Video Entry #6 - Homework task "Pitfalls of Independent Living"

We were given a homework task to do a 2 minute mini-documentary on either the "Pitfalls of Independent Living" or "My first day at Sussex". Our group chose to do the "My first day at Sussex". We went out and filmed people we knew and some people who we just asked as they were walking past. I interviewed the person we did not know. It was quite interesting being in the position of interviewing people. Peter had taught us techniques of how to sit and use their body language, not saying anything but using facial expressions and nodding to communicate and how to ask questions. My interview did not go especially well, the girl was nervous and kept looking at the camera. We needed to have brought the camera closer to the interviewer. It was also a silly mistake but the microphone can be seen in shot. We could have cropped it out in post, but in the real thing, you don't want this to be happening. At least we did it in practice and not the real thing.

We then went and imported the footage onto the Mac from the tape which was a new thing to me and I was a bit tentative about pushing a tape which had our precious footage on it, into something I didn't know which way it went in. But we got it onto the Mac and tried to edit it in Premiere Pro. The footage was slow and lagging. When we dragged the clip onto the timeline, it said the settings needed to be changed to match the footage, and we did just that but it was basically, un-editable. So we will need to speak to Peter about that. 

We edited on iMovie though, just to get a hands on feel with editing software. I've used Sony Vegas and Premiere Pro in the past, so iMovie was something new to me and I disliked every bit of it. Editing was such a hassle on this software. But we tried to make at least a rough cut of our footage. Unfortunately when it came to the lesson, the map of what we had done was on the timeline but the actual footage wasn't so it was kinda awkward in class. But we just need to look at what we did wrong in the practice and learn from it and carry on.

Here's a picture of George operating the camera when we were filming