Nilla the Doggo: Behinds the Scenes

    Video editing for the News Video project was challenging, tedious, and a fun learning experience. I did not have much video editing experience outside of putting together a montage of my hamsters and layering music over it through TikTok for fun. The editing interface was much, much simpler than the Adobe Premiere Pro software, so there was definitely a learning curve starting out.

    The amount of functionality and tools available in Adobe Premiere Pro was rather overwhelming. But, once I got through the tutorial and some videos, the basics were not too difficult to handle. The experience has at least given me some familiarity with the basic features like snipping, layering, transitions, and audio effects on this specific software.

    Some challenges outside of the technicalities of learning the editing software related to content collection, picking an audio track, and the scene setups. During content collection, I felt like I had been recording for so long, but once I cut out the scenes I wanted, I was only using seconds of what felt like minutes of recording. It opened my eyes to just how much material content creators need to put together a satisfying, full video. 

    I was also looking through the audio tracks Premiere provides for quite a bit, looking for the song that captured the mood of my video just enough. This also gave me an appreciation for those that are content creators and know enough music to be able to pick a specific song out for a specific video clip.

    In terms of the video I created, I was overall happy with how it turned out. I especially liked how the introduction montage worked out. I attempted to create a "time-lapse" segment where I did jump cuts into different quarantine scenarios to capture the isolation and boredom of the situation many of us have been in. The voiceover seemed to line up pretty well, and the video segments were clear in what they were attempting to portray.

    I also had a lot of fun putting the clips of Nilla together. Luckily, she is a very silly and playful dog all the time, so the clips perfectly built that image of her. I think one improvement that I could have made was replacing some of the still-photo shots with video footage instead.

    In the end, the images, video clips, voice overs, and soundtrack were edited together the way that I intended them to, and I think that is an overall success for one of my first video editing experiences with Adobe Premiere Pro. I will definitely be taking what I learned from this project and using it in future videos that I hope to create for music/choreography videos I am planning to make.