Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Mark Cersosimo. I work at vimeo.com as a Community manager, and I'm also a filmmaker. Vimeo is the number one spot for creators to upload their content. We foster this amazing community of people who are really passionate about film and filmmaking. As the community manager, I watch thousands and thousands of videos every year, and lots of reals, and resumes, and people just always trying to find work out there. I've watched so many awful reals. There's just so many bad ones out there that you can't even watch all the way through. They just drag on forever. They never really sell the person. In this class, I'm going to show you how to show off with a one minute video resume. The video resume is a video designed to show off you, to show off what it is that you view in a nutshell. I'm going to show you how to do this by working with my friend, Alex. She is a weaver and she needs a video resume. She wants to show off her weavings, what she does. So, we're going to go to her apartment and we're going to film a video resume, and you're going to see exactly how I do that. After shooting it, I'm going to take you through the whole editing process, so you can just see the whole process from start to finish. The project for this class is to create one minute video resume that people actually want to watch. All you need is anything that can record a video. That includes your phone, a point and shoot camera, DCLR camera if you have one, anything at all. I can't wait to see all the work you guys make. I will be in the project gallery, checking all of them out. Good luck.
2. Planning Your 60-Second Video: We're here in my friend Alex's apartment. We're here to get started on making her video resume. We're going to begin with the planning process, that is the first step that you want to take. You want to get a sense of, what your video is going to look like? What it is you want to accomplish? What is your ultimate and goal? Your goal here is to get hired or to sell what it is that you're trying to sell. In this example, my friend Alex is a weaver. What we're trying to accomplish here is to show how exactly it as she does her weavings. We want to see her process, we want to see her finished product, and we want to learn a little bit more about her as a person. What we want to do here is keep the video to about one minute long. One minute is the ideal length because people really don't have the attention span to sit there and watch anything longer than a minute. One minute is super easy to digests. Two minutes is pushing it. Three to five minutes is long form. Anything longer than that, someone has to actually sit there and decide to watch. Anything under a minute is probably a little bit too short, you don't want to leave anything out. The first thing you want to do is come up with your elevator pitch. What that is, is picture yourself in an elevator, someone else gets on, and you're trying to tell your whole story to this person by the time either you or they get-off on another floor. What are the essentials that this person has to know about you in the shortest amount of time possible? Alex has her elevator pitch down. She knows more about herself than I do, and so she's going to guide me through this process so I can capture just the essentials of what needed to tell her story. You want to have some work to show people, both finished products and works in progress. You want to show-off what it is that you want people to buy. It becomes a little bit more accessible to those people once they actually see your process. It's a lot more intimate than showing your finished products. There's something called the Rule of Three's. If you say something about yourself, say three things that you like, three favorite cats, where three pieces of work. It's always best to tell it in a series of three. Three is not too many and it's not too little, it's the perfect amount. As I'm filming with Alex, I'm going to keep the Rule of Three's in mind. It's sometimes better to go over three, maybe four or five and then whittled those down in editing, just so you always have enough.
3. Assembling Equipment You Have: Now we're going to talk a little bit about equipment planning. The three necessities you need are tripod, something to stabilize, lighting and sound. The best equipment to use is the stuff you already have, you don't need anything crazy. The first piece of equipment you need is a tripod or something to stabilize. I have this tripod right here. It's 20 bucks. It's nothing crazy you don't need a multiple $1,000 tripod. You don't even really need one, you just need something to help stabilize your shot so it's not super shaky. Next up is lighting, you don't need any fancy lights either. The sun is the best light source you have available to you. One thing you have to be sure of though is to not stand directly in front of the window with the window behind you because then you'll just be one big shadow. Always make sure the light source is in front of you or in front of the thing that it is you're trying to shoot. Next up is sound, sound is a super important part and it's really easy to get good sound. All you need is a quiet space and some device to capture the sound. One super easy trick is to put your phone in your pocket while it's recording audio. The audio source is right near your mouth so it's capturing what it is you're trying to say. If you do use an external audio source you need to link that up while you're editing your video. So, when you're shooting, make sure you give yourself some audible reference in your audio track so, you know how to sync it up with your video later. Either with saying what take It is or at a clap so they can sync up really smoothly. You don't need a fancy camera, you can use your phone for this if you want to. I'm going to be using this point and shoot camera. You don't need a DSLR or anything crazy like that. So, for Alex's video, I'm going to be using this camera and this tripod and that's it. For audio, it's really quiet in here so I don't need any external audio devices. For lighting, there is a lot of great natural light in here so I don't need anything fancy for that either.
