Ever wonder how companies manage to promote their products or events in a short period of time on TV? So do I. In the recent project that the publicity/marketing team is doing, an exhibit trailer is in the works. We had a general idea of what we would like to do: promote the exhibit and promote the Historical Administration program. What we found out that it is easier said then done.
Thanks to Brittany, one of our fellow classmates who is part of the exhibition team, and her work with Google Sketchup, we were able to export the images into a video format. It took about an hour to export the video from Google Sketchup and have it ready for editing on iMovie.
So we now have the footage that is approximately less an a minute, but now what? The next step that we took was to write a brief script of what we would like to say in the video, separated in several parts. Using our press release which we created recently for our publicity launch, some sections for our video were already written up to use in our video.
Next, we needed a voice… a voice that could sound a bit like Dr. Guy Buzzard, hence we chose Jim. After finishing our script, we recorded Jim’s voice using Audacity, a free audio editor and recorder program. Audacity allows us to record, edit, and also export the recordings as MP3’s. Perfect!! Our class attended the Audacity training workshop to get those extra technology skills, which came in handy when creating this trailer. There were some problems we encountered while using the program, but ultimately for it being a free program, it did its job. We were able to clean up the sound, combine various recordings and insert them within the audio that we ultimately used. One of those problems was that one of our recordings that Jim had done for both the introduction and end of the video were somewhat lost. We tried not to panic and loose precious time, therefore I took our script and recorded the introduction and ending to place in our video.
While editing, the next challenge that arose was timing. Timing was not on our side because when we finally got all the audio we needed, the video was too short, or when the video was finally edited and great, the audio was off. The program that we used on the Mac computer in the HA lab in order to edit our video was iMovie. Just as we received training on Audacity, we also received a workshop training on iMoive last semester. iMovie is an amazing program to use when editing videos because it has so many special features we could use, such as slowing down the video, zooming in or out of a clip, and of course, add audio into it. Since the Google Sketchup video was a bit short in the end, we thought it would be a great idea to use our famous 3 tier image we use and placed our social media sites to promote them as well in our video. (shown below)
Patience is key when doing a trailer so after adjusting the video and audio on iMovie, we were finally able to view our final work. After 3 long hours, we were finally finished. We recorded the voice tracks, we edited the video clips, created an ending slide to promote our media sites, and lastly we created our first exhibit trailer. Take a look:
Since this is our first trailer (because yes we will be creating more videos for ya’ll to see), it was a great experience to learn how to create one and also take into account that audio and video editing is not as complicated as felt in the beginning.
Check out and follow our progress on our media sites:
Website: http://www.eiu.edu/ha/exhibits/2014/home.html
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Textandtextiles2014
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/buzzard2014
Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/textandtextiles/
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtWOFohjb8IrKGlpBGhoXlg
Text and Textiles: Crafting the Lives of Guy and Irene Buzzard 