Mini-Project 2: Digital Story

And here we go, folks: your first (probably) foray into the world of video editing and production with professional-grade, industry-standard tools. Exciting, right?

In this small practice project, you’ll be creating a brief digital story using Adobe Premiere Pro. This video should contain the following elements:

1. A title screen of some sort
2. Still images
3. Recorded video (with audio) of you
4. A variety of external video clips
5. An audio bed (background music)
6. Some of the “Ken Burns effect” style motion to the images
7. An “end” screen
8. Credits

Seems a lot, I know! This is where your planning ahead of time becomes so important. Storyboarding and scripting is essential when you’re working with so many assets but telling a single story.

Preparation

For this assignment you’ll be telling the story of you creating or accomplishing something. This could be how to make a grilled cheese or how to do that really neat knitting pattern or how to build a bird house or … well, you get the idea. This can be something astounding or absolutely mundane, it’s up to you. Be funny. Be serious. Be satirical. Be whatever you want. Just make sure you’re following the requirements below. This is pretty rigid in terms of your requirements so you have as much of a scaffold as possible and less of just a blank page, as it were.

If you want to elaborate on something you did earlier in the class–like the OBS presentation topic, for example–you are absolutely welcome to do this! However, the materials for this (your recordings, images, et cetera) need to be new. Don’t recycle old work!

And please, before you start jumping into Premiere Pro and attempting to make something great, get those foundational skills, read the Classroom in a Book reading in week 5, and go through this assignment’s content first.

Storyboard requirements

You’re welcome to shift things things around a little bit if you want but this is your starting point in terms of how to organize your story’s scenes and elements:

1. Title
2. Your introduction to the story
3. Third party video clip (5-ish seconds)
4. Video of you starting the story, setting the stage, et cetera
5. Still image with KBE
6. Another video of you
7. Third party video clip (arbitrary length)
8. Another video of you
9. Multiple still images with KBE with your audio narrative overtop (minimum 3 images in a row)
10. Video of you
11. Third party video clip (arbitrary length), your narration optional
12. Concluding clip of you
13. Final image/video, up to you
14. End scene
15. Credits

Now, does your story need to follow this exactly? Again, no, but if you’re struggling to build a storyboard from scratch, this should serve you well.

I’d encourage you to use this storyboarding template from Indie Film Hustle and really put some time into crafting the story, from what pace you want to go at, to how many shots you want, to knowing what part of the story you’re narrating over the still images rather than using video of you or third-party video clips.

What does he mean, “Third party video clip?", I hear you asking. In this case, these are videos you’ve found online or videos that you’ve recorded, yourself, but not of yourself. For these, you can find many stock videos at Pexels and Pixabay to help illustrate your point. If you’d rather record something yourself (but again, not of yourself; those are the “Video of you” above) you are welcome to do that, as well. Make the choices that support your story and your ultimate goal. Videos that are used to support and illustrate but aren’t necessarily the topic or focus of the video are called B-roll.

For example, if you’re making a video on how to create a fly-fishing lure, you may choose to throw in some B-roll of a lake in your video. Here’s a video of Peter McKinnon talking about the importance of B-roll. Do you need a gimbal? Or a fancy mirrorless or dSLR camera for this? Absolutely not. Use what you have and focus on the content and delivery, not the gear or the “cool” factor. (Can you tell I really appreciate Peter McKinnon’s videos?) Remember you can always color grade or correct in Premiere Pro later.

Assignment Submission Requirements

You’ll be submitting something similar to what you submitted with Project 3: the final exported video, of course, but also a screenshot of your Premiere Pro interface showing your timeline and the files/bins in one image. The requirements for the final video:

1. At least a four minute long 720p video, exported as H264 MP4. If you want to work with 1080p or even 4k, you’re welcome to, but that’s not necessary for this assignment. Can you go over 4 minutes? Sure. Try not to. Aim for anything between 3:45 and 4:15. (This is why storyboarding is so essential.)
2. Have at least two different background music beds leveled appropriately. Sound effects are optional.
3. Either upload your video to YouTube or Google Drive. For YouTube, set it as Unlisted. For Google Drive, make sure the sharing settings are “Anyone with the link can view” or “Anyone at the University of Arizona can view.” Either works.
4. Upload a screenshot of your Premiere Pro interface, as mentioned above, to the D2L Mini-Project 2 dropbox.
5. Include a brief reflection on your experience in the comments of your D2L dropbox submission: was it really scary at the start? Did that get better? What was frustrating? What was exciting? Et cetera.
6. Share the link to your video in the #premiere channel in Teams.

This seems like a lot for a “mini” project, I know. But here’s the upshot: the skills you’re mastering right now will make your other video-based projects considerably easier.

