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Emmanuel School Promotional Video


Promotional videos are an art in themselves; too fancy, or too cheesy or too expensive! When promoting something, it is important to keep to the basics and eliminate anything that is negative or unnecessary. Moreover, it is important to portray the truth - without giving the audience a biased viewpoint.
Over the early part of summer 2013, I took on the task of creating a short promotional video for my old secondary school. On agreeing to this task, (as I hadn't made anything of the sort beforehand, and therefore had to do a rather large amount of research) I looked up how to make a promotional video. 

Prior to filming, I talked with several of the directors and staff to write down the basic structure for the video and this then enabled me to create a basic storyboard.


As my resources were limited at the time to a compact Ixus Canon Camera and Adobe Premier Elements (which the school kindly bought me in return for creating the video), it was difficult to achieve the desired look. The camera used has no manual lens and I was therefore limited to either normal shots or macro shots (close ups), and was not able to transfer from one to the other (tracking/pulling). I did however use a tripod for the some of the interview footage, although mostly it was handheld. The internal microphone on the camera was used as I did not possess one at the time.

I had aproximatly 2 weeks to film, which mainly consisted of interviewing the students and filming around the school. Specific lessons were noted such as art, science and P.E. (physical education) to ensure that a broad and varied amount of footage was shown. As always, it is important to make sure that enough footage is taken. In total, I took about 45 minutes worth of footage.

When it came to editing, I created a simple structure for the video and kept to it once a rough edit was done, and then the fine tuning and shortening of the length. Although the video lasts a total of approximatly 4 minutes, it was difficult to fit all of the information in. 

When most of the editing had been completed, a piece of music was recorded by Ashley Hall on the guitar - a cover of 'When I survey the Wondrous Cross' - which was then added to the edit and the project was adjusted as necessary.
 
Here is the link to the finished video: https://vimeo.com/79559596

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