Academic Honesty Video: process+evaluation+final work

For the past three weeks Alyona Sukhova, Polina Orlova and I have undertaken a new challenge by collaboratively working on a short video for the Academic Honesty contest. The showing is in the past and I would like to reflect on the process of making the video and the evaluation of my peers in this post. 

The idea of making a voice over for famous celebrities came to us very quickly and we went with it because we thought it was creative and original. And as my classmates noted, it was. 

To start off I went home and downloaded several videos off youtube for further editing. It was a new skill for me as I have never downloaded videos off internet before. After this Polina and I watched through all of the videos and picked out sections that we wished to include in the video. We were looking for sections with a lot of gestures but not obvious mouth movements. Then we brainstormed ideas that we would want to include into the video and wrote out lines that our celebrities could say. The only thing left to do was to record the lines and layer them over muted video sections. Easier said than done. We had to record over and over again for the voice to match the picture and it was so exasperating at times, I just wanted to give up on this! But I didnt. We then used GarageBand (a mac app) to experiment with different pitches of voice (afterall, we couldnt have Bieber and Queen Elizabeth talking in the same Karina’s or Polina’s voice!) FInally the voice overs are all done.

Originally, we planned on purely using voice overs and video clips to construct our film from but then we came up with a more original idea and that is a news program. We presented celebrity clips as sections from interviews with them that we ourselves took. Polina and I had to use our drama skills to play roles of professional news reporters whilst Alyona was doing the camera work. 

Once the video was all done, I spent some quality time editing it. In the end as an amusing little extra we decided to include outtakes from the video. 

I have posted the final project on YouTube:

Overall the video was a great success. During evaluation session our video was viewed first and Mr Gray noted that he felt sorry “for everyone else who had to go after us”. It was a great deal of praise for us. Others thought that our video was very relevant to the topic, original and creative. 

However, there was a huge problem with our work. It did not match one of the main contest requirements which stated that all materials, whether is it audio or video, should represent the author’s original work. 

It was a great shame and for the future, I will make sure to keep close attention to requirements for the work.