Sick of Hearing My Own Voice

“Well, you know what they say about the best laid plans…”

My plan for this week was to transition from training posts to good old history nerd content. Yes, I enjoy riding my bike, but that’s not the primary reason I plan on biking the Lewis and Clark Trail this summer. I might like the idea of bike touring in general, but I’m going on this specific trip because of the history. Well, you know what they say about the best laid plans…

The drama of this week has been more in launching my Kickstarter than any excitement on a ride. My overly optimistic plan was to launch on Tuesday. But, as you can see, that didn’t happen. Not only did I miss that deadline, but I missed my Tuesday blog post because getting this darn thing going has taken up every waking moment of the past week, save for bike training. I told you about my filming trip to Concord, well last week I started filming the talking head parts of my Kickstarter video. I wrote my script, and with my mom’s cinematic help, filmed a video explaining the project. It took me all day to get the files onto my computer in a file type that I could actually view. When I finally did, I realized the external microphone I used didn’t pick up any sound.

My mom and I agreed that the background was lackluster and the lighting bleached me out, so we went to plan B. My mom’s friend Stephen (cue plug: The Digital Doc) lent us a green screen to make the background a little more on theme. On his suggestion I planned on showing a map of the route behind me, as well as other images. We filmed it on the same camera, did an actual sound check (what an intelligent and novel idea!) We finished filming the whole thing and uploaded it. This time the sound worked, but you could hear the distracting whir if the camera’s hard drive grind through the whole video. It took just as long to get the files onto my computer.

When I got back and looked at what I’d filmed I realized that there was too much light coming from behind the green screen and it looked off. Finally, I moved the green screen to solve the lighting problem and filmed it again. As far as I was concerned, once I uploaded that video I was finished. Then I started editing. My eye line was so far off camera it looked awkward. I had set up a jerry rigged teleprompter by chrome casting my script onto a TV. I used a selfie stick attached to my tripod with Velcro, but we couldn’t really see what was happening on screen. At this point I was back at my apartment, no longer had access to the green screen. I was so sick of filming that I was ready to just deal with what I had, even though I knew it didn’t look great.

My friend Becca offered to help me edit, since I’m learning Adobe Premiere on the fly as I work on this project. I met up with her on Tuesday afternoon and showed her what I had so far.

“My morale was at an ultimate low.”

My morale was at an ultimate low. She told me what I already knew. I need this video to look professional if I want my project to get funded. Thank goodness for friends! When I sighed and said I knew I needed to re-film, that I was burnt out from filming it so many times and I didn’t know what to do for a background. Suddenly I had a director. More importantly I had someone who was excited to help, and I mooched off of her enthusiasm. We grabbed a tripod and went outside for a shoot. She gave me direction, convinced me to do it off the cuff instead of reading it off my screen (Is it surprising that I had it basically memorized at this point? Nah). We wound up with a much better clip, and I spent the afternoon editing at her apartment. I had two gaps I didn’t know how to fill, but played her what I had and asked for her thoughts. She told me I could use more action shots, and we were right back out the door to take video of me biking at “the magic hour”

I finished editing after my ride yesterday. I’m confident that I’ll be ready to launch the Kickstarter on Tuesday. Please come back and check it out!