Welcome to the new bookstore!

The Gatton Student Center has been under construction for, what seems like, a decade. Actually, my freshman and sophomore dorm is right across the street from the now completed building, so I got a front row seat to a lot of the construction. I was able to withstand all the noise during the mid hours of the morning with the promise of the building being finished half way through my sophomore year. Shockingly, the construction lasted longer than they predicted. And of course, as soon as I moved half way across campus, they decide to finish it... but I digress.

The point is, everyone on campus has been anticipating this building for a long time. So, it was a no brainer for my team to get footage from the student center for our project. We eventually decided to film in the bookstore to limit the amount of ground we had to cover. We compiled a good variety of shots, but we had a really hard time finding someone in the bookstore who wanted to be interviewed. Eventually, we ended up with two interviews from TAs in the Starbucks.

It was interesting to hear them talk about the student center and bookstore because they had both been on campus for a while. In both interviews, they each talked about how they had seen the construction for so long and what it was like to finally walk into the bookstore for the first time. Because I was right across the street from the construction when it started, I really connected with them over this point. So, my video is told from the perspective of people who have been waiting for the bookstore to open for a long time.

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Workflow & Final Thoughts

One of the most important things I learned from this project was to always shoot more than what you need. We were supposed to shoot a minimum of 15 shots, and my team did more than that, but once I sat down at the computer I wished I had more footage. However, this was the final file I ended up with:

I also decided to play around with my workflow this time around and end up using a tier above the main video to layer video over one of the interview's voice. You can see it exemplified in the screen shot below:

This was the first time I got to work with actual moving video and audio in Premier Pro. I felt a lot more confident than my last project because a lot of the same editing techniques applied. However, I did find myself using the keyboard short cut Command + L many times. I used this command to separate the audio in clips from the video so you could just see the nice shots without hearing all the background noise.

As I mentioned before, both of our interviews took place in Starbucks. We used lav mics to record the interviews, so we could get quality audio. But, unfortunately, we were there during rush hour, so the mics picked up some noisy background sounds as well. I tried to use some audio filters in Premier Pro to help reduced the background noise, but none of them seemed to help at all. So in the end, I decided to just leave the interview audio as it was. However, I did use the balanced background music audio filter on the music ("Creative Minds" bensounds.com) in the video.

I created the intro screen in Photoshop and used the zoom video transition in the beginning of the video because I thought it reflected the energized tone of the music. Throughout the rest of the video, however, I decided not to use any transition effects because they slowed the pace of the video down. Finally, I used a cross dissolve fade at the end of the video on a graphic screen I created in Premier Pro to bring the video to a happy ending.

Take a look and see what you think:

https://youtu.be/b_66bJUOc_4