Adventures in Film Making

While I’ve done a fair amount of video editing and filmming in my day, and I’ve been around plenty of folks who know what to do with a video/film camera, I’m not exactly what you would call a “film maker”.

However, even though I’m not trained in the art of making films, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t interest me and I don’t try to explore that area when I have the chance.

Waiting for Bus No. 905

That chance came this past weekend when Ruhi and I took a bus trip to a small village in the mountain that housed a rather large University.  The Xi’an Fan Yi Da Xue (Xi’an Translation University) is a private College where folks learn to become translators.  It also just so happens that two of Ruhi’s friends live up there and teach at the school.

So, I took this opportunity to film our adventures and take some photos.   First I’ll talk a little about trip itself.

Usually when people make a film, even a documentary style one like I was attempting to do, they have some sort of theme or idea of what might come about — or perhaps they are exploring a topic or investigating a truth.  I was doing more of a travelogue piece so I had to think up creative ways to show our journey that wouldn’t bore the viewer to tears.  Nothing is worse than lots of the same shots over and over again (which unfortunately I may have ended up with).

I was also trying to come up with some creative ways to show the transition in scenery from the hustle and bustle of downtown Xi’an to the relative calm and quiet of the mountain town.  On the way up I tried doing this by shooting straight out the window and doing transitions, which you can see in the video.  And on the way down I did pretty much the same thing, but with a different angle.

But from my vantage point I noticed that what was really interesting wasn’t so much the scenery, but the people going on and off the bus.  So, perhaps a bit too late, I tried to capture some of that as well.

The second part of this was the actual editing process.  I use Sony Vegas (an older version that doesn’t hog up too many resources) because I’ve found Premiere to be a bit on the crashy side.

The first thing I do is organize my media.  I took a couple hours of footage and lots of photos so I organized those in various folders based on the content subject.

The second thing I do is set up my timelines.  One for text, one for video layovers, one for the main video, one for audio and one for background music.  I used to just stick stuff on whatever track I felt like, but I’m much more careful now, having made a muck of a project file in the past.

I took a pretty simple approach.  I would say the hardest part of the whole video was trying to come up with good transitional sections for when the music is playing at the end.  I had certain parts of the musicians playing that I wanted to show on video, so I had to intersperce the B-Roll type of footage around that.  And so I used the footage of our journey back down the hill.

One important thing is that if you have a long clip and certain parts of it need attention, you use Placemarks (I’m not sure what they are actually called, but the hot key in Vegas is “M” for “Mark”).  They allow you to specify a place on the timeline and label it.  As you can see, I would label my timeline based on the various video transitions that were going on.

Aside from that, I just let my creativity flow.  The total time spent on making this 5-6 minute short video (basically a vlog, if you will) was about 3 hours.  If it takes 3 hours to edit together a mediocre 5 minute short, I can’t imagine how much time it would take me to put together an actual film.

Many props to all your professional film editors out there.

Here is what my whole project looks like:

And so, here is the video.  I hope you enjoy it!  Let me know your thoughts!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg6bZipfaM8

And here is one for those of you in China:

http://v.youku.com/vshow/idXMTI4Mzk5MTA0.html

Waiting for another bus and another adventure