The “Everyday Modern Marvels” assignment was to”Create a quick video based on the same theme as TV shows such as Modern Marvels or How Its Made. Film yourself assembling something basic (such as a sandwich) and then overlay an audio track describing each step. Make sure to hit each step, of assembly, when voicing over the film.”

For this assignment, I decided to assemble one of my favorite snacks. Living in a dorm with no kitchen makes things pretty limited as far as food goes, but I am able to make rice cakes. You’d be surprised at all the different ways there are to make a rice cake, such as peanut butter and banana, avocado, and pizza toppings. For the video, I decided to make a peanut butter, honey, and cinnamon rice cake.

This video was definitely one of the more complicated ones that I have made. I started out by assembling all of the ingredients and videoing myself with my phone set on my desk hutch. Things didn’t go perfectly in the video… I had trouble using three of the ingredients! Once the video was done, I muted the audio (my roommate and one of our friends talking in the background). I then recorded a voice over while I watched the muted video.

I uploaded the video and audio to VideoPad Video Editor. I had to cut and move the audio around a bit to get it to match the video. Then I added some music from this website to play quietly in the background. I also added both an opening title sequence and closing credits. You can see part of my editing process below.

After I was finished editing, I downloaded the video to my computer and then uploaded it to YouTube. I have seen countless tutorial videos on YouTube before, but I never realized how complicated it was to make even a simple one! I definitely have a new appreciation for YouTubers. You can see the finished video below.

Via the Assignment Bank, this video shows how to make a cup of tea in today’s kitchen (4 stars).

How’d we do it?

After some planning, my personal barista and I went into the kitchen and began filming. Uploading and downloading 8 clips took considerably longer than the previous video.While that dragged on, I found the theme music to How It’s Made, with which I’m very familiar because the dang show sucks me in every time.

Loading these into VideoPad, I started with the background music. I set in and out points on each video clip I wanted to use and lay them into the timeline, unlinking the audio from each clip and deleting it.

Once I had things roughly where I wanted, I watched the assembled video, pausing to write the narration. I recorded it with a handheld audio recorder and imported it to VideoPad. I laid each portion of narration on a second audio track in its appropriate place.

Once that was complete, I did some fine-tune video and audio trimming. As it turns out, if you want to do good audio work you have to buy the $100 VideoPad upgrade.

But I did find a way to lower the background music so it didn’t drown out the narration. Finally, I put in rough dissolve video transitions where they were needed to show time lapse and exported the video.