How to edit a video!

I made the decision to use Adobe Premiere Elements for editing the wowlookwhatigot.com promo video for one main reason - we have a copy! No brainer there then! It's a pretty good editing package as far as I can see, but then I haven't really used anything else, apart from Windows Movie Maker, which works but is, as you might expect from free/bundled software, a bit basic.

The wowlookwhatigot.com video - opening credits in production ... !

Not having ever done a course on video editing I've basically just made up a 'workflow' that suits me as I've gone along. It's something like...

• Write the script. Figured out my own process for this, something like:
• Decide what to say
• Decide how to say it - ie invent some scenes and specify what each one needs to convey
• Write the dialogue
• Decide who says what
• Decide on some locations and scene transitions - the rest to be worked out as we go along.
• Shoot the scenes. Some outdoor and some indoor
• Assemble any still photos required - includes making some captions in Photoshop, resizing, etc.
• Record any voiceovers (the dialogue comes straight off the camera recording, but the voiceovers can be recorded direct into the laptop at home).
• Source any music required - I'm using a generative music program called Mixtikl by Intermorphic to create most of the music, running on an Android tablet. I know roughly how long the clips need to be from a quick read-through of the script so I can do a rough version before starting.

Now to the editing...

• Set up a new project in Premiere
• Go through all the video takes and select the best one for each scene. I just drop all the takes for one scene into Windows Media Player to run through them all quickly and make a selection
• Import all the source material (selected video clips, stills, audio clips) into the media library
• Trim the video clips to the right length. I discovered you can do this by double-clicking on the thumbnail in the media library which gives you a pop-up editor)
• Drag the video scenes onto the timeline in order and preview to check the timing of the dialogue
• Insert any stills required and add animation (e.g. pan & zoom etc.) as needed
• Insert any titles required - in this case I'm cutting in and out of some solid color frames as transitions between some scenes, and using title screens with no text is an easy way to do this
• Insert start and end credits
• Drop in any sound effects and voiceovers, adjust scene lengths to fit the audio as needed
• Add the rough music track

At this point we can render a 'first cut' of the finished video and watch it many times to fix any timing glitches, sort out anything which doesn't flow well, etc. This is the stage I'm at right now! I'm happy to say it's all looking ok at the moment!

So, left to do...

• Polish up the video clips - ie adjust colour saturation, levels, add any extra video effects etc.
• Ditto the audio. Mainly noise reduction and equalizing levels. At this stage I've realised I would have got a more professional result by doing this immediately after selecting the clips - I should have extracted the audio into Audacity and tidied it up, then re-imported it in Premiere, but as it is I'll just have to use the noise reduction etc. which is built into Premiere. Maybe there's a better way, but I don't know - I'll have to check if you can invoke an external editor from inside Premiere, but maybe that's a 'Pro' feature?
• Make the final music soundtrack matching the final video length and drop that in - edit any fades in/out etc. as needed during dialogue etc.
• Render the final cut!
• Upload to YouTube!

So there we are ... Martin's quick guide to editing a promo video for wowlookwhatigot.com. Well, to be honest it's more for my reference really, I don't suppose it makes for exactly riveting blog reading, but for anyone who did battle all the way through, maybe you have some constructive suggestions? "Get a book on how to use Premiere" would probably be a good one, I suspect!

Art in focus - 1: "As Long as there is Life, there is Hope"

About time we talked about some of our art - the kind of thing we're likely to send out to subscribers of wowlookwhatigot.com.  We decided to make this an occasional series, and once we're up and running, we'll post every month with an in-depth discussion of that month's piece. To get started, a look at one of Vivi-Mari's handmade collages ...

"As Long as there is Life, there is Hope" : Handmade Collage :  31 x 23 cmCopyright © 2008 by Vivi-Mari Carpelan

"As Long as there is Life, there is Hope", is a mixed media collage consisting of photocopied images, decorative paper, and my own drawing. 

Sometimes I feel like a broken winged bird, or a chick in an unhatched egg, or even just the skeleton of something that could potentially fly... all of these musings are present in the symbolism of this image. The message isn't specific, but invites the viewer to let their own associations fly, using their own life experience as a starting point... 

When you look at a symbolic picture, it's often enough to let your imagination roam... but the experience deepen if you think about what the elements symbolize in general terms. It's not about reading an image literally, but rather allowing the elements to speak to you through a combination of thinking and feeling. Don't let your preconceptions about the facts of life rule your intuitive understanding of this kind of image. The way to see it is, the whole is greater than its parts... Looking at a symbolic picture from this point of view can stimulate your own creativity. It's literally about "thinking outside of the box"!