4. Storyboarding Your Video: Two things that will make your process a lot easier is scripting and storyboarding. Those will both help guide you along your way so you don't get lost while you're shooting. For scripting, all you really need to do is write a loose outline of what it is you're trying to shoot, some lines of dialogue, things that you want to make sure that are included. You want to hit the most important part. So, you don't leave them out. Everything else can be improvised. Storyboarding will help you visualize your shots so you know exactly what it is that you want to shoot. I'm terrible at storyboarding, and drawing is not one of my strong points. If you are too, you can just write out a shot list, a list of all the different shots that you want to get. If you are good at drawing, you can visualize it by drawing out each shot in sequence that you want to make. So, say, my first shot is of Alex behind her head. I'm just going to draw a loose, basic human outline here to show that this is behind her head. Then in front of Alex is her weaving loom. So, this doesn't look like much of anything, but it tells me that, okay, this is the shot that I want from behind her head. When you're storyboarding, you can also show movement. You can do that by drawing the next frame a little bit larger. In this case, I want to show a zoom. So, I'm going to draw these lines here to show that the camera is moving in. I'm going to show one more shot here of a close up of the room and Alex's hand on it. It's very, very simple. It doesn't need to really look like much of anything as long as you can understand what it is that you're trying to show. Anytime that you want a different shot, you're going to draw a different frame. I have six here. This is just going to be my first six shots, but you're going to want to continue till you get all the way through your video and show all the different shots that you need. If there is a specific shot that you have in mind, that you really, really want to get, this is good because it helps you, remind you that, oh, I want a really good close up of the weaving process or something very specific that it is that you want to show. It's also great to improvise while you're shooting. But again, it's also good to know, oh, these shots, we definitely have to get these. If anything else interesting pops up along the way, you get that too. One thing you definitely want to do is vary up your shot composition. You don't want the same static shots over and over again. You want to get a little bit creative with your camera movement and camera placement. One thing that's really good to do, but you need to be careful so it's not too shaky, is physically moving the camera. You don't want to zoom the camera. You want to physically take the camera and move it closer or further away from your subject. Getting interesting angles like directly overhead or maybe from a bottom corner, just get different sorts of perspectives that aren't average, something to make it a little bit more exciting.
5. Shooting Your Footage: So, I'm with Alex who's the star of the video in her apartment. We'd been friends for a long time, which really helps with getting warmed up. You want to make sure your subject is super loose and just really comfortable and ready to go. If you don't know your subject, it's best to maybe have one of their friends there so they can just help ease the traumatizing experience that is being on camera, for some people. We've moved all of the furniture around the room to give ourselves some room to work here and we're pretty much ready to go. One other thing you want to do to prepare is to make sure all your equipment is ready. Make sure your batteries are charged, make sure your lens is clean and wiped. Just get everything set and ready to shoot. The first thing we're going to do is have a little discussion and this is what we're going to capture on camera. I'm going to ask Alex a bunch of different questions about what it is she does. Basically, I'm going to have her tell me her elevator pitch. But we're going to stretch it out into maybe a 10-minute conversation so we have enough information just in case we need to cut some stuff out of it. One thing you want to make sure is your subject is repeating the question and their answer. So, if you ask them, "Why did you start weaving?" Their answer would be, "I started weaving because." Not just starting with because, because then there's really no context to what they're saying. Don't forget you're cutting your question out of it, you're not going to hear your voice, you're only going to hear your subject. So, if you're ready to get started let's do it. Sure. So, now we've got our interview setup here. As I said, you don't need any fancy equipment. I just have my tripod sitting on here to stabilize it a little bit. Alex is sitting opposite of me and we're pretty much ready to go. One thing I'm going to have her do is to not look in the camera directly. There's a mirror over there, so she's going to be talking to herself. That's just a matter of personal preference. You