Check out "Meet a Brother: COOKING Edition"!

featuring Will Manning

Boom Pole Operator/Assistant: Allen Chiu

I'll be making another post soon to talk about the details behind shooting this episode.
But in the meantime, hope you enjoy the video!

Off to shoot the next episode of "Meet A Brother" soon!

Wish me luck!

Party Foul #1: Missing Audio

So this week in our Intro to Video Production class, our one minute movies were unveiled. I was really excited to show the class what my partner and I had worked on...until I find out that when it was exported to a Quicktime file, there was no sound!

Even though our movies were not supposed to have dialogue or music, we still needed to record diegetic sounds. I was mortified when there was no sound coming from the speaker.

One thing I realized, though, was that when we were recording sound and editing in Final Cut Pro, sound was coming out of only one side of the headphones. I didn't pay much attention to it, but now I know that even if there's a slight problem, I should try to fix it.

So the lesson I learned is "don't assume everything is going smoothly" and "double check everything".

Editing my one minute movie project - "Dreamer"

So one of the assignments for my Intro to Video Production class is a one minute movie where we cannot have dialogue, written words, and we can only use diegetic sound (sound coming from the story space of the movie, which means no music).

My project partner and I learned a whole lot just from these few days of filming and editing. One thing to remember from now on is to not underestimate how long shooting a short scene would take. Sometimes, it would take half an hour to shoot a 5-second shot due to set-up time and shooting multiple takes.

This was also our first time working with Final Cut Pro (or "FCP" for short). One word I could use to describe this software is "robust". It is very different from Windows Live Movie Maker (WLMM). I like that there's a lot more you could do with FCP than WLMM, specifically audio.

If you remember my post about producing "Meet a Brother: GARRET Edition", it was really tough with the editing of the audio in WLMM. But with FCP, you can isolate the audio from a video clip (within the software) and edit it as its own entity. This feature, alone, helped trim down some editing time (that plus having a project partner haha).

Although our project has its hiccups (you can see our reflections in some of the shots if you look closely), it was really fun to shoot a movie with professional video equipment and use FCP for editing.

Hopefully if my partner's okay with it, I can upload our movie to YouTube so you guys can check it out!

"Meet a Brother: GARRET Edition" The Final Product!

Here's the link to the YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dT3I2fejTyQ

Hope you enjoy it!

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.