Eggs point to potential and rebirth. In primordial myths all over the world, the egg is a symbol of the very moment when the world came to being. "The One" was broken into two; Heaven (the white) and Earth (the yolk) became the first elements of reality as we know it. The two parts also denote the dualism that is present in our sphere of existence - everything has an opposite. On a very basic level there is up-down, male-female, night-day, cold-warm, young-old, and so on - perhaps you're familiar with the concept of Yin and Yang in the Chinese philosophy of Taoism? Yin (the feminine principle) and Yang (the masculine principle) exemplify the two opposite aspects of reality. 

A bird often symbolises spirit and a freedom from restraints. A skeleton is the very structure of our being, that which holds us together. Angels are usually seen as some form of messenger and the inspired help in moments of despair. This image is not about believing in angels, but about the belief that circumstances can change for the better. Help can come in the form of inspiration, or intuition, or another person - the angel in this picture symbolises any one of countless of possibilities. It happens when the time is right, or when the proverbial egg has hatched.

Vivi-Mari Carpelan, 2013

More movie-making

Vivi-Mari demonstrates how we are poverty stricken artists ... can't afford much electricity, obviously.

Finished the first rough cut of the promo video yesterday (hooray!). No transitions or color interjections yet (yeah, I know, but what do you call it when you just have a single color screen with some groovy music stabs to introduce the next scene? Guess it's just another transition really, but I'm going to have to find a catchy name for it! I quite like 'interjection'). Nothing done with the sound either, and no stills or voiceovers, but at least I can see that the whole thing is going to hang together, dialogue-wise. Off to go and put in some bits of soundtrack and try out some of those funky transitions now... By far the most ambitious video project I've done so far (yeah, like I've done a lot!) - I'm just hoping the whole thing doesn't look completely stupid after days of work!

The making of...

Making the wowlookwhatigot.com promo video ...

Your friendly local scribe pens another riveting video script - a still from our upcoming production, the catchily titled "wowlookwhatigot.com - the indiegogo promo"

Indiegogo.com has a number of friendly guidelines as to what makes a good pitch video for their funding site. It has to be simple, entertaining and informative, answering the users' potential questions about your project within the attention span of the average internet viewer! They are basically; who are you? Why do you want my money? What are you going to do with it? and What do I get out of it? Answer those questions succinctly and entertainingly and hopefully you're on your way to inspiring someone to invest in your project.

We both love vintage clothing and having an excuse to get dressed up, so it seemed natural to shoot a lot of short scenes in different costumes and in different locations, jumping from one to the other quickly. My theory was that that would make the whole thing easier to edit as well. It certainly made the while thing easier to shoot for a couple of people not used to memorizing whole stretches of dialogue!

Obviously we needed to get some of our artwork in there, as well as just putting over the message, so as well as having a little 'gallery' section with a voice-over taking about what we do, I decided that to break up the dialogue I would put in some simple colourful transitions between scenes incorporating some of our pictures - (this was inspired by some of the editing in the Swedish culture programme 'Kobra').  Finally we figured showing something of the beautiful area where we live would make the whole video (and concept) more attractive, especially to international viewers, so we shot some of the scenes outdoors, making use of a lucky coincidental snowfall last weekend, and I threw in some time-lapse footage of clouds racing over the countryside that I shot in the summer.

Vivi-Mari Carpelan - an artist outstanding in her field !!

Right now all the footage is shot, voice-overs recorded, sound effects assembled, and I'm starting to edit, trimming clips to the right length and getting them in the right order to tell a coherent story. This is the interesting bit, to me! More news coming soon :-)

Why crowd-funding?

We need a crowd !!
"Loose Promises" : Handmade collage : Copyright © 2008 by Vivi-Mari Carpelan 

Crowd-funding is at the heart of the wowlookwhatigot.com concept. We need two things to make the idea a success: capital, for a start, to put the whole thing into practice - to buy a suitable printer, consumables (ink for these things doesn't come cheap - at least £250 for a set of ink cartridges), rent some office space, etc. Money on its own, though, would just leave us with a nice printer sitting in an office somewhere. The other thing we need to make it into a real sustainable project is a list of subscribers. To get a starting list of interested people would normally cost us a lot of expensive advertising (i.e. a lot more capital) and we'd be thinking, probably gloomily, in terms of return on investment, probably followed by "is the whole thing really worth it?". The beauty of a crowd-funding-fuelled start-up is that it not only gives you the capital but an instant list of interested people.