can have your subject talk to the camera if that's what they want to do and action. I'm Alex, I live in Brooklyn, although I'm originally from Canada. I first got into weaving when I moved into this apartment and I was looking for some arts to hang up on my walls. When I saw how expensive the weavings were on Etsy I thought to myself, "I could learn how to do that." Ended up taking some classes and I've been weaving ever since then. You want to go into what is it you like about it and why you continue to do it and invest more money into bigger looms and things like that, and action. So when I started weaving, I really just love that it was something creative I could do while I was relaxing, watching TV. I've always been a little bit crafty and would knit so. Just close it and then open it up to that page. Okay. Cool. So, we've got the interview done from the A set up. Now, we're going to go to the B setup. The purpose of that is the vary up the shot's a little bit. We have one static shot from the front and sometimes you're going to want to cut to another shot of the same interview. So, I'm going to just move the camera, because I don't have two, and we're going to try and recreate some of the magic that we did the first time. We're going to have her answer the same set of questions and we're going to try and match up her answers to the ones that she said the first time, so it's a seamless transition between the two. So the first question was who you are, where you live and how you got into this, and action. I'm Alex, I live in Brooklyn. I'm originally from Canada and I first started weaving. Cool. I think that's everything. It's important to get a lot of coverage. Look around your location and look for interesting shots you can get that you maybe didn't think of prior. In this case, I'm looking around the room, I can tell that I want some shots from back here, maybe some camera movement behind the loom and showing Alex's face. These were things I didn't think of prior to actually being on location. There's always a lot of improvisation required while shooting. You have to be flexible. Make sure that if you get a wide shot, you also get a range of different close-up shots, so you can cap between them. You don't just want one shot of the same thing, maybe it doesn't look that good when you're editing and you need to switch it up and go to a different shot. Always get way more footage than you think you're going to use. I'm going to estimate for this one minute long video, I'm probably going to have about 10 minutes worth of footage. That gives me a lot of wiggle room and a lot of stuff to play around with later. It's also a good idea to get something called B-roll footage. B-roll or shots that aren't necessarily directly related to the video you're shooting but are things in the area or in the room that you are, that sort of tie it all together and bring you into that space. Now, the first shot I'm going to do here is the shot that we first storyboarded, that's the one we're moving closer to Alex from behind her. Now, remember, we're moving instead of zooming, because we're not shooting a cheap horror movie. So, we're just going to stay as stable as we can. Now, it's a good idea to shoot each shot that you want about three times, keep the rules of threes in mind. Sometimes the first shot just doesn't work out and you don't realize it until later. Always best to have a safety. See, in this case, I think third shot was the best shot because it showed some hand movement from Alex. I didn't get that in the first two. Now, I'm going to try a bunch of different shots from behind her just to get something varied. One thing you want to look for is things around your location that you can play around with and be a little playful. So, here, we have this, I'm going to try and get a shot through this because it looks pretty cool. You want to get a lot of different shots from a lot of different angles. You never know which short you're going to use. So, just get a whole bunch. When moving, it's a good idea to just use your legs because those are the most stable part of your body, as opposed to your arms, they can get a little bit wobbly and to keep the cameras close to your chest as possible. Make sure you have a good range of wide shots and close-up shots. Don't mind me. Don't be scared to experiment. If you find some crazy shot that you want to do and you're not sure if it works, just test it out. It might be great. You might have to throw it out, but it doesn't hurt to try. If there are specific tools that the person's using. It could be a good idea to get some B-roll and some close-ups of those tools to just put into the shots a little bit, to sprinkle them in. Can you put those scissors back down again. I want to see you take them and move them. [inaudible] Can you do it one more time? Okay. Perfect. Okay. Now, I'm going to get some B-roll of things around this room that ties it all altogether. This is just so we can see where does Alex create these things? What sort of environment is influencing her designs of her weavings?
