I decided to use this final project as a chance to do something my friends and I have been meaning to do for a while – make a short documentary about how there is actually a group of girls that play D&D in this world. We’ve discussed the idea among ourselves for quite some time, but never really got around to doing so, most of the time simply because we’re too busy actually playing the game to worry about the camera work. This project gave us an excuse to set all our other excuses aside and just get to filming.
When making this, we had a few difficulties pop up, but most of them were only discovered after the filming was complete. One issue was that, while I knew I personally had shaky hands, I had little idea that the shots I had taken were quite so wobbly. As such, a few of the shots that I took were completely unusable, and many simply don’t look as strong as they should. Another problem was sound – upon uploading the files to a computer, my first discovery was that the volume on all of the clips was dismally low.
I found that the volume being low for the clips when we were just playing the game worked fine – inserting those clips with audio playing over them was an ideal use for those shots anyways. The real difficulty came from the few bits of narration I did, and from the interviews. To get around this, I put all the interviews and all the bits of narration I did into video files, cranked up their volume all the way, and then rendered them. If the volume still was not satisfactory, I cranked up the volume all the way again and repeated the process. This did lead to some static in the background of many of the interviews, but at least it made the girls audible.
Both of the afore-mentioned issues affected the goal of this project to me, which was to make this look as professional as possible. Still, I’m pleased with the product, and intend to work on it more on my own time to polish it. One technique I used to try and make the video more “professional” looking, at least in my mind, was the use of name plates at the bottom of the screen. The professionalism is diminished a little bit by putting snide comments in the margins here and there, but if this documentary took itself too seriously it would simply fall flat. What I did aim to do, though, was be consistent. I made sure that the “terminology” slides all had the same font and that the “terminology” label was placed in the same location each time, and I did the same for the name plate images. These images were made in adobe fireworks, and in order to insert them into the video, I put a light blue background in the images with name plates and what not, and then used the chroma key option to remove the light blue (because I couldn’t simply save the name plates and put them into the video without them having a colored border around them otherwise).
In order to make sure that no one was on screen for too long, and thus making the shot dull, I also edited the audio in such a way that the people on screen would often continue talking for a few seconds after they went off screen. I used this technique as a wedge between topics in the video – the girls would talk about one thing in their interviews, then I’d show a clip of them playing, and the video moves onto another topic. Over all, I thought it worked rather well.
I’m pleased with this project. It’s not the be all, end all of video making, I realize, but it’s my first attempt to make a video based off reality, rather than a script, and I found I liked the process quite a bit. I intend to do more of this in the future.
