Video Bootcamp

I survived my one week video bootcamp in Maine. Well actually, I did more than survive it. I excelled at it and had a terrific time. What a huge contrast it was between last year's 'bootcamp' training and this year's class. Last year I almost never saw the light of day. It was nothing but grueling long hours inside a dark cold computer lab with my nose stuck behind a monitor from 8 am to 10 pm. My goodness just thinking back to it gives me the shivers. It's hard to believe that I willingly volunteered for another week of this sort of intense training, but I am so very happy that I did. I learned a tremendous amount of information. In fact, the instructor normally takes 5 weeks to cover what he covered in 5 days. To say it was fast paced was an understatement, but I couldn't be happier. I love fast moving things and finding fast moving things in Maine can sometimes be a challenge . . . as I flash back to my drive up there and the 56 miles of one lane roads and nothing but locals in my way driving too slow . . .

Oooops, back to the training . . . This class was fantastic for several reasons. First, we had a really good instructor and teaching assistant. Those two guys made the learning easy and entertaining. Then we had a great group of people that all got along and gelled really well together. That is probably the single most important thing to having a great class compared to a disaster. It's the people that make it and these folks were fun. And the last thing that made this class so awesome was the fact that we were out and about with shooting assignments every day. It was just a thrill to get out and interact with the community for all of our various assignments. My God are people from Maine friendly. In one week's time, interacting with over a dozen different people we were just floored by the level of cooperation and kindness we recieved. It was just so refreshing. I never felt so welcomed anywhere. Oh, and add to that the fact that my partner for the week was a stinkin' hoot. Never a dull moment and nothing but laughs.

So now that I painted a picture that it was just a joy ride vacation week I should share some of the real details to illustrate what I did. Day one was intro to a professional video camera, that has no less than 50 buttons, switches, levers, and adjustments. You can not imagine the extent of controls and adjustments on these cameras. Holy spinning head of trying to remember what to do and when. But off we went with with several thousand dollars of equipment and zero experience or knowledge of how to work them. There's only one way to learn and that's to just do it. It was a challenge, but it was a ball.

Day two we learned about audio and it's importance in any film. Our exercise on this day was to record an audio short story that didn't include any narration. The listener should be able to visualize the location and what's going on. Since I had a car, my partner and I had more flexibility to get off campus and we headed to a local music shop. The guys working in it were, of course, all too eager to help us out with the lesson. Let's just say that our project rocked!

Day three was all about simulating the real world of video production. In the morning we were given the video theme and it was up to us to go out into the community to talk to people to try to find a good story. We needed to find our lead characters and develop 6 different 'scenes' that could be strung together to formulate a short story within our theme. Just like in the real world, you are given so many hours of research time before you need to be back to the art director to 'pitch' your ideas. During the pitch the instructor helped up develop our scenes and then were were sent out for the rest of the afternoon and following morning to shoot the footage. Wow, was THAT every challenging. Now we had to worry about everything all at once . . . working the camera, recording the sound, figuring out how to do the lighting, directing the overall shoot, the angles, the ambiance, the "cinemaverte" (which basically means 'keeping it real.' We were not allowed to mess with reality as far as directing our characters what to say or do. This, by the way, drove me nuts because I'm not a documentary filmmaker. I make propaganda to sell products. I'm all about distorting reality!

It was a long 24 hours of shooting. Our next huge challenge was to jump into the editing phase and we were already late with getting the footage. Then my camera took twice as long to transcode so we did a lot of pacing around. It wasn't until Friday morning that we had all the footage and after hours of painstakingly beginning my project, the computer I was using crashed, not once, but twice, causing me to lose hours of work. I was so frustrated that I just wanted to throw my hands in the air and quit. I didn't really get started on my project until 2 pm and I had it all finished by 4 pm. In the professional world we were taught to budget one day for every one minute of finished edited video. I think I blew that average out of the water. Of course, my project was crazy raw and mostly bad (as far as the professional world goes) but I was very proud of my accomplishements. I had, by far, the biggest disadvantage in the class and ended up with the longest and most complete project. I will try to upload my project to YouTube one of these days and share it here on my blog. But first I need to stay home for more than 31 hours. I'm already sitting in another hotel room and homesick :-(