This semester, I had the opportunity to film and edit a video for our event w/ the Atlanta Science Festival! We hosted the Einstein’s Ghost Tour, where attendees walk through a tour and learn about the research and the untimely demise of four scientists throughout time: Archimedes, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Joseph Crocé-Spinelli & Théodore Sivel, and Marie Curie. I don’t get the chance to do media for an event often, so I’m really glad I got the chance to. Videography is one of my favorite hobbies, and I wanted to challenge myself for this event!
With this video, I learned a lot of new techniques and skills. I’ve been learning to edit with Black Magic’s Davinci Resolve, which is one of the video-editing software that the film industry uses typically for color-grading. I wanted to practice and learn color grading, so I recorded in Log format, a camera setting that captures footage in a flat, desaturated way to preserve maximum dynamic color range and information. There are so many tutorials on color grading on YouTube! Because of that, there are also several ways to color grade, and it got really overwhelming for a newbie like me.
One thing I found to be challenging was working with footage from a low-light setting. I can’t really color-grade too much or really fix the dark video in post-production. I think it’s hard for me to reach my fullest potential with the kind of footage I had to work with. Another challenge I faced was not getting any footage of the guests’ faces, which I think takes away from the recap video, because we couldn’t see their reactions or expressions to our actors’ lines. Hopefully, the final video is still good!
I really enjoyed the trial-and-error of the entire experience: figuring out which colors to bring out, how to bring out certain colors without sacrificing others, which footage to keep and which to scrap, etc. I enjoy the creativity and open-ended aspect of video editing! It’s so much fun putting together various video footage to evoke emotions and tell a story. I hope I achieved that with my video!
