For this assignment I had to create a video of the a “day in my life” which meant filming what I did or what happened during a particular day and editing it together into a video.

When thinking about this task I took inspiration from the YouTubers Casey Neistat and Sam “SeenThroughGlass” (who I ended up seeing while filming). When Casey used to create daily vlog videos I would find that his cinematic shots, especially the use of timelapses along with his general fast-paced editing style would make the videos engaging and fun to watch. I also wanted to take inspiration from his “intro sequence” to his daily vlogs where he would simply write the video location and date over the a particular shot. With Sam’s videos I take inspiration from the cinematic shots he uses to break up his vlog style shots since he always uses interesting camera angles and shots.

When thinking about the video I wanted to create I had a few ideas of what I wanted to include: Firstly I didn’t particularly want to include myself talking to the camera since I don’t like doing it but instead use point-of-view shots to add a personal feel that it is of my day. This meant I would have to edit the cinematic shots to music as the assignment suggested to engage viewers while using interesting camera shots/angles to get the viewers attention.

To film the video I would be using my Samsung S4 phone, a GoPro Hero 4 and a Canon 700D camera which would potentially pose some issues with differing video looks and video quality. However I felt that this differing quality wouldn’t matter since the video was about making the video to show the content/story and not necessarily to make a polished flawless product. For example on many social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram & Snapchat it’s more important to users to make a bad quality post rather than not to post at all. For example how Casey Neistat keeps filming and uploads it when his external microphone breaks even though the sound quality is worse like in this video or adds in phone shots like in this vlog since it’s better to have the worse shot to make up the story rather than leave parts out because it’s not as high quality. Alongside this something about creating the video which would be difficult for me to do would be making the video solely out of video footage filmed over that one day (since I was doing other things rather than just focus on filming) and also to edit using the footage in roughly the same order it was filmed to create a logical story throughout the video which is not something that I usually do.

During the day while filming it was slightly tricky remembering to try and film every single thing; especially in front of other people in the street when “aimlessly filming” my surroundings. I think I managed this to an extent as I took quite a bit of footage however it would have been useful to have recorded more so that there was better choice during the editing.

For the edit of the video I mainly used Sony Vegas Pro 12 but however used Adobe Premiere CS6 for the editing of some of the timelapse sections. I started out by importing all of the video clips into Vegas and began putting the first few onto the timeline. After the first few I placed the intro scene using a timelapse clip that I sped up using the rate stretch tool in Premiere, added text over it and then went in search of a piece of music which could be faded in here for the rest of the video to be edited to. This chosen song was “Seinabo Sey – Pistols At Dawn (Lucian x Mickey Valen Remix)” which I’d heard before in this video and was good since it has quite regular beat/vocal changes which can be edited to. After this was inserted then I dragged the other video clips on the timeline and set about editing them together using a variety of tools such as the orange markers for positioning important cuts, trim tool for resizing clips and fade tool to fade between clips. Some of the video audio was then muted while some was isolated and increased in volume to make it audible above the music.

To create the best video possible I then set about stabilising (where possible) and colour correcting some of the video footage to make sure it looked as good as possible. Some of this colour correction was done using the standard “Sony Colour Corrector” plugin while some like the example below was done with the more advanced Magic Bullet Looks plugin.

Screenshot of the video before (left) and after (right) the colour correction process.

Visible below is the finished Sony Vegas project file for the video which shows all of the used clips and editing within the timeline:

Embedded below is the finished video assignment: