There’s a lot that could go wrong in the world of content creation. If you’re editing a graphic, Indesign could force-quit and you lose your work. If you’re going on location to shoot photos you can arrive with all your gear and realize you forgot your SD card. You could schedule a time and date to interview a source for video and they can back out the day of. It’s a pretty nerve-wracking world to be a part of day in and day out. But, if you’re lucky and you get to work on projects you’re passionate about, all the stress makes the work worth it.
For the last seven weeks, I’ve been working on my passion project. It was a bike safety campaign that was composed of audio, video and social media elements. And while I loved the opportunity to pursue this topic that means a lot to me, it did not come without its road bumps. And by that, I mean that I did in fact lose my work after my browser force-quit one afternoon so I had to start a Canva graphic again. I also recorded an entire interview and came home to edit to find there was no audio. I also got stood up by a source I was supposed to interview two days before I was set to move four hours away. It was a very busy, very stressful two months. But it’s the last day of my seven-week journey and I am beyond relieved to have still been able to finish what I set out to accomplish.
My overall project was supposed to consist of a video sandwiched between two podcast episodes with a month-long social media campaign sprinkled in between. During the last few weeks I was able to schedule the entire campaign throughout the month of July and was able to write, record, edit and upload my first podcast episode. Because I had already recorded my footage, this meant that I had only a few days to find another interviewee, record, edit, upload, and also write, record and edit my final podcast episode. And the day before the final due-date, I somehow managed to do it. Talk about a sigh of relief!
THE FINAL VIDEO
The final video took about three days of filming. After realizing I had no audio because of user error (I didn’t plug in the mic all the way), I woke up at 6:30 a.m. and made my way out onto the road to hunt down another interview and managed to find an extremely solid interviewee.
Video has always been one of my favorite mediums in the world of content creation and I had so much fun out on the field, just like I did when I first pursued broadcast journalism for my undergrad.
Looking back on my final product, my only disappointment was wishing I was able to find an additional person to interview, or at least similar to the interview I was hoping to record before my move. But in the end, I was pretty happy with the way it came out.
Watch my final video here:
Though I’ve been editing on Adobe Premiere for nearly 10 years, I still found myself Googling how to do techniques I had never done before. One of which was how to zoom during a still photo. I found this helpful article on this website called Motion Array and was able to figure out how to animate a still image.
After uploading it to YouTube, I created a playlist titled Chain Reaction where described the purpose of this project. And did the same for my podcast, which brings me to my next section.
THE FINAL PODCAST
My final podcast playlist on Soundcloud consists of three tracks; the introduction to this project, the interview and the wrap up. I organized it this way so that listeners could listen to it all the way through and get a beginning, middle and end.
After recording my first episode to my computer and then uploading it to Adobe Premiere where I edited the audio, I felt like there had to be a smoother workflow. I read an article by author Brenda Stokes Barron titled “10 Beginner Audio Editing Tutorials for Adobe Audition” that cut my workflow in half for the second episode. Learning how to use Audition in just a few hours made me incredibly excited for working with audio in the future.
The following is my final Podcast playlist on Soundcloud:
WRAPPING UP
After a very stressful seven weeks and terrifying thoughts of “Will I actually be able to finish a podcast, video and social media campaign?” I feel pleased with the way everything turned out and am excited for my bike safety campaign to be released to the public. Now, all I can do is keep learning, raise awareness and check back on my analytics.