final video assignment for the week Stefanie and I did “Swede a Scene” (4.5 stars). We decided that it would be easier and more fun if we did it together. It would allow us more people to work with rather than having to do a scene where it was just one person or where we would have to take on the role of several different people (more than we had to in this one).
How we did it:
Stefanie and I brainstormed for a while on which scene we thought we should do. Stefanie had the idea to go with this one because it would be fun, and I agreed! We could make it really funny and fun and cheesy which is kind of what we tried to do. Originally one of us was going to be Omar but I managed to convince my wonderful boyfriend to take on that role instead, it took a little coaxing but I got him to agree. He also brought an awesome camera for us to use–you may not be able to tell because YouTube cut down the quality but it looked great while we were making it.
Our sets consisted of inside and outside of Stefanie’s house and outside of my house. I did much of the recording with Stefanie recording the scenes that I was in (and with my boyfriend’s help because neither Stefanie nor I had really used a camera like that to video tape with before). We had to re-do very few scenes but it still took us well over an hour to get everything recorded. I was surprised at how long it took. Stefanie and I both said we couldn’t imagine how long recording a whole episode or even a whole series would take. I know it gave me a whole new appreciation for the work that directors and actors do.
Once we had all of the scenes recorded, we went to the Convergence Center to use the Macs to do the video editing. This was upon Groom’s suggestion that I try that rather than Windows Live Movie Maker because I wasn’t happy with the amount of editing I was able to do on Movie Maker. I was extremely happy with what we were able to do using iMovie. It took a little while for us to figure out the processes (and we still haven’t quite figured it all out) but we definitely had fun figuring it out. We had to import all of the videos (which I took from the memory card and put on my thumb drive so we could have access to them in the ITCC) into iMovie. Then we had to add the scenes that we needed into the project. We moved them around and had to cut out the yelling of “GO” at the beginning of each one (haha). My favorite edit that we made was at the end where Omar (Ryan) walks into Stefanie’s house and closes the door and then we cut to the inside with him closing the door. I was super proud of that edit haha.
When we finished editing the timing of the different scenes we moved onto the sounds. It was really windy on the day that we recorded so we had to be careful what we did with the sound. We found that you could insert sound effects using iMovie that were already on the computer. So we did that for almost all of the scenes. Even the outdoor ones. Sometimes we had to cut out the sounds that were there naturally because the wind was too loud or whatever. Sometimes we even had to amplify what we were saying so you could actually hear it (and some of Ryan’s scenes you still can’t hear because he talks super low and quietly). We amplified some scenes as much as we could and it is still hard to hear but we didn’t know what else we could do. We added background music to the scene were Omar is in the store getting the cereal. We took the liberty of changing it from asking if they had Honey Nut Cheerios to asking if they had Fruity Pebbles. We thought it would be funnier. We didn’t really change any other lines. But there also weren’t really any lines in this scene. We did change the drugs from pill form to powder form (kosher salt) because none of us had a whole bunch of pills lying around (thankfully). After we were done adding the background sounds, we added a title and a credits page, as well as the bloopers at the end. Then voila, we were done.
We uploaded it to YouTube and you can find the video here:
