Fortunes Rock Beach
This project began like any other would. With an Idea. In the Fall of 2019, I was given a simple prompt from my Music professor to create a 5-minute movie. The general criteria were that we would have a completely free range of everything. We were not held back by only having to use one software or another. It’s a creator’s dream. Sadly, my previous computer that housed the progression of this video no longer has that file due to it being corrupted. Luckily, the final product and the individual photos and videos were saved on the cloud. The original working product was sadly lost. However, I have gone into iMovie yet again and remade a working product to the best of my ability.
For this project, I starting thinking of things that I would want to do. Do I want to do a time-lapse and narrate what is happening? I won’t be able to do that because that would be too short of a video… Do I do what we had done for my Jurassic park movie where I just layered a sound onto a video that was already made? All of these types of thoughts came into my mind, but, if I was really going to have this as my final hurrah for the semester, I wanted to go all out. What a better way to show that then a Day with Bella.
If I had the opportunity to be able to do this project again, I wouldn’t want to change anything. I not only made this project for me but, I made it for others to enjoy. In my Dog Blog I talked about how Bella isn’t just my tool, she helps out everyone around her as well. When people see her they immediately want to come and say hello. This is one of the reasons I put the video onto Youtube so that everyone can enjoy her day at the Beach. I wanted it to look like a home video, with having the feeling of we are on this adventure together.
Visuals
Knowing this, and being devoted to this idea, I went to the beach and shot some footage. The footage of Bella playing with a soccer ball was just the original footage. But then I came to thinking, just Bella playing with a ball doesn’t really tell a story.
Which is what I wanted to do was tell what a full trip of a day with Bella is really like. So, I ended up going back another day and shooting some B-roll of the waves crashing at Fortunes. If you don’t know Fortunes Rock Beach, it is a very rocky beach on both ends of it. The footage of Bella playing is at the southern half of the public beach, where the B-roll of the waves on the rocks is on the northern end of the beach.
Additionally to collecting my footage for Bella I also collected the footage that I used in my Fortunes Rock Beach image. When I shot Bella’s footage is was a nice sunny day with partial clouds giving me the opportunity to capture some great footage. For the B-roll, the weather was completely opposite. It was a cold, wet, rainy day, which ended up benefiting the B-roll. How do you ask? When the weather is acting up it makes for wonderful wave action against the rocks, making it look more dramatic than it is.
Audio
Now that I had collected my images, it was time to think of what sound I should use. Of course, there is the obvious keep the original sounds, but, as I said earlier I wanted to go all out. So you know what I did? I made my mp4 into an mp3 file, layered it on top of iMovie’s “generic” wave sound, and got this beautiful creation.
The main song that plays is “All is Found” sung by Kacey Musgraves is Disney’s Frozen 2 sequel. I choose this song because I had just seen Frozen 2 on the day it had come out and grown rather fond of that version, so I wanted to incorporate it into my video. The other songs I use are very short but can be heard at the beginning atop the wave sounds “Sea Rose Beach”1 by Stephen Bennett which usually is played at Disney’s Beach Club resort in Florida. This song is used at the end of the video as well. The additional sound that I used was for my end credits called “Vacation Beach” by ROSS. As you can see I stuck to a beach theme for this project and wanted the audio to match that.
Editing
As for editing this video goes, I added all my videos into iMovie. To me editing in iMovie is easy since I have plenty of background knowledge on it. After my videos were added I individually went into them and cut them to my desired lengths and stabilized the footage as much as I could. From there I went in and added the layered wave effects so that they were throughout the entire video.
I intentionally made this video so that I wouldn’t have to have any of the human socialization be the focus. I wanted there to be no actual talking in the video, I wanted it to be focused on just the visual aspects, not so much the audio that was in it. If I was to break the audios and add in what my roommates and I were talking about, I knew it would break up the viewer’s perspective on what I was trying to achieve. So, I stuck with my gut and made the videos mute. Which I included a Gif of, above. Which is in the video at around 30 seconds in.
To complete my video I added in the beginning introduction sequence, and the end roll credits. I believe that by giving credit where credit is due is an important piece when you are making any type of video. In total there were 15 individual videos that were used to make this movie. Each of those videos was incorporated into it with minor/subtle fade-in/ fade-out techniques, as well as using the splitter tool and video trimmers to get my final product as shown below.
A few tech specs about these videos:
- Wide angled
- Dual 12 Megapixel cameras
- 60 fps
- 4K footage
- Uploaded to Youtube at 720p
- Bella footage
- Shot at 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm, November 10th, 2019
- B-Roll footage
- Shot at 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm, November 24th, 2019
Copyright Information
1 Background Music-
Sea Rose Beach · Stephen Bennett
Harp Guitar – A Compilation – Two Disc Set
℗ 2004 Stephen Bennett
Released on: 2004-01-01
