Monday, 9 August 2010

Creative Steps to Filming Welsh Water



Developing a story using clips from existing videos in your collection is a great creative way to generate new material. Here is the process I used to create the video above.

1. Collecting Material
During my holiday in Wales, I recorded a whole series of shorter video scenes (over 30) with a wide variety of subjects, including some of the most dismal rainy day we encountered!

2. Looking for connecting threads
Reviewing the clips, I was struck by overlapping groups of clips that contained
  • Walking/feet
  • Water (rain, sea, rivers, faucets)
  • Weather

3. First Story Board
Initially, I used a video editing program (Corel Video Studio 12) to simply arrange all the selected clips in these themes in chronological order, e.g.
  • Standing in stream on Porthmadoc beach
  • Walking out of stream into sea
  • walking along in sea
  • walking on dry sand
  • Walking up to Watertank
  • River Mawddach at Ty'n-yGroes
  • Glaslyn River in Beddgelert gorge
  • Walk in torrential rain back to cottage watertank
Total run time nearly 20 minutes


4. Edited Story Board
I then looked to see if I could rearrange the video clips to get a consistent story. The watercycle emerged as the main theme, walking as a connecting thread and the dripping water tank as the beginning and end. Superfluous clips were removed, resulting in:
  • Walk in torrential rain back to cottage watertank
  • Glaslyn River in Beddgelert gorge
  • Walking out of stream into sea
  • Walking up to dripping watertank
Total run time 9 minutes

5. Completion
Trimming of final clips, insertion of transitions and addition of title and end.

Final run time 3 minutes and 29 seconds


Other combinations and different stories are possible from the original collection of 30+ video clips.

What's your story?

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