…at home!

This week marks the end of the final unit for my Professional Multimedia Content Creation class, COM 561. It also marks the 7th week of shelter in place in the Bay Area and California. While some of our friends in the Midwest are starting to get haircuts and grooming appointments for the dogs, we are still…here. More grateful than ever that we have a dog to help us pass the time.

For that reason, the past two weeks were pretty much a blur. I stayed home, worked on my Adobe Premiere project, and watched my classmates’ videos. Apart from that, there’s really nothing to report. The good thing is that working on my video kept me busy and while I was unable to get new material (thanks Covid-19 🙄), the topic I chose makes me happy.

This week was more about fine-tuning details here and there, and improving the video story draft I submitted a couple of weeks ago. Honestly, I also took a couple of days off from this video. By watching it SO many times, I began to ignore the things that needed to be improved, most of which were very accurately pointed out by my classmates.

The final video story

First, you should know that there were no major changes because as I mentioned, I could not get new footage. The storyboard remained the same and my actors (hehehe 😉) are still Mocha and his dad. Here’s what did change:

• Transitions. The lack of variety in my transitions was, overwhelmingly, the most criticized (constructively) aspect of my video story. In my original post, I commented that I had purposely used the same type of transitions to avoid making them a distraction. Turns out, I overdid it. I was SO consistent with the transitions, that they became a distraction because of how repetitive they were. I added different transitions, trying to be consistent with the scenes.
• L-Cuts and J-Cuts. One of my classmates pointed out that many of the transitions in Adobe Premiere were cheesy, but that L-Cuts and J-Cuts could help. I was watching videos to better give me an idea of how to best incorporate these in my video story and I came across this phrase: “The best L-Cuts and J-Cuts are those that go unnoticed.” Initially, I had included more than the 2 L-Cuts and 1 J-Cut you can see in my video story. I ended up reducing them because most of my audio was a voiceover narration. I used them to break up what felt to me like very long scenes. For example, the scene where I am in my living room and Mocha is doing what he does best: nap.
• Sound. I played around with sound effects on Premiere. Since I don’t have a separate mic, I had scenes with very loud background noises. Particularly the scene where I am in the living room, you could hear a very loud humming noise. For my draft, I increased the dB of the audio, but that didn’t work very well because it increased the volume of everything. For my final video story, I used the “Dehummer” and it worked like a charm!
• Music. Originally, I had only used a sad song for my introduction, called “Sad Song”. This song along the typewriter effect are both free to use under CC license 0 and can be downloaded from https://freesound.org/. For this video story, when the scenes go from black & white to color, the background music goes from sad to happy. I added a song called Happy and Joyful Children which I downloaded from SoundCloud and is free to use. If you are working on a video that needs a catchy, happy tune, this might be ideal for you! I added the link to the song at the end of my post.
• Text. The animated text is one of my favorite features of the video. I animated the text with keyframes and used the sound effect on the background. I made the fonts larger and added a couple of seconds to everything so it’s easy to read.

With that, I hope you enjoy the video and remain safe and healthy.

Wags & kisses,

Mocha’s mom