ONW Fire Drill Procedure

Overview

For this assignment in my video class, my group decided to create a description of the fire drill procedures in place at my school and most likely many other schools. We  made this clear by including shots of the students, and teachers, including reaction shots. Another way we expressed this topic was by filming the fire alarm so we could later edit a flash into the video. This later made it very clear that our topic was a fire drill procedure, and not another reason that we could be going outside or other possible areas of confusion.

Process

In order to make our filming process go more smoothly, we storyboarded our concept, including shot sizes, audio, and camera movement. However, before we could even begin the storyboarding process, we needed to brainstorm possible storylines for our film. To do this, we each came up with visuals, audio options, and how the video would come together overall. After we all had out individual ideas, we came together as a group, picked the key ideas, and figured out how the film would flow together. My personal role in this film was partly as I described before, coming up with d=ideas for the video, then after we started filming, I was primarily an actress in the film. Despite this, I still occasionally checked the camera placement and made suggestions as far as lighting, camera angles, and camera movement. When we finished filming, it was time to edit, which is usually the part of the process that I feel the most comfortable with, but I struggled a but editing this film. I believe that this was because when I began to import the footage into the software, I didn't look through them first to decide which clips I wanted to use in my video, causing me to be more disorganized in the slightly disorienting format of the software.

Conclusions

I personally used communication by making sure everyone in my group was clear on what our next step was, and what the storyline of our film would be, as we had many options for the latter. Although I was not the director of the group, I think I still used leadership and project management well, by respectably clarifying different issues and leading the group when necessary. For example, occasionally group members would get off topic, myself included, and I sometimes had to keep us on track. I also used collaboration skills by making sure everyone agreed, and that everyone was happy with the direction our project was going. I thinks that the most major thing I would fix in my video pertains to editing. When I was adding audio, I did not consider how the background music would sound with the fire alarm going off simultaneously. In the future I will definitely consider how the audio will sound when it is all overlaid, not just how it sounds separately. Despite this, I do think it was a good idea to have some consistency in the audio, for example I had both the music and the alarm sounding at the same time all throughout the video. I think this made the video feel continuous, however I should have chosen one sound, either the music or the alarm, to be playing during the entire video. One new technique that I learned, was how to get a sound effect from Youtube, and then import it into Adobe Premiere. This skill will definitely be helpful in the future, in order to expand my sound effect options. Overall, there are definitely lots of improvements I could make within this film, however I have learned how to avoid these mistakes in the future, and will make an effort to improve or possibly eliminate these issues from my future works.