6. Editing: Coverage Footage: Okay. So now, we're in Adobe Premier, and you can see I have all of the footage that I shot right here in the timeline. There's about 20 minutes worth of footage that I shot for this one minute video. Now, where do I start? That's a very good question. There's so much footage here. What I like to do is I'd like to just take out all of the bad footage. So I'm going to go through this all and pick and choose what are good shots and what are bad shots. Then, I'm going to remove all of the excess footage I have in here. Like here, you can see I panned over, and right over here, there's a person and there's a tripod leg. That's something that we don't want to see in the final video. So that's something we're obviously going to leave out. We only want the best versions of every shot. So now, I'm going to go through, I'm going to remove all the stuff that I know that we're not going to use. This shot here is very shaky, it doesn't look like I was ready so that one probably stopped and started without meaning to do that. Here, again. Here, I think I was just waiting to shoot so. Okay. So here's where it actually starts. So I'm going to remove everything before that. Okay. There's a little shake there so I'm going to remove that. All right. So I'm going to stop this shot right before that other shake. You only want the best stuff. If you come across something that may or may not be usable, just keep it anyway just in case. Right now, we're only getting rid of the stuff that is 100% not good. Here, you can see I have five different shots of the same exact thing. I just did the same thing over and over and over again because one of them is going to be the best shot. One of them is going to be awful and the other three are just going to be okay. So this gives me a lot of room to play around and choose which one is going to work the best. Now, these shots here, they're a little shaky, and I knew that they'd be shaky because I was doing it all handheld. But this is something that most editing programs can fix with image stabilization. It doesn't always look great but sometimes, it can clean up a shot just enough. Remove all that shakiness. There's that experimental shot that I made. Now, here, you can see once again there's someone in my shot here. So this might not be usable but we're going to keep it to see if we can fix it a little bit later. Sometimes, you can only use a portion of the shot but that's okay. You should keep it anyway, hold that aside just in case. Sometimes, you'll watch your footage back and think, "What was I even thinking?" That's why I'm just going to get shots from all different angles because you never know what you're going to end up using. Some things that you think were great at the time of shooting turns out not so great when you look at it when you're editing. Here's another super experimental shot that I did. This one ended up actually working. I think that looks pretty good. I couldn't even see the screen when I was shooting this so it's hit or miss. Now, here's some of that B-roll that I was getting of Alex's apartment. This shot actually didn't really turn out all that well. I'm a little shaky here so I might not end up using that one but it's a good thing I got a whole lot of other B-roll to put in here. Alex has a really cozy apartment that really reflects her personality very well, and that's really, really good to include that just as another way of showing off who Alex is.
7. Editing: Interview Footage: So, here I've asked Alex the same question twice, how did she get into weaving? So, I have two almost identical answers but one of them has a little bit better flow than the other one does. So, I'm going to use the second take. Whenever you have multiple takes of the same thing, play them back over and over and over again and more often than not, there will be something about one of the takes that just slightly make something a little bit better than the others. That's the one that you're always going to want to use. During the editing process, if your subject stumbles over their words a little bit, that's something that you can always take out. So, you can hear, she started her sentence with, "So when I- when I-" See that? So, we can just cut that right out and we're going to start on the second time where she says when I. So now I've removed the part where Alex stumbled over her words and it plays back really smoothly now. When I started weaving- That right there is called Movie Magic my friends. You're also going to want to remove a lot of ums and uhs and anything else that interrupts the flow. Don't forget, you only have 60 seconds here to tell a story and you don't want to take up any time with ums and other awkward pauses. Since we have a lot of footage that isn't just Alex talking, we can cover up those little ums and uhs that we're taking out with other footage. So, here we're going to take out one of Alex's ums. Because something creative I could do while I was relaxing. So, did you see that jump cut there? She was in one position and then she moved to another position because we took out about a second of video in between. That is something that we're going to cover up with other footage. We'll get to that a little bit later. Now, I've asked Alex way more questions than we could ever fit within 60 seconds. So, what you want to do is, when you're watching all of this stuff back, you're going to have to make some really tough decisions and cut out stuff that you're not going to want to cut out. So, here I have Alex talking about traveling and picking up yarn along her travels. It's a really great story but it's not the most important part of the story and it's something that unfortunately, although it's nice, we're going to have to take it out. The editing process is a really ruthless, heartbreaking process. You're going to have to lose some of your most beloved footage but it's for the greater good. So, now I'm done taking out all the footage that I know that I'm not going to use. So, I took it from 20 minutes worth of video down to about seven. That's a good start but we still need to take six more minutes out.
