Placement Day 2

Today was much more relaxed than yesterday, since most of the team were either out or preparing fly to Italy for a shoot. I arrived at 10:00 and was left alone to chill until about 11:00. Peter was going over the final tweaks for the Toyota video. There was still a small change to be made to the audio, so I helped him to record the voiceover again. He continued editing the video until just after lunch.

Almost immediately after this video was finalised and sent to the clients, the Sandstorm team began looking over another video that they were working on for Nationwide. It made me aware that in the professional world, there are no breaks, there's always more work to be done. Although most of the video was finished, there were still final touches to be made, this included adjusting the noise and colour grading. Peter briefly began working on this, adding a vignette to make the scene look more dramatic. After Peter left to go to Italy, Tom continued working on the video.

14:55

In the meantime, I was given the responsiblity of editing a behind the scenes video for the Sandstorm website. Peter had initally edited together a sequence, however felt this was too intense and contrasted with the Dyson video that followed. I therefore had to reedit the sequence to be more calm. I had to choose a much slower song, I narrowed it down to 7 different choices from their library. In the end I went with the one called 'The nature of things'.

15:43

16:51

I tried to follow conventions of previous Sandstorm videos, for example I wanted to find out how long to leave the logo titles for. I changed around the order of the shots so that they started much slower and built up the action. I also increased the length of some of the shots in order to decrease the pace. Tom was impressed with the sequence I created, which I was surprised by. I initially didn't trust myself to edit any of their videos because I thought that I was nowhere near as experienced as they all are. However it was reassuring to know that Tom, as a professional, was happy with the work I did. Both Tom and Jenny told me that I should have more confidence in myself, which is something I know I need to work on. They also said they would be happy to have me back.

From doing this placement I also became aware of the very long hours that take place. I left at 18:30 today, yet Tom still had to stay to correct the colour grading, sharpness and de-noise the video. I was previously unaware of how much work goes into corporate videos. It seems to be the same amount of work as any other video production medium. It's possibly even more work, since there's the added pressure of creating an industry standard video for another company. From my observation its seems like professionalism is equaled to perfectionism.