Week 12: Reeling in the Results

Whether you’re tuning into my blog for the first or last time, welcome! Especially if you visited my showcase this past Saturday, I want to thank you for your interest in my “fishy” exploration. As the final edition of my 12-episode shark saga, I’d like to provide some insight into my video making process, how that turned into my final result, and where you can find all of the resources I used for my project.

The Video

First off, if you haven’t seen the video or if you haven’t seen all of it, you can take a look at its entire ten minutes here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvUsGsW0BWY.

Now, breaking down my process, I started with some brainstorming for interesting visual techniques, themes, and topics to cover in a piece of visual content. This planning stage helped me get an initial direction for my final product. At the core, I wanted a more casual or informal video that could include a bit of humor while remaining informative and not falling into any of the more alienating tendencies conservation advertisements tend to do, i.e. extreme appeals to emotions that may push away some audiences and broad sweeping statements that are meaningless to the common person. This led me to a few core points that I wanted to cover: statistics, normal behaviors of sharks, common portrayals in media, a twist on a comparably more popular animal, and finally, an emphasis on the importance of sharks. With this setup, I had the springboard to expand my idea into a script.

To make the recording and editing process as seamless as possible, I made sure to extensively map out my script. It extended from the specific intonations (I thought) I wanted to use, key words I wanted to highlight, certain transitions that I envisioned in the video, and other such similar notes on the audio and visual side. However, there was a clear downside to being so thorough. I wrote a lot. I even said so in my Week 10 blog, but my script ended up being 14 pages long, including some images I planned on showcasing or adapting and, once recorded, resulted in a one-hour audio file with numerous tweakings in lines that eventually boiled down to eight minutes of just me talking.

Adding onto my experience of recording the script, because I don’t have any fancy equipment, I resorted to some more “interesting” methods to suppress any background noise and echoing. Firstly, I tested every single microphone I could get my hands on: my phone, different headphones, and a headset mic. I eventually just landed on my phone’s Voice Recorder app, and then, I tested different rooms around my house from the living room, my bedroom (with and without closed doors), the closet, and the blanket. From my mini experiment, I found that subjecting myself to a baking in my sheets resulted in the clearest recording of my voice, so that was what I went with.

Finally, onto the grueling process of making the video, I had initially zero knowledge on how to edit with my only experience being in BISV’s Animation elective in my Junior year. With the advice from my external advisor, I decided to work with Vegas Pro’s free trial (you can see the watermark on my video) as it’s fairly intuitive and has a wide variety of built-in transitions, animations, etc. The biggest things I struggled when I started learning the software were the layer and animation timing systems. Compared to programs like Adobe Animate, Vegas Pro required new layers to be created for each new element and the “key frames” (basically, specific snapshots of the frames in a video) followed by Vegas Pro were in a fairly different format from Animate. I eventually got a hold of it, but the learning curve was definitely a hindrance and slowed my progress at the start, though not terrible for moving from animation to editing.

What really took a toll on my patience was a mixture of waiting for assets to download from the Internet and how abysmally slow my laptop ran Vegas Pro. In my video, I used plenty of stock assets and some snippets of YouTube videos, and although I had already decided on quite a number through my script, the downloading, importing, and trimming time for each individual file definitely added up. Additionally, though I know my laptop isn’t the best, it absolutely couldn’t handle the sheer number of moving parts and layers that the final ten-minute video required. However, it pulled through, and I couldn’t be prouder about the result, especially given that I had finished it in a little over a week.

The Final, “Fin-tastic” Finale

It seems like it’s almost time to go on our separate currents, but I’d like to add here a huge thank you to Mr. Meyerowitz, my faculty advisor; Mr. Adams, my external advisor; and Mr. Cunningham, the Senior Project Coordinator, for their help in the past year. In addition to all of the teachers that have supported me to get to this position, they especially have encouraged me to take on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and make the best out of it.

I’d also like to thank you. Whether you’ve seen one blog, all the blogs, or only attended my Senior Project presentation, I truly appreciate the support and hope that you learned something new and enjoyed my journey.

To show my gratitude, I’d also like to provide a link to both a Google Drive of all my files if you wanted to take an in-depth look at my research (https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1pdM_PpXJjM4LkDxYK_SePJAgBYKniq3m?usp=sharing) and the GitHub repository holding the data I analyzed, the code I used, and some images of it in action (https://github.com/Fire05s/Senior_Project/tree/main). If you’re looking to continue any of my work or if you use any of my files, I’d greatly appreciate a citing and a message as I’d love to see what more can be accomplished for my favorite animals.

While this may be goodbye, I hope to greet you all once again, maybe petting some of the “dogs of the oceans.”

Bibliography

Link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12oeCIFeiBNCjP56y2rcGrTItVKnJzRTkbViOp_U0LUM/edit?usp=sharing