[Music]
Hi, I'm Ian. I work for BT at Adastril Park.
Welcome to this short video about making videos.
I'm sure you'll have seen loads of videos during the last
several months of lockdown.
Videos from all sorts of different people, but in
particular, what I was going to think about today is videos
from groups. So the first thing that I wanted to think
about and talk about is time.
The more you put in, the more you get out. If you want to
get contributions for a video you want to make from your
friends,
that's going to take time. Putting it together will take
time. For this video, I need to keep it down to only a few
minutes,
so I need to plan how long I'm going to take for each
segment. So I'm going to move on fairly quickly.
Sound. When we see video, we can assume that it's really
tightly integrated with what we hear,
but if only it was that easy. I put together something
about a month ago for the churches across Ipswich.
I got about 30...
people all saying the same prayer. Now I thought this was
going to be quite easy.
I sent out a control video for everyone to speak along with.
Easy, yeah? You just
say it along with it. No, I was completely wrong. I found
music is far easier
because I've been doing bands and things and they're much
much easier. Put together
from people recording on phones, on tablets, on laptops.
Try to get people to
do it all at the same time though. Proved to be impossible.
Let me show you. Let me
play you the line. This is the control version that I sent
out to
everyone. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Easy,
yeah? Let me show you what I
got back. This is what it sounds like if you just put
everybody together. Are you
ready for this? Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.
That was never gonna work. It just sounded awful. Do you
know what? As
humans when we hear sound we can hear really small deviances.
Things that are
slightly wrong are really easy to hear and
but when you watch a video you would never tell because our
eyes aren't as sensitive as our ears.
So what do we do about it? Well when we speak we speak in
syllables.
Syllables. Each little part of a word comes separate and
when they don't line up, that's why it sounds bad.
So what I had to do for every single line, break the whole
thing down and
take all of those syllables and line them all back up again.
So let me play you just one line that I got from one of the
contributions.
I saw her in heaven.
Okay, sounds alright, doesn't it? But didn't fit. So what I
had to do to it was this.
I saw her in heaven.
Do you hear all those little gaps in it? Let me play it
again.
I saw her in heaven.
Sounds like she's jumping doesn't it? And and that's not
just one. I had to do that for absolutely everybody.
I mean you can see as I scroll on the screen here, you see
all the little lines.
I'll zoom in a bit. You see all the little gaps in the
recordings.
That's how I managed to put these back together and it took
quite a lot of time.
But I think it was worth it because the end result...
sounded something more like this. Much better. Lots of
people but all speaking
together. That's the audio. I'm not going to show you the
video for this because
it was just about putting lots of people all on the screen
at the same time. I've
got something much more fun to look at for video.
So I had loads of fun making this. This is a puppet video.
I worked with a
puppet team and they were going to tell a story of Jonah
and the whale. I don't
know if you know the story but it's all about a whale and
he swallows this guy
called Jonah and there's all at sea and it's a lot of fun.
So lots of things we've
got to do. First you've got to get the footage, the basic
footage that you're
going to use for your video. So what was I going to need?
Well actually I needed
some sea. So we don't live too far from the sea do we? I
got in the car and
went down to Felixstowe and I recorded things like this. It's
just sea. I sat
there with a camera for a minute just videoing the sea.
see. How sad is that? Move on from that. I've got to then
create a world that Jonah is going
to live in. So I went looking for other pictures, other
things that I could use as a background,
and I found this picture. This might be the city that Jonah's
going to. I found a picture
of the desert. This might be where Jonah is. At one point
he talks to God, so I thought,
"Oh, let's have a cloud. Let's have God on a cloud." If
Jonah's going to go inside a
whale, then I need something that's the inside of a whale.
And of course, if he's going to
go to sea, we need a boat. So you find all these things,
and then you've got to try and
put them together. How could I do that? So let me show you
the boat. This is the boat.
Look at that. I got it sailing on the sea. It's sort of in
the sea. It's not just floating
around on top. So how do you do that? I've only got one
picture of the sea. What I actually
did was I cheated a little bit, and I've actually got two
copies of the sea here. Let me show
you. I'll take one of them away. So I took away the back of
the sea, and now the boat's
sort of floating on...
one bit. If I take away the other bit of sea, it looks like
that, it's just a boat.
And then as I play the boat you'll see that I've made it
just rock. It just
rotates a little bit as it's moving across the screen. If I
put the sea back,
now it looks like it's floating on the sea. But of course I
need more than just a
boat, so there you go, I had a whale as well. A giant fish
swimming through the
same sea. Told you this was a lot of fun. But I need more
than that, now I need
some puppets because all I've done here is a little bit of
animation. So what did
we do? Well I wanted a guy called Jonah, so let's have a
look, here he is. This is
Jonah and yeah that's my head at the bottom. And I'm
listening to the music
track that's going to play along with this and Jonah, you'll
see him at
different times, he'll sing or he'll dance or move around
and I had to record
lots of different bits that would all come together and all
fit. So he's
looking the right way or looking the wrong way or wherever
he's supposed to
be. So if he's on the boat he's got to look like he's going...
across the screen. If he's falling in the water he's got to
look like he's falling.
You have to put all those things together. That bit there,
that was just
where he was talking to God. So I've just shown you where I
recorded him talking
to God. This is what the final sequence looks like. There
he is, he's standing
there, he's dancing, and then God appears on a cloud and
talks down and you see
him looking up and I had to pretend that I knew where he
was going to be. That's
that. Transition and off he goes, he's singing into the
next bit.
Now this song needs a narrator as well so let's put the
narrator back in. There
she is at the top but you can't really see her very well
there so most people
these days they play with a bookcase behind them don't they?
So there we go
let's have a little bookcase behind her and there she is
she can sit there and
she can narrate. And a little speech bubble, a thought
bubble there, he's
thinking about a fight that might happen. So we've got lots
and lots of elements
that we can start bringing together. Okay so did you see
how we used green behind
the puppet and that green disappeared and instead we
put other things on. That is called green screening or
chroma keying. Now I thought
you might like to see how that's done. Let me show you.
This is from from that
Jonah video. This is the narrator and she's sitting there
you can see we've
got some lights on her and she's got a green screen behind
her. But what I want
to have is her sitting in front of this bookcase. So first
thing we have to get
just the bit of picture that we're interested in. That's
called cropping.
Let's crop her down now. So we don't want all this stuff on
the side because we
don't want those lights. We don't want all that height
because she's not going
up and down but we do want the book and we want the table.
So we've cropped her.
She's a bit smaller and we can see a bit of bookcase but we
can still see the
green screen. We don't want that. In this software I go to
something called pip
designer. That's the thing that allows me to do chroma key.
So I turn on chroma
key and then I say I tell it what is the color that I want
it to take get rid of.
So if I click on this green the green just disappears. Easy
as that. Dead simple
isn't it? And that's it. So by putting together all
these sorts of techniques and then moving things around on
the screen at
the right times you can end up with a finished article. I
wish I had time to
show it all to you now but if you want to watch it I've put
the link on the
screen you can go to the Puppet Team's video page and your
Facebook page you
can see the whole thing in all its glory. I hope you've
enjoyed these few minutes
we've been able to spend with me just talking to you a
little bit about how
much fun it is to put videos together. I hope you're
inspired. Enjoy doing it
yourself. You don't have to pay a lot of money for the
software there's stuff for
free out there. Get together with your friends, think of an
idea and just go for
it. It's dead easy. Put it out on YouTube. We'd love to see
it. Goodbye.
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