8. Editing: Pulling It Together: So, here I have all of my footage, every little piece that I'm keeping. It's about seven minutes worth and what we're going to do is we're going to continue trying to put this stuff together. Now, one thing you have to keep in mind is what is the base for this video? What is the most important part? The most important part is learning about Alex and that's what comes across in her interview footage, which is all of this stuff right here. So, that's the foundation that we're going to lay down. So, I'm going to take all of my extra footage, I'm going to put it out of the way, and right here is all the interview stuff. You can see the interview itself is about three minutes worth of footage. So, we need to take about two minutes out of this. Luckily for me, some of the stuff are extra camera angles that I've tried to get. So, this stuff doesn't account and we're left with a little over two minutes, so we need to cut this in half. I'll get to this extra stuff in a little bit. So, now what we want to do is play this back and figure out what stuff is essential and what stuff can go. I'm Alex. I live in Brooklyn. I'm originally from Canada and I first started weaving when I moved into this apartment and there I was looking for something to hang up on my walls. When I saw how pricey some of the weavings were on- hang up on my walls. When I saw how pricey some of the weavings were- So, sometimes even taking out an extra one or two words out of a sentence, it could be extremely helpful in cutting it down. On Etsy. I deci- I decided I'd rather learn how to make them myself and I took some classes and I've been weaving ever since then. When I started weaving I really just loved that it was something creative I could do while I was relaxing, watching TV. I've always been a little bit crafty and with knit. So, fibre arts weren't really completely new to me, but weaving's just a new way to express myself and got a lot of positive reaction from my friends and family when they saw what I was making. That just made me want to continue and got a lot of positive- It's a new way to express myself and- Now, what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to try and incorporate our additional camera angle that we shot. Now, this is a very similar answer to the first one that Alex gave. So, what we're going to try and do is use part of the first answer and part of the second answer and make it seem like it's the same exact thing, just two different camera angles. So, here we have Alex saying she is originally from Canada, and that she first started weaving. Now, I know that Alex had a very similar thing in the first take. I'm Alex. I live in Brooklyn. I'm originally from Canada- Brooklyn. I'm originally from Canada and I first started weaving when- So, here we're going to take out the part where Alex said that she's originally from Canada and she first started weaving. We're going to remove that from the first clip and then here we have Alex saying the same thing from the alternate angle. We're going to slide it right in there. We're going to make it seem like it's the same thing and it should be pretty seamless. Let's check it out. I'm Alex. I live in Brooklyn. I'm originally from Canada and I first started weaving when I moved in this apartment. Okay, not too bad. We're going to fix this up a little bit. Because the audio is a little bit mismatched. You can hear she says weaving and then you can hear in the second clip the G comes back in in weaving. Weaving when I moved in- So, we're just going to clean that audio up a little bit. Started weaving. So, it'll be a lot more seamless. In Brooklyn. I live in Brooklyn, originally from Canada. All right, so now let's play that back and see how it all looks. I'm Alex. I live in Brooklyn, originally from Canada and I first started weaving when I moved into this apartment and I was looking for something to just hang up on my walls. That is beautiful. So, we've cheated and made the viewer believe that we've used two cameras, but we've only used one. Makes everything look a lot more professional, and it's really nice to switch up the shots a little bit. So, here we have some B-roll of Alex holding up a magazine that she was in and here we have Alex talking about being in that magazine. So, what we're gonna do is we're going to take the footage of Alex holding up this magazine, and we're going to remove the audio from it. Then we're going to take the footage of Alex talking about the magazine. Now that's the audio that we're going to want to play and we're going to put this footage of the magazine and mix it in with Alex talking about it. This British crafting magazine. I'm going to put that here. Found my work and they reached out to me and they asked me to actually do a tutorial that they would use in their magazine. It's so cool to see the final product and see it in print. It's great if I inspired other people to learn how to weave and- Okay, so now we're going to see what that looks like when we put the footage of her looking through the magazine, on top of her actually talking about the magazine. It makes it a lot more dynamic than just showing her face, talking about it, and then showing the magazine later. You kind of want to see both at the same time. This British crafting magazine found my work and they reached out to me and they asked me to actually do a tutorial that they would use in their magazine. It's so cool to see the final product and see it in print. It's great if I inspire other people to learn how to weave and pick it up. That looks pretty good. Okay. So, now I've got all the little pieces that I want Alex to say in the video, and I have them all set up right here. They hit one minute and five seconds. That's not bad. We almost had our minute mark. But what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go through, and I'm going to cut out even more little pieces of silence and ums and uhs. I bet we can hit one minute exactly. You don't have to worry about really cutting this footage up. You're going to be able to hide any cuts and missing parts with B-roll and other footage that you have available. One thing you're probably going to want to do is to leave a little gap of maybe one or two seconds in-between each thought. So, in this first part here I have Alex talking about who she is, and how she got into weaving. In this next section, she's going to be talking about why she loves weaving. Those are two separate thoughts and we don't really want them to run into each other. So, make sure that there's a little gap here, just a little bit of breathing room in between each different thought. Okay, so I've now cut out the additional ums and uhs. Look at that, I hit exactly one minute. I've really left just the essential information in here that's needed to have someone create a human connection with Alex and really understand what it is that she does. There's nothing extra in here that isn't needed.
