In working on the draft portion of my video story, Premiere was perhaps the toughest program that I have worked on so far this semester. Adobe Premiere combines many of the elements of other programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and Audition, so it was a bit overwhelming trying to figure out how to work things, even with the help of the tutorials. Not to mention that since Premiere is such a large program, it would sometimes work slowly on my laptop and not cooperate. The only experience I have with editing videos is with Windows Movie Maker, which, I realize, does not contain many of the capabilities that Premiere does.
In deciding the concept of my video, I knew I wanted to present it from my perspective. Going off of that, I chose to film different parts of my everyday life, with the video culminating at an audition room, something I am familiar with and is a big part of my life as an actor. I also used a voiceover in the form of my narration to help convey the message.
To make the video, I filmed myself performing different daily activities with a camera in one hand. For the driving shots, I set my camera on my dashboard while I was driving to different locations such as work and the gym. To edit them together, I mainly used Tutorial #1 as guidance because it was the one that contained music, which I used as well. I used quick cuts for each shot, and I also recorded narration for the audio portion of the video. It was surprising to me how quick each shot needs to be in the video in order for it to not seem too long.
After my first draft was completed, I realized it needed work. The message of the life of an actor was not fully conveyed via my video. This was due to a combination of vagueness in the filmed images and the narration, which my instructor noted when commenting on my video. There was also a smaller issue with the volume, in which my voiceover was a bit drowned by the music, which a classmate noted.
To fix the vagueness issue, I decided to insert shots of myself going through a script throughout the video. I did this by filming myself flipping through a script, then cut them in-between some of the shots. One of the new effects that I added was a cross fade with two images on top of each other. I then set the image on top (the one with the script) to 65% opacity to make it look like the two images are combined. I also significantly changed the narration of the video to be much more specific. In the narration, I talk about being an actor going on auditions, and the fact that this is my passion. Lastly, I adjusted the volume using the volume control panel to make the music a bit softer and my voiceover a bit louder.
Jonathan Keyes 