Cat-watching during COVID

 
For my video, I chose to show my coping method for COVID, which was cat-watching. Cat-watching is pretty much self-explanatory, it's when you go outside and look for cats. Doing a video over my hobby helped me realize just how many cats there were outside just waiting to be stared at and bothered, and gave me a new appreciation for going outside, even in an urban environment.

In making this video, I have learned and grown to appreciate videomaking. I found it difficult to keep the camera steady at times, and collecting b-roll footage for my video at all was trying, as the subjects for my video do not respond to human language, and most would run away if I got too close. There is also the fact that cats operate on their own schedule, so I had to work to find them when they wanted to be found. This caused a mild amount of stress towards the deadline, as I was missing twenty seconds of footage and no cats were showing up. There is only one cat on my street that shows up with any regularity, and he only shows up long enough for me to get him lunchmeat. I couldn't do a video with half of the footage being of one cat, so I had to go out and explore further in my neighborhood. Most of the cats shown in the video were cats that I had never seen before, even having gone cat-watching several times before. I got lucky and got footage of other cats in other parts of my neighborhood, and even at my local grocery store. 

Getting b-roll footage for my video turned out to be the easy part of the videomaking process. Getting a-roll footage was surprisingly more difficult, as I wanted to use footage of past foster kittens that I had fostered with my family. Unfortunately, I had taken very few useable videos that weren't blurry, showed too much of my room, or were taken in portrait when all my other footage was in landscape. Fortunately, I was able to get some footage of the kittens my parents were currently fostering, so I was able to use that.

Another challenge was using the video editor. I wanted to use Adobe Premiere Pro initially, but I got an error message saying that I would need to install another driver to make that work, and being unsure what that meant, I decided to use the default video editor that came with my computer. The video editor was very basic, it had a timeline that I could place footage on, and the ability to add custom sounds, as well as some premade title cards to use, which turned out to be enough for my purposes. It was surprisingly difficult to set up my narration on the video, especially if I had added any footage to the video. All the audio clips were stacked on one timeline, and some sounds would lay on top of others, making certain audio files difficult to move around and set where I wanted them to be. 

Overall, I had fun with this project, even with its difficulties. I got to have fun doing my hobby, while also learning how to edit and create videos.