3:7 My 90 second Video for HW

As mentioned in my blog post about the group video we made, I decided I would make my own shorter video that focused on the artists of Hackney Wick rather than going with my group's focus of gentrification because I couldn't find a way to resonate with the topic and wanted my video to be fun and alive and not depressing and gloomy which is what our longer video is.

I compiled my 1.5min video through footage that we had as a team but also found footage from YouTube of street art and art festivals in Hackney Wick. Unfortunately, I came to the conclusion of making my own video a little too late and didn’t have enough time to shoot my own footage.

This was my first time editing in Premiere Pro so, naturally, I had a lot of difficulties. After I gathered all my footage and put it in the order I wanted, I cut it all down to the right timings to fit the 1.5min specification. I then made sure all the colour schemes throughout matched each other as most of the footage was found on YouTube from different uploaders.

I chose my audio to be the instrumental beat from this rap song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sALhYkA-ij4 because the song came on shuffle at the time of production and it just worked but in hindsight, I probably should’ve gotten some music from a Hackney Wick music artist to fit in with the artist theme.

I then added transitions which were a struggle as I didn’t actually know how to use the software. There were two clips in one of the videos I found, of an artist playing around with a can with his hands and then his feet (this is the clip https://streamable.com/2rh6d). So I thought it would be cool to have them play at the same time, cutting the clips in the middle and having it be one clip with the top half being of the hands clip and the bottom half being of the feet clip. I managed to crop the videos and size them and choose the slide transition but I found that as the clip is so short in length, by the time the animation had finished, it had already ended so you couldn’t even see what was happening. This is what I mean: https://streamable.com/vrodp I realised you can make transitions shorter (or longer) if you wanted to by trimming them down so I did just that and got the outcome I wanted, which can be seen here: https://streamable.com/byop8

After learning how to use transitions, I ended up putting them almost everywhere and realised too much is over-kill, for example, in this clip https://streamable.com/uwvh0 I used the gradient transition to show footage from the canal but realised it was too distracting and it looked better without a transition: https://streamable.com/wfal5

As my audio had a lot going on, I wanted my clips and transitions to fit in perfectly with the beat and I found that in some places, my original order of the clips didn’t match the audio as much https://streamable.com/c8tz7 and so I experimented a bit and swapped some clips around and found that it worked better this way: https://streamable.com/w2cmw

In the end, I was really happy with my clips and the transitions all worked perfectly but I realised I needed some text so at first I had just a simple title screen at the end where my video fades out but it didn’t feel fun.

As I made the video after doing the branding for my Hackney Wick artists website/app, I was reminded of my three chosen words; creative, independent and expressive. I decided to add these words as cut out letters throughout the video and then changed the way I wrote Hackney Wick at the end to fit in with the theme.

Unfortunately, I didn’t realise until after I had uploaded the video on YouTube, that at the end, my letter sizing in my title screen that at first says ‘Hackney’ then says ‘Hackney Wick’ didn’t match and so didn't flow right. So, I had to go back to Premiere and fix it and then reupload it.

My full short video can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK06Y7DChtY&feature=youtu.be

Overall, I’m so proud of my video and love how it turned out as I had never done anything like it before and didn’t have much time either. Although I’m still a little sad about how my group worked together, it was refreshing to have full control over something and to really make it my own.