Blood Drive

Here is my news piece on the "Boiler Up, Roll 'em Up" blood drive which is a competition with IU.



I used my Sprint Evo 4G for the video recording and took all the footage while at the blood drive.  It was actually a hard thing for me to do, since I am scared of blood and needles.  Luckily I didn't have to give blood myself (I am ineligible), but got a friend who loves to give blood to do it for me.  This worked out very well since I could focus on taking video then.  When they started drawing the blood, I actually had to look away and try not to pass out while I was shooting.  So if you see any shakiness or drifting off target, that is why.  I was told by the nurses there that if I passed out, they'd take my blood while I was unconscious, but I think they were kidding.

I really enjoy voice overs.  I feel like a voice over is perfect for giving your piece a story arch and I'm pretty happy with the flow of my own piece.  I started having some fun with Adobe Premier and added in titles and overlays.  The product is actually really nice and my computer runs Premier very well.  I still remember the days that encoding a video would take hours and now my finished video (even in HD) only took 8 minutes to compile.
I think I should have taken more B-Roll from different angles to make the editing process a bit easier, but in my defense, the Red Cross people were watching my like a hawk.  I didn't include an establishing shot, but I think my piece didn't need it.  I wish I could have gotten more voice variety, but most the voices in the videos are really hard to hear.  I wasn't able to get any interviews, which probably would have made this video a bit more interesting.  Lastly, I want a better mic for my voice overs.  The ones that I had all seemed to cut off the highs and made my voice sound so boring. bah!

I ultimately had a lot of fun editing this video, much more than the first one, and my stress level was a lot lower.  I actually was having enough fun to choose to loose sleep over getting it done, thus why this blog post is going up at 4:05 AM while YouTube gets the upload.  I really enjoyed the news piece project, but am pretty uncertain what I'm going to do for my ritual....