Client Work (North by Northwest)

While the class watched "North by Northwest" Megan, Jayleah, and I worked on our Chisolm Trail Dance Team client project. For the assignment we were asked to do two main things; create a slideshow video of the dancers, and to film their spring show and then create copies of the show for all of the dancers.

To start off the project we began working on the slideshow for the banquet. Ms. Hankins, the drill team coach, had the parents of all the dancers put pictures of their son or daughter onto a google drive folder that was being shared with us. There were also video clips that Ms. Hankins recorded of the dancers talking about their favorite memories from the year. We had to import all of those clips into final cut, but once we started to edit we found out that not all of the dancers had the pictures or video clips that we needed. Learning to work with google drive was a bit of a challenge at first, but throughout the process we emailed Ms. Hankins frequently about who was missing what, and in doing so we were able to efficiently get the job done. The actual editing process was challenging due to the fact that our clips were not very organized, and it's hard to make a slideshow video creative. We learned the importance of naming your folders and having your project organized as well as how beneficial and important it is to communicate with your client. Creativity wise I think that we did a good job adding little elements to the slideshow that made it interesting to watch. Ultimately Ms. Hankins was really impressed with the outcome of the slideshow, and how efficient we worked.

After the slideshow was completed and given to Ms. Hankins to be played at the banquet Megan and Jayleah went to film the spring show at Chisolm Trail. Prior to them filming I checked out all of the equipment- camera, SD card, tripod, and battery. Unfortunately, I failed to realize that a 60D camera was not the camera to be used for filming long clips such as a spring show. As a result Megan and Jayleah encountered several problems while filming such as the camera randomly turning off, and the SD card saying that it was full. Had I checked out a Panasonic camera these problems could have been prevented. Luckily, Ms. Hankins had a dad at the show film all of the dances so we are going to get the clips that we missed from him and then continue to edit. I have definitely learned the importance of knowing which camera's are best for what and how important it is to have several SD cards in case something goes wrong with the first one. Although, we started editing with the footage we did get, we have yet to receive the clips from one of the students father's. Once we do receive that footage we will still face challenges when editing, but so far I have already learned a lot, and I am expecting to learn more as we continue editing.

I hope next year we are contacted by Ms. Hankins again, because I really enjoyed working on this project. If I could change anything about this experience and our editing process I would start by organizing all of my clips and pictures as best as possible, then I would check to see if I had everything that I needed. Also, I would of course make sure that I got the right camera depending on the task that was presented to me.