Making Videos

Movies, Film, and Videos have always been a serious passion of mine. While I was in my teenage years friends and I would spend countless hours planning, shooting, and editing movies with our old Super 8 mm movie cameras. Then during high school and my first year of college we were introduced to 16 mm cameras, equipment, and of course the additional film processing expense. We did create some award winning productions, however the expense dampened our spirits and abilities to continue.

40 years ago home movies were quite a novelty and relatively few people participated in the phenomenon. Today with the ease of video nearly everyone is a film maker, and many people carry a video camera with them everywhere they go, in the form of a cell phone.

Back then if you had just developed a new product and were getting ready to market, you would be putting together some type of brochure to educate potential customers on the benefits and features of your new product. Today is a whole new ball game. Instead of just a brochure, now you must design a brochure, website, and video.

No longer is it enough for a graphic designer to learn only such graphic tools as Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark, or InDesign, they must also become familiar with video programs like Final Cut, Premiere, After Effects, Flash, and Dreamweaver. They may not have to know all the whistles and bells associated with each program, but they do need to know them enough so that their design work will work with any of the additional mediums that are required.

The following are a few of the projects that I have had the opportunity to work with. The first being a video my daughter requested of me. She had been asked to the Prom in a relatively cleaver way and she wanted a cleaver way to return her response. She had chosen the song “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen and wanted to do a fun video to it. We set out a plan and with help from a lot of friends and a couple of teachers the following video was produced. Click on the "Call Me Maybe Prom Response" link to see the video.

Call Me Maybe Prom Response

A few production notes of interest we used three High-Definition Video cameras. The video was edited in Adobe Premiere with some special effects being done in Adobe After Effects. The violin solo at the beginning of the song was lengthened by nearly three times to allow the visual establishment of the story to be strengthened.

Our young man was stocked throughout one school day by a team of friends and teachers, by the end of the day he had a good idea something was up, but didn’t know what.

The bumping of the cars was not staged, but it actually happened as Mitch was being stocked by our camera teams.

Overall it was one of the most enjoyable projects I have had the opportunities to do. Of course, I may be a little prejudice towards my daughter.