9. Editing: Polishing Your Video: Over here, I have all the interview footage, and then over here is all of my B-roll footage, and all the footage I have of Alex doing her craft. You're going to want to find a good balance between the two. You don't want to show too much of either one. I go with about a 25 percent to 30 percent of showing the person, and the rest is all showing other stuff. No one really wants to just sit and watch a person talk, they want to see what it is they're all about. So, I'm going to go through my footage here again, and see what shots are my favorite. Which ones do I absolutely want to include? Also, don't forget, you're going to want to remove the audio from all of those clips, you don't need any of that audio. The only audio you're going to be using, is the audio of your subject talking. You should also add in some music, but we'll get into that in a little bit. The first thing I definitely want to include are my Swiss shots. So, we got a little experimental here, and we included this cool effect called the swish. That's a transition to get from one shot to another, in which you rapidly move the camera up, or down, or left, or right, and then the next clip you shoot, it does the same thing. Here, take a look at what I mean. It's a really fun and super simple effect that works for a lot of different scenarios, and I'm just going to pop it right in here. What I'm actually going to do, is I'm going to speed this up a little bit, because they're all a little bit longer than I wanted. So, I'm going to speed them up to 150 percent. So, now let's play this little piece back and see how it looks. That event got a lot of positive reaction from my friends and family when they saw what I was thinking and that just made me want to continue and get better. Sweet, that works great. So, now we're going to search for some more footage that we can include here. So, I'm going to make my establishing shot a little bit something more experimental. This was something that just caught out of the corner of my eye, it was just a decorative item on Alex's mantle, and I was like, what would happen if that was in the foreground of my shot with Alex in the background? Including a little bit of movement, that's a really dynamic shot, and it looks really good. I think I'm going to use that as my establishing shot instead. So, we're just going to put that right near the beginning. All right, and that's it. That's all we're going to use, we're going to put that right there. It's a similar shot, but I have it way more close up. You see that? So, it's from the same angle, just a little bit closer to Alex's body. So, that's what I'm going to put in next, because I think it's a natural transition. I first started weaving when I moved to this apartment and I was looking for something to hang up on my walls. One thing you want to watch, is make sure that if you have two similar shots, you want to make sure that the hands or body placement are in a similar position when you go from one shot to the other, so that it doesn't move. So, here you can see Alex's hand is on her loom right here, right hand is on it. When we go to the next shot, and her right hand is still on the loom. It's not in the exact same spot, and she's not holding the tool in the exact same way, and she's not holding the exact same tool, but I think it's close enough that it'll fool most viewers. Now, we're going to get up even closer with this shot. So, these are three shots that are completely different that are all basically showing the same exact thing. Shot variation here has really helped tell the story. You don't just want to see one thing from one angle, show it from a bunch of different angles, show it from a different perspective. So, here we're going to use a jump cut, which I think it's okay to use in this scenario. It's just going to show a passage of time. So, here we have her touching her loom, she's about to stick her hand through it. Now on this shot, she's doing the same thing. Perfect. But we want to get to the end of what she's doing, so we're just going to use a cut here. In fact, we're going to use two cuts. That's a fine way to speed up time without actually speeding up the footage. You just cut chunks out of it, and it still works pretty well. Okay. So, we're going to continue. putting in our B-roll here, and our quick shots of Alex working. The last thing you're going to want to do, is find some really good music for your video. For a lot of people, this is actually the toughest part, because you want to find the music that fits the project perfectly. There are a lot of great resources out there for music including The Vimeo Music Store, Free Music Archive, and lots more. There's a ton of music out there that's royalty-free or under a creative commons license. You just have to get out there and search. I found a song on the Vimeo Music Store. It's a creative common song, and I can use it for free. So, we're going to pop it right into our timeline here, and