Tools
Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Audition
Descriptors
Editing, Animating, Captioning, Audio Editing, User Research
Project Context
During Spring semester of my Sophomore year I took a client consulting class. This class spent the semester focusing on working with real clients and the process associated with it. During the second half of the semester, I worked on a product delivery team of five students to create short videos for Livingston County Historical Society and Museum's salt mining exhibit. During this project we also worked with the SCRUM methodology to consistently deliver content.
Problem
Livingston County Historical Society and Museum came to our group saying they had a new salt mining exhibit within their museum and wanted to include videos of the process as a part of it. They chose us specifically to focus on short form content that would keep people of all ages engaged with the museum's educational content.
Solution
As our final deliverable, our team created eight videos focusing on different jobs and aspects of the rock salt mining process. These videos were created with content provided to us from the museum in collaboration with the company American Rock Salt.
Pre-Production
At the very beginning of our first sprint, we decided to create an outline script and storyboard as a reference for each video's specific script and storyboard. My teammate Megan created the outline script and was an integral part of communicating with both the museum and rock salt mining company as separate shareholders.
Additionally, our team worked together to research American Rock Salt to better understand all of the jobs within the salt mining process. We created a list of the eight main jobs we saw with brief descriptions of what they did as a reference.
Despite our focus on preparing materials and planning in advance before we started making specific videos, we eventually ran into a problem. Creating a lot of the videos we wanted to create would not be possible given the footage we had been provided, as it was either hard to see the job in progress or a miner was hard to hear. The museum had also informed us that getting new footage would likely not be possible before the end of our project, meaning we had to pivot and base our storyboards and scripts on the footage available to us. As an example, below is the script for our LHD video, where the voiceover talking about the process was done by one of our team members rather than one of the miners.
Editing, Graphics, Captions, & More
Following scripts, different people in our team cut up the videos to be less than a minute. Due to the quality of the footage we were given, a decent amount of footage had to be cut out and quality of video varied drastically. The cut up videos were then passed on to Megan, who did the majority of the graphics editing on our videos throughout the entire project process.
The final step before exporting any of these videos was captioning them, as ensuring that they were accessible to anyone in the museum was a vital part of our final deliverables. I did all of the captioning for our videos throughout the project, in addition to helping some of my teammates with editing and adding graphics when needed, and worked back and forth with Megan to ensure graphics and captions lined up with one another. As a part of the captioning process, I also made use of Adobe Audition to use their noise reduction feature and amplify the speakers volume.
One final addition we had as a part of the editing process was an outro animation to make the videos feel more finalized and show the collaboration between Livingston County Historical Society and Museum and American Rock Salt. This animation was an entirely new experience for me, as I had very surface level experience with After Effects and not much experience creating a whole animation within Premiere Pro. Despite the learning curve, I managed to make a simple animation where both shareholders logos were present and edited this animation onto the end of each video.
User Testing
Throughout our sprints and multiple iterations of videos, we conducted two different sessions of user testing. Each video we created was tested at least once to see what worked and what didn't work. Our user testing focused specifically on school age kids, although we found a wide range of ages to ensure that our videos were applicable to people of all ages like we hoped. Because of our focus on educational and entertaining videos, the notes of test results focused heavily on how interested each tester was and how easily they were able to recite information.
Sprint One Deliverables
Throughout the project we had three rounds of deliverables. Sprint one's deliverables were two videos for the Powdermen and the Undercutter as much of our time during that sprint was focused on planning and figuring out footage problems. Both of these videos featured video and audio about the miner job and were captioned in English.
Sprint Two Deliverables
Sprint two consisted of eight videos, six new ones and fixed versions of the previous two videos. Our six new videos were: the LHD, Roof/Ground Control, Driller, Admin, Fire Safety, and the Mine Collapse. All videos were around a minute in length and captioned in English. Additionally, this sprint also included the first draft of our outro animation.
Final Deliverables
Our final deliverables consisted of all eight videos with the same length and captions but fonts being changed so that they were consist with all of the other content posted by the museum. The outro animation was edited slightly and then versions of each video were provided with and without the outro animation at the end. Additionally, the compiled premiere projects for each video were provided as well.
Conclusion
There is a fair amount that I learned from this project, whether it be in relation to video editing or to working with clients.
For the video editing aspects, I have a much better understanding of how Premiere Pro works now, from cutting videos down, to adding graphics and text, to captioning. I also specifically challenged myself when it came to the animation aspect, and while it may have taken me a while to create it, I learned a lot from the experience and I have a much better grasp of how animation works in Premiere Pro now.
When it comes to clients, I've realized that you always need to have backups planned in case something can not be done on their end like you hoped, and that there are differing specific things that clients will focus on. For the situation with getting new footage, we ended up only being able to deliver two videos that sprint because we were so focused on getting the footage, but when we instead so quickly pivoted during the second sprint, we not only had the six videos planned but an extra animation for wow factor. That experience in particular has really shown me how important it is to be flexible and prepared to adjust plans whenever needed. For things clients focus on, in this case, there was a lot of emphasis on visual unity and proof reading for professionalism, which is why the final videos we provided had those font changes and I watched through them a couple of times in the hopes to catch any spelling or grammar errors.
Credits
All footage used was from American Rock Salt, their team, and Livingston County Historical Society and Museum and their team.
Thank you to the Livingston County Historical Society and Museum for this opportunity.