Producing "Meet a Brother: GARRET Edition"

Me filming my friend/fraternity brother, Garret
(photo credit: Maria Clarice Chua)

So I'm in a business fraternity at my school, Alpha Kappa Psi - Psi Lambda Chapter to be precise. I'm also its current historian. For those who aren't too savvy with Greek life terms, historian preserves the history of the chapter. They usually take pictures or videos of brothers at events or just wherever brothers congregate. Historian is, thankfully, a creative position in my fraternity. As long as it's approved beforehand, historians can preserve the history of the chapter using any medium they choose. For example, the historian before me took all of her pictures and compiled it into a huge scrapbook at the end of the semester. It was incredible.

I, however, am not very crafty when it comes to scrapbooking. I decided to choose a medium that was more suited to me. From this, I came up with the concept of a video series called "Meet a Brother". In each video, I would highlight a brother by "interviewing" them in a shaky, mockumentary-style of filmmaking. The interview questions would start out serious (e.g. "Why did you choose Alpha Kappa Psi?" and etc.), but then they would progressively turn ridiculous. Fortunately, the rest of my fraternity liked this idea, so I decided to go along with it.

Another shot of me filming Garret
(photo credit: Maria Clarice Chua)

I wanted these videos to show the more fun side of the fraternity. Sometimes business and academic fraternities get a bad reputation for being "stuck up" and "boring", but honestly, some of the funniest people I know are in my business fraternity! I wanted to show other people that through these videos. Of course, there's also a marketing aspect to these videos. Hopefully more people would want to join our fraternity if they knew that in addition to being professional, we're fun, too?

On the first day of filming, I realized that filming was the easy part. This was going to be a relatively short video with very quick shots and scenes. I'm pretty sure we wrapped up the first day of filming in a little less than half an hour (we had to film over a series of a few days due to new ideas for costume changes, lighting, and etc.).

Snapshot of my production notebook for this episode
(By the way, just noticed that I dated this storyboard as "2/14/12". Still not used to the fact that it's already 2013!)

It was editing that proved to be the beast. For a 2.5 minute video, I think I spent over 4 hours editing it. I really enjoy editing, though, so I didn't mind it. I just didn't think it would take so long to edit such a short video!

The problem I ran into the most was syncing audio perfectly with the video. Some of the shots intended to have music superimposed on it. I thought this was going to be easy. It sadly wasn't.

You see, for these videos I decided to go with Windows Live Movie Maker (or WLMM) because it was pretty straightforward to use, plus I was already experienced with it since I've used it before when editing other videos. (It also helps that it's free with my school-issued laptop)

Unfortunately, trimming audio on WLMM isn't so straightforward. There isn't any precise way to trim audio on this software, you just have to eyeball it and hope that it syncs well with the shot.

There's this one scene where the brother featured, Garret, is dancing to a Skrillex song. The audio from the video wasn't as clear as I wanted, so I had to superimpose the song over the shot. Some of Garret's dance moves had to sync perfectly with the music, so if it was out-of-sync, you would definitely be able to tell.

Preview of Garret's dance scene

After about an hour of trimming the audio to the perfect size and syncing it to Garret's movement, the shot finally turned out perfect.

I'm really excited to upload this video tomorrow! It took a lot of work to produce such a short video. And while I'm still learning, I'm really looking forward to future "Meet a Brother" episodes and other projects!