In-Depth Post #2

Hello and thanks for tuning in again! This will be a progress update on my In-Depth project and my comments on the first three aspects of How to Have a Beautiful Mind.

 

Mentor

Very soon after my first In-Depth blog post, I found my mentor, Dan Clayton, through a freelance website. He’s graduated with a degree in audio engineering, but he’s experienced in practically all areas of media production. He even founded his own company, Thumbmuffin Productions! As for just video editing, I recall he has 8 years of experience.

Dan also uses Adobe Premiere Pro as his editing software, which is convenient since it’s the program I had planned to use and already started learning. So far, I’ve found him very easy and enjoyable to work with!

 

Progress Update

At the time of this post, I’ve had two online meetings with my mentor (we’ve set up a roughly 1-hour meeting every week). Our first meeting was a short introductory meeting, where we just got to know each other and how my mentor would be helping me for the next five months. He also answered questions I had mainly regarding editing and how I would get my footage. He recommended that I first start with using stock footage and depending on what I’m feeling, I could start recording my own footage later on. I also put out the idea of asking my peers for videos they want me to help them edit, and he agreed with the idea. I think I’ll probably start to open to editing other’s videos in a month or so, depending on how experienced I think I am, and my mentor’s thoughts.

Our second meeting was on getting started. I had already played around with Premiere Pro a bit, so we decided I was ready to start on my first short video (Ahead of schedule!) My mentor suggested I create an orange juice commercial, and I went along with it. In the meeting, he showed me his favourite sites to get footage and free audio, Storyblocks and YouTube Audio Library. Since he already had a subscription on the site, he offered to download the videos I wanted to use and send them to me, so I could get them without the watermark which I thought was a very generous and great idea. Also in the meeting, he took an extra few minutes to show me the most useful and relevant shortcuts in Premiere Pro for faster editing.

Currently, I’ve gotten the footage I wanted for the orange juice commercial from my mentor, and I plan to get the video done at the very latest by the week after the next online meeting. I’ll have it posted in my third blog post as well.

I think it’s also worth mentioning that I edited a simple 10-minute video for my group’s Humanities project. It took an obnoxious amount of time, but I got it done, and now I feel a lot more confident with using Premiere Pro’s basic timeline functions.

How to Have a Beautiful Mind

First off, I did not know about recording our mentor meetings as of the first two meetings so that would be my fault. I will record my future online meetings with my mentor to share on my third In-Depth post.

I found it difficult to implement the three aspects “How to agree, how to disagree, and how to differ” into the meetings with my mentor. Especially in our first meetings, there were few places to have opinions on. I knew that my mentor knows much more than me, and as the person who knows less, there’s much more listening than speaking on my side. I personally think that these aspects would have been better to resolve in later meetings, as the mentor and mentee would have gotten time to know each other, and the mentee’s thoughts might differ from their mentors as they become more knowledgeable.

For example, my mentor might show me their fastest formula of editing a video and I couldn’t disagree because I’ve never tried it. Later, however, I could find that I work better using another way, and that would be an area my mentor and I could differ on. Something else I believe me and my mentor might disagree on is our video style. My mentor might think a shot or transition was lousy and didn’t fit, while I might think it was spot on and added engagement to the video (These kinds of things happen all the time among people familiarized with each other).

Anyways, the first aspect, how to agree, is the only aspect I can give good insight on. I can provide tons of examples just from two meetings. A relevant one would be when my mentor explained that I shouldn’t be shooting my own videos right away, and instead should be editing stock footage. I hadn’t thought of using stock clips before I met my mentor, and at that point to me, it seemed pretty obvious that my mentor was right there. If I want to record my own footage, I also need to learn the basics of other filmmaking skills and wouldn’t be able to spend as much time honing my video editing skills.

 

Thanks for reading my In-Depth update, if you’re interested to see progress in my video-editing journey, just give a quick check-in here every 2 weeks to see my latest progress!