Hannah Wilkinson spent five days editing a documentary video about a school trip to Aruba. On the first two days, she filmed interviews and began editing them together with relevant footage from the trip. She edited color, framing, and added titles. On the next two days, she continued matching interview clips with trip footage, but ran into issues when files were moved, causing missing clips. She was able to restore her progress. On the final day, she added music to complement the video and finished all edits.

1. Production Diary
Hannah Wilkinson

2. Day 1
I started today by writing up the interview questions
ready for the afternoon. I had to ask somebody else
to do the interview for me as the original person I was
going to interview wasn’t able to make it to college.
After collecting the kit I went into the studio to film
with the interviewees. I set up the camera and tripod
but wasn’t able to get the microphone working. I
ended up having the record the Audio on the cameras
microphone which doesn’t sound as effective. The
interviews were successful and I finished by uploading
all the footage onto the computer.

3. Day 2
After this I started to edit the footage. I started by editing the first interview question and going through the
Aruba footage to find clips that matched what Hannah was talking about in her interview. In the first question
Hannah talked about what she had learned about the town San Nicolas. I had video footage of us going
around on the mural tours which went well. I then put text on the bottom of the screen to introduce Hannah
by putting her name and title. I put this on the right side of the screen to balance out the video.
I also edited together the introduction for the video. I liked the video clip of the sea crashing against some
rocks. I then had a clip of some palm trees that I had for the title screen. I thought that was good because it
tells the audience what the video is like by setting a positive mood and establishing a location.

4. Day3
I then continued to edit the other questions which
were about the things that they enjoyed from the trip.
I went through my Aruba footage to find clips of us as
a group and of the different leisure activities we did
whilst we were there. I found that I didn’t have as
much footage to use for this that I liked. There were
also a lot of videos that were filmed in portrait that
weren’t usable.
I then edited the last question which was about how
the students think this experience has changed them.
After all the footage was included in the video, I made
the final touches. I thought that the lighting in the
interviews was too yellow so I edited the colour. I
adjusted the blue tones in the video to even out the
yellow to make it look more white. After this I made
adjustments to the framing of the interviews as I
wasn’t entirely happy with the final outcome. I felt
that there was too much head room in the original
ones so I zoomed the videos in

5. Day 4
On this day I made the mistake of moving the footage
around in the computer files. This caused many of the
video clips to disappear as the computer couldn’t locate
the videos. I was able to relocate the footage and move it
back into the correct place. This meant that Premiere Pro
was able to locate all the missing files and restored all my
progress.
To finish the video I got some final bits of footage for my
outro. I wanted to make use of some of the footage that I
wasn’t able to put in the video earlier so I put it together
to make a montage of clips. I then faded them out at the
end. I then decided I wanted to make transitions
between the different sections of the interviews. I
thought this helped with the flow of the video and split it
into clear sections.

6. Day 5
The final part that I had to do to complete the video
was add the music. I struggled to find music on the
royalty free websites because none of it suited the
style and content of the video. I ended up looking at
royalty free music that is available on YouTube and
found some songs that fit the Caribbean theme. This
worked a lot better for the video and made it feel
more complete. I made sure to have it fade out at the
beginning so that the music was quiet during the
video. This was because I didn’t want the music to
distract from the video but just compliment it in the
background.