COVID-19 has emerged in the world as the newest pandemic since 2009, that has quickly spread and stopped everyday activities. The virus has affected lots of people and without proper precautions, the conditions will get worse. People will get sick but it is about slowing the curve so hospitals aren’t overflowing. We need to stay together while staying apart physically.

In this project, our goal was to tell a story through a video of our community during this time of physical distancing. Through a topic we picked, we needed to interview someone and use this info in the video. 

I wanted to focus on what the district was doing to help the situation of the virus and try things that I have never done before. Taking 10s of hours of Mel life this video is by far the longest video I have created spanning over 13 minutes. In this video, it uses a variety of drone shots I took, two interviews and voiceovers. I used GarageBand to create the music and adobe premiere rush to edit.

The journey from having a vision of what I want to do to finished was tiring and especially long. I put so much effort into this video, planning, researching and creating with many inconveniences along the way. I took a long time creating the video but most of the time spent was not my fault. In the storyboard I had planned out, most of my shots were aerial drone shots so I needed to buy a drone quickly. I bought a drone that I had been looking at for a long time and it was supposed to come in a day. Instead, it came in just over a week which set back my production for a long time. 

The interviews first started with an idea to contact the district. I wanted to talk to someone making decisions and knowledgeable about the subject. I started by finding someone working for the district and I decided to email the communications director. I was able to get a response and after a bunch of emails, we settled on a time. I made many questions centred around her profession and the responses were really good. I used Zoom to call and using the record feature I was able to get a slightly laggy mp4. Then I decided to interview Mayor Little for more content and different perspectives in the video. I wasn’t able to do a video call but I was able to use the audio and fit it into the video well. I wanted to interview someone working at Vancouver Coastal Health to talk about the medical side but nobody got back to me. However, I would have had a much longer video and in the end, I didn’t need the interview.

Interview Layout for Banner

The drone shots were a great addition to the video and were fun to shoot. The drone arrived late but no project is going to work out perfect and there has to be at least one problem. Besides that, it was a really good investment and I will use it for many years onwards. The drone I bought is called DJI Mavic Mini which is very powerful for its small size. At only 249g (which allows you to fly a drone without a permit and registered) it has a gimbal for a camera that shoots 2.7k. Before I could film anything, I needed to practice in an open space. I planned what I needed to get done and when I was going to get them. I woke up early to get my shots and it was amazing to see what it could do. Unlike lots of my other videos, they were way more interesting to look at and showed many more things.

To make music compliment the talking I decided to make Lo-Fi which incorporates chord progressions, vinyl sound and a drum beat which is calm nice to listen to. I used GarageBand on PC because it provides more features than IOS and you can download plugins and provide different sounds. Lo-Fi is a genre of music meaning low fidelity that captures imperfections and is relaxing to listen to. To start I used a YouTube video to teach about chord progression and how to make it sound good together. I then added a second melody using a different piano type and bass to add a filler. I added a hi-hat, clap and bass drum for a beat to make you nod your head. I added a plugin called iZotope that adds mechanical noise and other features. To download the plugin it took many steps and a YouTube video to guide me. Finally to top it off, I added a vinyl and rain noise in the background to make “Lo-Fi.”

To prepare us to create our final song, I first created the song on IOS and I simply made a remix of this song called flamingo. I used the piano as the main melody, added drums for filling and bass that was using autoplay. The song turned out well and I used the tempo changer to make it sound jazzier.

Adobe Premiere Rush is a simplified version of Premiere Pro that I used to create my video. Premiere Rush, in my opinion, is a better program than iMovie, simply because of all the features it has and in every area Rush is better. With more text options, the ability to move videos around in the frame, multiple layers, better sound settings while still having a simple interface. Rush has thousands of texts which many are animated and you can download text from online. You can place the text anywhere you want unlike iMovie on IOS where you can only place text in two positions. Many extra features were nice to have and made editing easy. In Premiere Rush, shortcuts provided faster working and provided easier workflow. I wanted to make a banner around the interviews to show information while they were talking. Rush has a limit though and you can only have 3 layers so I had to use a different project to make a separate video to get more than 3 layers. This made editing the interview part hard to edit and ended up with imperfections.

Preparing and planning greatly helped the production of the video and sped up filming drone shots and recording voiceovers. Our first task was to outline our video through a storytelling method, either a story mountain or story spine. I chose to do both and go in detail so I can have a good idea going into the storyboard. Planning was really important to me because it would take me less time doing post planning and more of just creating. I made storyboard have every shot I wanted, a description and a few lines I wanted to say about it. Moving forward I then extended off my descriptions and wrote a script for voiceovers.

Editing took forever. Trying to trim the clips and picking only the most important parts of interviews while still looking and sounding good. Piecing everything together and finding clips that matched was difficult and time-consuming but eventually, I got a rough set of clips to put voiceovers in. This was a multi-step process, I added clips according to my storyboard, then added text and transitions, interviews, audio and finally finishing touches like filters. AirDrop allowed me to quickly exchange clips from my iPad to the computer to phone easy and made everything so much easier. 

This video shared a lot of info about our community and it portrayed the story of our community during this time of physical distancing. I put a lot of effort into all of the areas of this project, from music to the editing. This was a fun yet difficult video to produce and I learnt a lot of new skills as well as a new program.