The five minute video is almost done now. I've been going at it pretty hard for the last few nights... I wanted to extract some lessons learnt, but maybe it's too early? Maybe I need more perspective? Maybe it's because my daughter, anxious about school, is tossing and turning and chattering away nervously to herself? Even from the next room, stuck upstairs because she won't settle if I'm not nearby, I can feel her anxiety prickling my skin like static. However, I think I should try - I don't want to post the lessons at the same time as the video...
Things what I have learnt from making my first 'art' video:
- Shoot more footage than you think you need - you can always trim it down and pick the best bits, but if you don't have enough, you can't make it longer.. Well, you can sometimes get away with doubling stuff up, but it's better to avoid the problem in the first place
- Movement is important - video needs movement, even if it's just a bit of zooming/panning in a static image. Sound can help the illusion of movement when there isn't any.
- Sound effects add immersion - simple sound effects, which might go unnoticed, significantly add to the immersion into the video - silence is unnatural, and ideally there would always be some sort of relevant background noise (which makes the use of silence more deliberate and effective)
- Transitions are important - I'm sure they teach this on video 101, but I've not been to video 101, so I learnt the hard way - my video started as a series of fragments with pauses between, it still is a bit, but working to bridge those gaps will keep the thing moving, save for those moments when you WANT things to stop. You can bridge with footage, transitions, but also with sound e.g. let the sound from one sequence bleed into the next
- AI is amazing - I've done a bunch of cool stuff with AI, including all the narration
- AI is not amazing - but the sequences it generates are short (and financially expensive!) so it can contribute to the feeling of disconnected snippets
- Traditional filters are more powerful than you think - they might end up being labelled 'cheesy' but I was surprised how much interest and atmosphere you can generate with simple filters like 'de-saturate' and 'posterise'
- Band pass filters are great for cleaning-up audio - most of the tracks featured hiss and hum and traffic noise. The 15 band filter was great for massively reducing this without wrecking the audio - my technique is a bit brute force - just keep removing bands till the problem sound goes away, and then start carefully adding them back in until it returns, starting from the furthest from the 'problem' band.
- Start long and overworked and edit down - like my static art, sometimes it's easier to just check a lot of stuff in, see how it looks and then start removing as much as possible until you can't remove any more
- Shotcut is powerful but buggy - I've learnt a tonne about Shotcut, and I'm amazed how well it has stood up to some fairly heavy editing, but there are some odd bugs that surface sometimes - you just need to keep a close eye, save regularly, and be prepared to re-do stuff if you have to
- Keep it simple stupid - sometimes the simplest sequences are the most effective - some of my favourites are just a video of me huffing up a hill with a voice over
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