Last November I shot a promotional video for a friend who does fashion photography. Last weekend, I delivered the finished video and he absolutly loves it. The whole process was fun, exciting and stressful all at the same time and I came away with a long list of things to do differently next time.
For the actual shoot, being that I had never been on a live fashion shoot and didn’t really know what to expect, I used two cameras and just shot everything I could. I shot everything live as it happened while staying out of the photographers way.
Putting it all together was a real struggle at first. I had over three hours of video that I needed to condense down into a two minute video with titles, credits and background music. I have to admit that the task of actually doing this kept me from even getting started editing for almost two weeks. Thankfully I didn’t have much of a deadline. I started to think that I had jumped in over my head at this point. I had spent weeks watching online training, reading blog posts, watching other similar videos getting ready for this.
One day, I just sat down and put everything on the timeline in the order it was shot. I skimmed through the footage over and over and over. After about the tenth time, it just hit me. I could see how I wanted things to be and started cutting. Two hours later, I was finished with the first cut. After that, it just flowed like water.
Once I had an edit I liked, it was time to find some background music. This paralyzed me more than the editing did. After a day of listening to a lot of music, I finally found a few tracks to pick from and let the client decide on which on to use.
Once I added an opening title sequence and some credits on the end, I sent it off for client approval and crossed my fingers. Luckily, the only changes I had to make was re-ording some still photos.
The last step, color correction. This part took me a while to finish, and I’m still not totally pleased with the results. This is definitely one area I need to work on more, a lot more.
Finally, it’s finished. Overall I’m quite happy with the end result and the client thinks its fantastic. It was my first rodeo, but it won’t be my last. Finishing this project has given me a much needed confidence boost. I can’t wait to start shooting my second promotional video next week.