On the Cutting Room Floor

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With our StoryCorps interviews filmed, we began the process of putting together and editing our interviews into coherent videos for our latest PR pubs project. Onto the cutting room floor for us.

On Tuesday, I watched my entire interview with Sierra Abbott again, thinking of a possible theme that would shorten the nearly 11-minute-long interview into a two-and-a-half-minute video. Since I asked many questions about her life at OU, I decided on that theme and made a list of all the segments from the interview that centered on that theme.

The result was a group of sections that focused on why she chose OU, how she established herself at OU, what she likes about OU, her proudest Sooner moment, etc. After choosing the sections, I brought the interview over into my Premiere timeline and began cutting clips. This took nearly the entire day on Tuesday.

With my clips selected, I had some free time Thursday before class to edit some more. I changed the order of the clips and cleaned some of them up. My video was now down to three minutes. I had to make some serious decisions on where to cut. My focus was Sierra's experience at OU. Keeping this in mind, I cut a section where she talked about her plans after college. This saved me about 30 seconds worth of video. After a few more tweaks and cleaning, my video was about two-minutes-and-twenty-seconds long. 

I brought in some B-roll I took around campus and around Gaylord Hall. I feel that I didn't have enough B-roll. In addition, the B-roll I had was very impersonal. I asked Sierra if she could get me some pictures of her doing things with her sorority and at Soonerthon since she was heavily involved with that initiative this year. She gave me several pictures that I will be able to easily incorporate into my video. 

For the background music track, I searched through the music provided by our instructor to find something that would create a good tone to the interview. One track was a soft guitar. It would create a laid back atmosphere for the video that was neither too serious or unprofessional. 

My StoryCorps video project is near completion. With a little more editing and modifying, I think the video will be good quality and probably better than anything else I have created thus far in my creative career. I am hoping to have it completely finished by the end of next week which should be easy to do. I just have to finish a 10-page paper, a French composition, a PR writing assignment, the first half of a book and content for a social media marketing campaign. Just the usual work for an up-and-coming PR pro.  

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