Life Scripted

I just got done with my first three hours of substantial video editing for MD. Thankfully the IT building is open 24 hours a day, including holidays, apparently. I had been there a couple weeks ago to play around with the equipment and see what was available in the multimedia rooms, and I've spent many hours at home cutting raw footage into segments, but tonight was my first time putting the pieces together into one video. I must sound like a giant loser right now. I'm still learning all the quirks of the PC in the multimedia room, but it's still infinitely faster than what I own. There are also a couple of multimedia Macs in the IT lab, and this is one of the first times I've seriously wished I were more familiar with using Macs. There's more user friendly software on them, I think, but I figure with the time it would take me to get used to using the Mac, I'd be done with my video. Another few hours in the lab and I should have a rough, presentable video, but I'm still missing several scenes. Actually, it turns out it's a good thing I haven't finished filming yet, since I've noticed a few scenes that I need to reshoot or can cover up with what I have yet to shoot. I'm going to try to finish shooting everything this week and hopefully have the video entirely done by next weekend. I expect that'll I'll be doing more film editing for a couple of upcoming MSI orientation videos, so I'll try to keep my projects from overlapping too much.

I got almost halfway through with the video tonight, but as I was importing one of the final clips of the night, Adobe Premiere gave me a low memory warning. I'm hoping this doesn't mean the demise of my ability to edit the rest of my video, since I clearly still have many more clips to import. I'm really happy with the way it's turning out so far, even though the video looks like it could have been put together by a five-year-old. Sure, I wish I had shot some scenes differently, with different angles, different lighting, different zoom, whatever, but there's so much to like about the video that I can overlook its faults. Whenever I watch these scenes, I'm reminded of how much fun it was to shoot each of them and how great it was that whoever was in the scene volunteered to be in it. And for the people who honestly had trouble in front of the camera, I'm trying to make them look as good as possible through clever editing. It's the least I can do for them for agreeing to take part in this insane project.

As for the MSI orientation videos I mentioned earlier, those are still in the scripting and casting stages. One video will be educational, and another will be downright useless but fun. The educational one will be fun, too, but educational fun could never beat useless fun. It's like comparing Number Munchers to Grand Theft Auto. Number Munchers could be just as fun as GTA, but it's adulterated with intelligence and doesn't have enough explosions. Of course, I finished the script for the useless video first, and I'm still working on the educational one. Both are parodies of TV shows since I'm clearly not capable of crafting original, creative works from scratch. I've never written a script like these before. The closest I've come was when my friends and I filmed "MacBeth Meets His MacDeath" in 11th grade, but that involved plagiarizing Billy Shakespeare. I think I would enjoy being a scriptwriter in another life. I don't mind putting words in people's mouths and making them do my bidding. Mwahahaha.