Note I say "interested people", not "subscribers" - there's no way to sell subscriptions on a crowd-funding site, indeed they're not primarily intended for selling anything, although, for instance, many tech start-ups offer gadgets as perks, but for raising money to fuel ideas. That, of course, is exactly what we're trying to do with wowlookwhatigot.com - raise money to fuel an idea. The friends (for they will all be friends to us!) who invest in wowlookwhatigot.com won't be buying subscriptions, they'll be receiving trial issues of artwork as encouragement for their support. It's up to us to send work which is engaging enough for them to want to carry on and subscribe to the service, so even after we're up and running the whole thing continues to be a bit of a gamble. Attracting investors is our first big challenge. Converting investors into subscribers is our second, but that, as they say, is a whole new ballgame. One step at a time, eh?

We've chosen indiegogo.com as the crowd-funding site to launch our project. The reason is that such sites work in two different ways - there's the 'fully funded' version, like Kickstarter.com, where you know exactly how much your project is going to cost, and it's basically all or nothing. In this case you set a target and only get the money if you reach it - no point in carrying on if you can't afford what you were trying to do in the first place. In our case, though, the project is scalable - if we only raise a few hundred pounds we can still buy as smaller second-hand printer and get started - it'd just mean we have a 'kitchen table' enterprise rather than a large-scale one. In this model you get whatever money has been raised and cut your coat according to your cloth. The trade-off is that you pay a larger percentage to the crowd-funding site, and that has to be figured into your costs.

Having got the website ready for launch, the next job before we can go live is to make a promo video for the crowd-funding site - so onward with the video editing. I'll talk a bit about that process soon...

First steps

Screen-capture of the new wowlookwhatigot.com website ... ready for launch!  (Well, more or less)

So, backtracking a little, the first job on the list when setting up wowlookwhatigot.com (apart from coming up with the list in the first place, of course) was to design and put together the website. Having secured the domain name, I had to figure out just what the website needs to do. It was a bit of a change in perspective - the whole project more or less sprang into my head fully formed, with the concept of using crowd funding both to raise initial capital and, more to the point, secure an initial subscriber list to get things started. That meant that must of the mental effort was really focused on putting together the indiegogo.com page to raise funding, and advertising it to actually get people to visit and contribute to the project. I had to think though, what were we actually advertising? The backbone of the business itself would be the website - that's what will remain when all the crowd-funding hoo-ha has come to an end and we're left (hopefully) with a functioning business. It's the website which will become there backbone of the whole enterprise.

The goal in designing the site, then, was to come up with something that looks a bit arty and sophisticated, but hopefully not so much as to people off. Something accessible and navigable that would spark people's interest to the point where they would decide that the art itself looked worth having, and that £5 a month was a small price to pay for such groovy stuff.  The arty bit, I decided to make a bit subliminal by adopting a colour palette from an artist we both admire, Giorgio de Chirico. I was going to make the user interface very blocky and colourful to look modern and contemporary in the style of the new Windows 8 (formerly 'Metro') interface, but just as I was thinking about brightly coloured rectangles I happened to catch site of a box of arrow shaped 'Post-it' type stickers on my desk. I assembled a vertical column, one of each colour sticker, on a piece of black mount-board, scanned it, and hey-presto, a menu was born. I tweaked the colours to conform to the de Chirico palette, and twiddled about with Photoshop for a while...

So after about 3 weeks of putting together bits of design and writing web-pages (using a very old and cranky version of Dreamweaver), we have a website more or less ready to go live. Not visible to the general public yet - at the time of writing there's only a place-holder page at wowlookwhatigot.com, and I've asked a few people to review the site from the point-of-views of prospective users, but that will soon be changed - the indiegogo.com page is under way, this blog is up and running, and soon we'll be launching the whole thing for the as-yet unsuspecting public ....

Playing dress-up

Vivi-Mari does Bollywood ...  Still from the wowlookwhatigot.com promo video - coming soon!
Copyright © 2013 by Martin Herbert & Vivi-Mari Carpelan

Hooray! Yesterday we completed shooting all the footage for the wowlookwhatigot.com promo video. Whew! We've had three days out trudging round in the snow, standing in the middle of very cold fields in near whiteout, failing to get to one of our preferred locations because the road was blocked, and then coming home where Vivi-Mari spent ages dressing up various views of the house to act as sets, while we tried on virtually everything in our wardrobes to do silly things in front of the camera.  (See one of the best examples above :-).

A few things left to do - some voiceovers to record today, and a few sound clips to track down, and then I can start editing. What looked like it was going to take weeks is coming together remarkably quickly. It's actually starting to look as if we might be able to go live with the funding launch in a couple of weeks time... scary!

The artist's lot ...

I came across a really good illustration by Estonian artist Kai Kaljo  of why we need to come up with a whole new way of marketing art ... Thanks to her for making this wonderful video ... :-)  Please go and check out her work at http://cca.ee/webarchive/kaljo/works.htm.


 
Loser, 1997 from Kai Kaljo on Vimeo.