A Thinking Sam @ITP

For our final video project, our group (which included my wonderful ITP colleagues Myriam Melki and Wajma Mohseni) decided to do a weird, abstract piece about a girl and her seemingly troubled relationship with a guy. No spoilers, I’ll just let you see it for yourself (and lessons learned are down below):

Producing a well-shot, edited and cohesive video proved harder than I expected (but we had a lot of fun doing it!). Some lessons learned:

• Start with a cohesive story, and then make it weird, not the other way around. We started weird and tried to add a story, and that was challenging. That said, we’re all pretty happy with the final outcome (and how strange our piece ended up being).
• Lighting and camerawork are damn important! I felt this was an area we really cared about, and therefore, excelled. Also, the 5D MarkII can make anything and everything look incredible.
• Editing can be tricky with different people doing it (all of whom are somewhat newbies). I do think the editing process probably is better with just 1-2 people operating alone (not necessarily at the computer together). “Too many cooks in the kitchen” type of thing.
• Setting up scenes took much longer than I expected. Poor actors :/
• Dialogue is really tough unless the actors are really good.
• Video is fun! The 5D MarkII is fun! Adobe Premiere is fun! ITP Sound & Video is fun! All around, we had a great time. Thanks to our fearless leader and instructor, Gabe.