Another Lesson in What not to-do: Making a Video About Sleeping.

When I first started on this video project, I can certainly say I had an idea of what I wanted to make: a video explaining how the time freed up by the pandemic, at the very least, helped people finally better their sleeping habits. After storyboarding this idea however, I immediately ran into a roadblock. While storyboarding a video to set its scenes in stone may help some, I frankly didn't get much use out of it as coming up with interesting scenes for a video about sleeping proved to be more difficult than initially considered, leading to a disappointingly basic storyboard. Additionally, whenever I did come up with a better idea for some scene in the video, I would have to rethink all subsequent scenes in the storyboard which proved to be more frustrating than I thought it would be. 

Even worse though was how my rethinking of how to structure the video proceeded well into gathering B-roll footage. This, in addition to the fact that I was admittedly way too shy with filming in public when gathering some of my footage, led me to commit one of the worst possible sins of filmmaking: not gathering enough B-roll. This failure to gather enough footage immediately turned what was supposed to be a visually varied and interesting video essay into me just talking into a camera for two minutes straight. 

In a misguided effort to resolve the lack of useful ideas for B-roll, I reworked my script so that it would follow a more broad premise about how the pandemic generally helped free up time for people, which would hopefully give me the creative freedom needed to gather interesting footage. In reality, all this change did was remove any real focus the script might have otherwise once had.  

Seeing as to how any and all efforts to improve my video were inevitably making it worse, I decided that it would be best to just stop thinking about how to improve the video and instead work with what I had. While I was initially pessimistic about how the resulting video would turn out, my attitude began to change when things slowly but surely came together in Premiere Pro. 

Sure, my resulting video was noticeably crummier than those of my contemporaries, but as far as last ditch efforts go I’d say this project turned out to be better than the sum of its parts. For example, while supplementing my lack of B-roll, I learned how to animate individual sections of still images so as to give them some much needed motion. Additionally, my vocal performance when reading the revised script proved to be more clear and confident than I expected, despite the poor audio quality and me having to look back at the script every three seconds. Overall, while my final product may have fallen short in many regards, I am proud of it regardless of this due to the important lessons in filmmaking it helped me learn.