Storyboards, Shotlists, and Production

Students will hone their editing chops by producing a "music video" using song lyrics and "freegal" video & photo resources. This will help develop a simple planning process for editing (which can be transferred to shooting video, too.)

1. Students will select a song to make into a video, and will script out the lyrics (with time codes) in a table to create a "shot list."
2. Students will complete the table with a description of what images they want for each lyrical segment, making a "shopping list" for video footage and photos, etc.
3. Students will begin "shopping" for "freegal" visual collateral, saving all assets in a folder dedicated to the project.
4. Along the way, students should keep records of the assets which require attribution, (e.g. CC BY licenses.)
5. Students will revise their shot list based on the images they actually chose to use, making the list into a Video Editing Guide - which will guide their editing in the lab.
6. Students should refresh their knowledge of copyright laws and Fair Use guidelines to discuss how such materials may or may not be used.

Below is an example of a couple minutes of a music video of Mary Chapin Carpenter's "I am a Town"  using CC 0 (Public Domain) image resources from the Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons, and video footage licensed through VideoBlocks, and a few CC BY images from VisualHunt (which will be acknowledge in the credits of the finished video.)

The Shot List / Editing List looks like this:

Know Your Camera - and Camera Shots!

Students will acquaint themselves with their newly-assigned digital cameras - or the photo features of their smartphones - learnign the ins and outs of settings, downloads, footage organization, etc.

Then, they will produce a "Video Vocabulary" consisting of examples of the following shots:

(CC0 - Pixabay.com)

1. Wide Shots (Wide, Very Wide, and Extremely Wide)
2. Mid-shot
3. Medium Close Shot
4. Close-up
5. Extreme Close-up
6. Cut-ins & Cut-aways
7. Two Shot
8. Over the Shoulder Shot
9. Noddy Shot
10. POV Shot

Shots shoudl be about 6 seconds each to illustrate the angles an characteristics of each shot - and SHOULD be labeled with TITLES over each shot.

Students will export the video and post on YouTube - and will embed the YouTube video in their blogs with comments.

Next class session they will add camera movement shots to the "Video Vocabulary" to to video project

1. Dolly Shot (aka Trucking or Tracking)
2. Pan (left/right)
3. Tilt (up/down)
4. Following Shot
5. Zoom (in/out) 

Examples can be seen here: http://www.mediacollege.com/video/shots/