Thursday, September 16, 2010

I like St. Mike's but I have come to HATE this video.

I suppose HATE is a strong word... I just got very, very, VERY frustrated while working on it.


First of all here is the video I am talking about:


Secondly, let me explain my sour feelings toward this video...

Here's the thing, there is a new marketing theme (or whatever you want to call it) here at St. Mike's. You might have heard of it, the whole concept runs on the statement "I Like St. Mike's." It's simple, it's true, and it is very inspiring to a vlogger like myself. Why not find out why other students like St. Mike's. When I mentioned this idea to Mallory (she is basically the person in charge of the bloggers and me) she LOVED it and said that if I didn't do it she would. She also decided that this video was going to be heavily marketed by the school. This made me really excited and I couldn't wait to get started. And right then the trouble seemed to start.

Now, I understand when a random girl walks up to you with a camera and says "Would you like to be in the official St. Michael's College video blog?" You would be a little surprised and nervous but so many people were camera shy! They were willing to tell me in words but not on camera. This was rather interesting and strange to me. But then again I am kind of a camera whore so I wouldn't understand the concept of not wanting to be in front of a camera. I did find a few participants here and there and my best luck seemed to be at the activities fair where people were really excited about their clubs and more willing to speak out about there love of SMC! I had to enlist some friends but I tried to avoid that because they show up a lot more in my videos on a regular basis.

Once I got all the footage, which took over a week, I started editing. I asked all the people to say their name, class year, and major before completing the sentence "I like St. Mike's because..." but I made sure I took down their names on my phone so that I had them later for spelling purposes. Well, it seems my phone wanted me to do more work because it deleted half the names and some people did not say their last names on camera which meant i had to search around Facebook and the email directory to find people. I also had to download a new font so it corresponded with the font that the school uses. The first version I got had no numbers or symbols. So, I found something that worked with it, set the video to music and uploaded the video. Then I watched the video again and decided I hated the music. I cut it out and re-uploaded it. Watched it again and realized that the font and names seemed to have disappeared from some of my labels! At this point I near broke a window! I threw like a shoe across my common room and made some sort of exasperated scream, slammed my computer shut and refused to open it again until the next day. After some ice cream and homemade brownies that my friends made I felt better but still decided to leave the video for the night.

The next day I was sent a better version of the font, with symbols and numbers, so I went back through, changed all the fonts again, had to research names and re-watch the clips that mentioned class year and majors all over again. I decided to Skype with my friend Heather who is in England because she is a great critic and she was really excited about the video. We screen shared and she said she was really bothered by the background noise from the activities fair clips and that she thought the ending was corny. I tried to separate all the activities fair clips as much as possible so that they didn't have consecutive background issues. This was done after i explored ways to fix the background noise issue. Unfortunately, although I have final cut on this computer I have not yet taken my classes on it so I can't really use it and that would probably be where I could have fixed that problem. So, I re-uploaded a THIRD time before I went to bed. In the morning I sent the private link to Mallory only to discover that some of the audio was dropped on one clip and I had forgotten a person's major and class year. UGH! Finally, after fixing those two problems I finally was able to upload the current version the FOURTH time I have uploaded!

In this way, I hate this video... or got very, very, VERY, frustrated with it. But in reality, not only because of all the work I put in but simply because of how well it came out I am! I really think this might be my best video yet! I really hope you enjoyed it. You better after I went through hell to make it for you! I am lucky to have such great friends who don't mind random screams and flying shoes... And who make delicious brownies. It very much helped me through this trying time. Its also a good thing I love doing this or I would have given up LONG ago.

:-D Please feel free to ask me any questions about this video or anything you want! Here or on my Formspring or where ever!

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