Backyard Studio Blog

My First Video

// October 9th, 2009 // Uncategorized

I was looking through a video folder that I had on a file server and I found a folder with some of Backyard Studio videos plus some of my personal videos. One of those was one of the first videos I made, a “music video” that got my started in video production.

Here is the story behind it. In my sophomore year I took a Microsoft Office class. The first quarter was Word and the final for that class was making a slide show using Apple iMovie. I just watched that movie and it was pretty bad. All the pictures were really bright and the scanned ones looked really bad. The second quarter was Excel and I excelled at it. I got everything done in half the time it was supposed to take. I got to work with the IT department and learned a lot about networking. The final for that class was a music video. I had a great idea, problem was I couldn’t replicate what I had in my mind. I had some people drop out of it and then I had to change songs twice. By the end of it, I had no one that would help me with it, so I had to do it all by myself. This was also a hard time in my life, I had two of my very good friends leave me, so I felt depressed. There was this one song that I really liked so I decided to use that as my song for my music video. When I finally chose this song, I had two weeks to get it all done. This song was kind of depressing and I had a great idea in my head. Problem was again that I had a hard time making it look like my head. I filmed like 4 scenes. Most of them were scenes of me looking down and depressed. There was one scene where I walked through a dark hallway and one where burned a piece of paper.

By the I got the four scenes filmed, I had three days to get it all done. So I cheated and used Movie Maker (it probably harmed me more then helped me), I was supposed to use iMovie, but that wouldn’t have given me enough time. I put my 4 scenes in there and then split them up. Now there was one part of the song that I needed to have more then one person in my scene, so I took something I had filmed just for fun and used that. I put most of it together, I took out the audio and rendered out the movie. The last day of school, which was three hours, I got done with all my classes and went to work on it. I put the rendered video into iMovie and the audio in and an hour after school was done, I got my final done. I never knew what grade I got on it.

Watching it made me shake my head. It was so bad.  It was me in two different places, and dark hallway, me burning something, and a clip of some people (that had nothing to do with the video) mixed around. My hair was a complete mess and I looked really depressed. The one good thing about it was that the scenes changed when the lyrics did, so the video flowed with the audio. But other then that it was bad, it was badly lit, very grainy, and I looked just stupid. I remember at the time though I thought it was the best thing. Maybe I’ll put it up on the web site some day just to show you where I started with video production.

-Matthew Loberg