Shooting & Editing with my Padawan

Today we got up around 9am and started to work on what our plan was for today. My padawan Troy had highlights of what he wanted to say in his SAM-e Complete Good Mood Blogger contest. We planned to show it several times on our property and then go to Vasquez Rocks and shoot it a few more times.

Everything went pretty much as planned, it was windy which screwed with the audio but we would try and record while the winds died down. Our first location was behind my house over looking the valley below. I had him stand by a tree, which was nice as it kind of framed the picture. Next we went to the front of the house and I had him sit on our bench and do the entire piece over again.

We then drove to Vasquez Rocks where we did it again two more times, so we had a total of four different recordings of the same thing but in four locations. We got back and I started to upload the video while Harry and I went to a neighborhood meeting for the hour. Troy hung out at our place surfing the web. When we got back it was lunch time and I started uploading all the video clips to Avid. When we got back there were a few more clips that needed to be uploaded and another hour everything was ready to go.

For the next six hours Troy and I edited he contest video together. There were a few issues, the major one was the audio, the wind was so strong at times you couldn't hear Troy at all. Another issue was our first location, thought it was pretty, the tree branches blowing in the wind made for some strange shades on Troy's face which he did not like.. so we couldn't use any of that footage. Our second location, the lighting was great but there was a strange reflection hitting the camera lens which I didn't see when I was shooting. We could only use very limited amount of footage from that shoot, but this shoot had the best audio of course. So we pretty much used the Vasquez Rocks shoots to edit the video. Like I had said the audio was the worse but we manage to find bits and pieces to make the video work and other then the audio sound the piece turned out really good. We've uploaded it You Tube and it will go live for the contest in a few days.. I'll keep you posted.