next, what you're going to want to do, is you're going to want to lower the audio level. Because without doing that, the song is just going to overpower anything you're subject is saying. You couldn't even hear Alex speak. So, we're going to go ahead and lower that level. When you're doing this, it's important to try it with both headphones on and headphones off because you never know how people are going to be listening to this. So, you're going to want to find a balance where it sounds good with both headphones off and headphones on. Sometimes, especially if you're shooting with your phone, or point-and-shoot camera, the sound that you're going to capture isn't going to be all that high. So, you're going to need to raise that volume in your editing program in conjunction with the lowering the volume on the music track that you selected. Okay. So, now I have both the audio from my interview, and the audio of the song working together perfectly. They both have really great levels that sound good with both headphones on, and headphones off. When choosing a song, make sure it fits within the scope of your project. You're not going to want to choose a death-metal song if you're trying to tell the story about someone who does weaving. One last thing you're going to want to do, is add in contact information. The whole point of this video is to show off who you are, who you're about, and you're going to want people to contact you. So, here let me show you what I'm talking about. Here, I'm going to add some information. I'm going to put this at the bottom of the screen. So, here you can have your titles. Maybe just at the bottom of the screen the whole time, that could look a little bit sloppy maybe. I think what I'm going to opt for here, is including it at the very end. Okay. So, we're going to fix this text and make it look pretty nice. So, we can have the contact information right there at the very end of the video. Now, I know what you're thinking, Mark this makes the video a minute and five seconds long. That's over a minute. Yes, you have a good point but the video technically and a minute-long. I'm just adding one last shot with the contact information at the end, it's totally fine. If you want, instead of just having a black screen here, it could be white, it could be rainbow, you can play around with it, and make it a little bit more quirky, just make it fit you. If you want, you can even include a call to action at the end. So, instead of just writing the name you can write, "Say hello" or maybe even a bolder call to action like, "Hire me". You can put in whatever you want, whatever you think fits. For this video, I'm just going to leave the name, number, and email address. That gives us our completed video. Now, if you have a some video editing knowledge, what you can do, is add in some color grading or some other color correction to make it visually look exactly how you want it to. It's not completely necessary, but if you know how to do it, it's a nice added bonus. I think that just about covers everything. I've guided you through sorting through this whole mess of footage that you have, and brought you all the way through to a completed project. Now, all of this stuff varies depending on what editing program you're using. If you're using a phone or an iPad, you're going to have a little bit less control over your footage but just make do with what you have. You don't need any big fancy editing software like Adobe Premier, there are always ways to work around the limitations of the software that you're using.
10. Sample Project: Alex's Weaving: I'm Alex. I live in Brooklyn, originally from Canada. I first started weaving when I moved into this apartment and I was looking for something to hang up on my walls. When I saw how pricey some of the weavings were, I decided I'd rather learn how to make them myself and took some classes and I've been weaving ever since then. When I started weaving, I really just loved that it was something creative I can do while I was relaxing. It was creative but it was also productive and got a lot of positive reaction from my friends and family when they saw what I was making, and that just made me want to continue and get better. This British crafting magazine found my work and they reached out to me and they asked me to do a tutorial that they would use in their magazine. It's so cool to see the final product and see it in print. It's great if I inspire many people to learn how to weave and pick it up.
11. Conclusion: Make sure you upload your video to the project gallery so everyone else can see your video and comment on it. You're also going to want to check out and comment on other people's videos too. Don't forget to give constructive feedback. Take a look at their shot selection, just watch the whole video through. If it keeps your interest, let them know, and if there's something that you think they should change, give the feedback but give it in a nice way.
Mark Cersosimo, Video Producer
