Portfolio - Digital Creations Club PSA

This was another school project, but not for a video class. I took a general multimedia class that did a lot of work in Flash to get a better handle on that, and we had to do a big overall project in any media discipline. So of course I chose video to get something else in my portfolio.

I was the Communications Officer for the DCC and I worked on this project with the VP. She ended up doing the coordinating and I did the shooting and editing, which worked just fine for me.

The project was shot on one of the school's HD Canon cameras (I can't remember the model) and honestly, I struggled to make it look like I knew what I was doing during the shoot. Our subjects were a professor and an alumni, so it wasn't bigtime pressure, but I didn't want to look like an idiot. I had spent so much time focusing on post, I had let myself not be so confident on the camera. But I managed to do just fine, luckily.

This project otherwise came together pretty easily. It was intended to be shown on the internal video system at IUPUI, which is why we went with the border. I personally still don't care for the border, but my partner insisted, so there it is.

Portfolio - Vollrath Speakeasy Tour

This was created for NUVO and I believe it was the last video I did for them. It was a bizarre time. Katie shot it and I attempted to direct the interview, though the subject had a bit of a mind of his own which we're pretty used to. The Vollrath is a very old bar in a very bad part of Indy. We tried to capture some of the band that performed as well, but the sound quality of the bar mixed with the screaming metal quality of the band didn't really capture on tape so well. We got a tour of the basement from one of the workers (who also explained what a speakeasy is somewhat inaccurately which kind of stinks) and tried to capture the environment the best we could. It was kind of a whirlwind tour and definitely difficult to edit it cohesively.

I decided to open the video with some of the goings-on of the bar itself to show what it's like today, and a little bit of the only good audio we got from the band. I used the audio as a segue into the basement where the speakeasy was, and since the quality got bad, it was nearly unusable after that point. Rather than scrap it, I decided to EQ it so it sounded dull and as though it were coming from above, like it actually sounded when we were walking around down there. It made for a rather creepy effect.

There are a ton of cuts with the audio because our guide kept going off on tangents, both interesting and not that interesting. The raw footage I dealt with did not show any signs of life and I thought maybe after the initial review of the footage that we wouldn't find anything compelling in it. But after a little thinking, I came up with the structure you see now and I feel like if someone is interested in the Vollrath, this will serve them well.

Backlogging some entries...

I decided to do a short blog post about each video in my portfolio. I'll be linking them to my portfolio site, so after people watch the video, they can click through to read the blog to learn more personal details about the creation. I felt like I should do this because as an editor, it's our job to remain invisible and make everything look awesome. Well, not every piece of footage that crosses our path is awesome. It's hard to really show how you turned a piece around just by showing it, so hopefully I can get that across to people who care to know more about it. And if they don't, they simply won't click through the link, and all will be well!