Advice for Recording Great Video

Make sure you’ve read through and watched all the content from these past couple weeks about elements ranging from lighting to composition to focal length. Obviously, if you’re shooting this video with your phone–unless you have a phone with physical lenses that zoom, NOT a “digital zoom,” which is really just a crop), you don’t need to worry about focal length. That just means you have to doubly focus on scene composition!

A tripod is handy but absolutely not necessary. Just set up your camera or phone on a stack of books or a stool on a chair, whatever works and gets the shot! And make sure to really scrutanize what’s in the view of your camera before you start recording. Ask someone to stand in for you in the scene while you get the shot just right.

If you can–because of the app you’re using on your phone (Filmic Pro is my go-to) or the camera you’ve got–change the framerate and aperture, try different combinations until you find the one you like. I personally shoot my demonstrative videos at 4k and 24fps, which gives a nice human-eye-like and cinematic feel to it. A framerate of 30fps is your typical video you’ll see on YouTube or television, while 60fps gets into the soap opera feeling. Once you get up to 120fps and above, you’re talking about sports, generally, or footage that’s going to be slowed down to, say, 30fps but still look smooth. One note about the framerate: remember that your shutter speed (again, if your camera app or camera support changing it) needs to be roughly double the inverse of your framerate. So, when I shoot at 24fps, I set my shutter speed to 1/48 (it’s actually 1/50 but that’s close enough). The order of operations that I use is this:

1. Set the aperture to get the depth of field you want (remember: smaller F-stop number, the larger the aperture and more shallow the depth of field)
2. Set the framerate and shutter speed to match that framerate
3. Light the scene to the exposure you want as far as possible
4. Set the ISO if the scene is under exposed OR toss on a neutral density filter to bring the exposure down if it’s over exposed, if you’re outdoors for example
5. Film!

I aim for keeping my ISO as close to 50 to 100 as possible, as higher ISOs introduce grain. While this can be a great stylistic choice at times, generally you want to avoid it. And remember: if all you have is your phone, just try to focus on proper exposure by playing with the lighting in the location.

If you find that your audio is lacking when shooting your video, don’t hesitate to go back and re-record that audio separately. You don’t have to be speaking while shooting the video of yourself doing the thing you’re illustrating in the video. The video of you doing the thing, whatever it is, can be without your narration at the time with you narrating over it later, walking the viewer through the process. That said, you do need to have some video of yourself talking to the camera, vlog-style. Not sure what vlogging is or what I mean by that? Here’s a short video on how to get great video with your smartphone, vlog-style, specifically with an iPhone but the same applies to Androids.

Advice for Effectively Using Premiere Pro (Especially for These Assignments)

I’ve been doing video editing in Premiere Pro for some time and I want to share some of my favorite tips and tricks to make the process a little less painful:

Number 1: Work out your file structure first

Keeping your files organized goes a long way to making sure you aren’t spending unnecessary time sorting through poorly named images or video files, remembering where things are kept, and so on. My advice is to create this file structure FIRST, save it as a “TEMPLATE” folder, and then just make a copy of that folder whenever you’re starting a new project.

Number 2: Enable proxies

If you don’t have a machine that’s built for editing 4k video (for example), then how can you possibly hope to use any in your video, right? Nope! Premiere Pro has a feature called “proxies.” When using proxies, Premire Pro will convert your high resolution videos to a much smaller, more compressed, and easier-to-work-with version. Whatever you do to that one (you edit it like you would normally, as if it were the actual file), gets done to the full-size version at export. Peter McKinnon demonstrates how to do this and tweak a few other settings that can help you speed up the process of video editing (note that depending on your machine it can take some time to make those proxies; it’s time well spent, I assure you):

Number 3: Easily add the Ken Burns Effect

This is really just a time-saving tip. Creating these kinds of effects may seem daunting but they’re actually quite simple when you know where to look in the software. Here’s a very brief (just one minute!) guide on how to create that Ken Burns effect in Premiere Pro 2020.

Number 4: Creating Rolling Credits

These are as easy to make as they are fun. Since you’re using a variety of external assets, each of them should be listed in the credits. Here’s a brief video on how to create rolling credits:

Number 5: Linking and Unlinking Video and Audio

If you’re wanting to use audio from one clip (ie, your narrated voiceover) and video from another clip, you’ll need to unlink the audio and video at some point. Here’s a quick example of how to do that. This is nicely used creatively when you’ll hear the audio from one clip coming in before the video cuts. Playing around with this can get you some great and impactful effects.

Number 6: Queue, don’t Export

Finally, when you’re ready to create your final video, do not click the Export button! Instead, click the Queue button, which will open up Media Encoder and the export will be done there instead of in Premiere Pro. Also, you’ll likely get good results with the following options:

You’ll notice that it says “Custom” at the top. This is because the Render at Maximum Depth, Use Maximum Render Quality, and Time Interpolation options have been changed from the default, which was the YouTube 4k preset. The videos I do are all in 4k but you aren’t required to do that, of course.