Videos and Motivation
Yesterday I had 12 people come over and everyone taped 3 words. I know some aren’t perfect, and I’m preparing to hear people say we didn’t do the ASL or Spanish word correctly. The thing is though, we followed as best as we could from the dictionaries we had.
Today I began the time-consuming process of editing the videos together. Fortunately, they are very short and I don’t have to worry about sound issues or mis-matched shots or multiple takes… any of the usual editing stuff.
These videos had their own problems. Namely, I didn’t have a ‘theme song’ set up yet. I quickly made an intro with a simple animation from Keynote, then had to ‘guess’ the timing when playing the music in Garageband. I’m grateful that my four year old computer can handle so much work! I’m always keeping him busy!
After doing this process over several times I finally found a pattern that seemed to flow well and was quick and simple. I referred to a video of old logos to give me inspiration. It will be nice someday to pass this type of thing off to someone who likes to do it. I don’t mind too much because I’m like learning stuff, but there is a lot research that I might have to research to make things go the way I’d like them too. Right now I can’t used Motion because my graphics card isn’t fast enough. This is a good thing though because I don’t want to learn the ropes of a program that I’d barely use.
Another part I didn’t anticipate was that if I shoot against a green screen I’d have to find a royalty free picture for every video! Yikes! I’m not ready to do all of that (although I tried for a few of the videos).
Fortunately, I remembered to focus on what is important. I wanted to get the first video done as a template so I and went with a basic color background. Some words will be easier to illustrate with pictures than others, and I can always change the background another time. Yay computers!
So after about 4 hours I had the first video edited and up on YouTube. I figured I’d start a few others and then do some other chores I’ve been putting off.
It will be such a challenge to maintain balance with productivity. I don’t want to spend my life fretting about things being perfect, but I also want to make some quality stuff. I still hold on to the belief that with quantity I will learn quality. I’ve seen a lot of my ideas get swept into the corner because I hadn’t felt it was ‘finished’.
I’m trying my best to learn how to ‘just do it’ and keep motivated. There are a lot of “what about…” types of people out there, and I would be paralyzed with all the work involved if I heeded every suggestion or comment from others. I hope I can start insulating my environment with others who share my values, the world can be such a battlefield when you are fighting for what you think is right.