Personal Video Stories…

Late last year, 100 ACRE FILMS edited a number of videos for Your Social Marketer, who was working for the County of San Diego Health and Human Services Agency. They are all short “video stories” that tell of one person’s struggle to overcome addiction or other personal trials. Each of these individuals are remarkable people with incredible stories. Working on the videos really makes you thankful for all you have, and is also a reminder of how we must always be mindful to be there for the ones we love when they need help.

The projects began with a script provided by Your Social Marketer. They worked with the subject to craft a 3-5 minute script of their story to be told through photos, artwork, video clips, or whatever other creative means they wanted. They then recorded a voice over of the subject reading the script.

The script, voice over recording, and other creative materials were then brought to 100 ACRE FILMS for us to put together. For this series, we had 8 videos to create. We wanted to try and give each of them a slightly different look and feel, but keep the overall structure and style consistent from video to video.

One of the difficult things we faced was getting too few pictures, or pictures that had too low of a resolution for video. The advent of camera phones has been great, but for a long time they took lousy photos quality-wise and sometimes that’s all people had. Because some of the images were so small (200×120 sometimes), it was decided to work at standard definition resolution (720×480). That way, we wouldn’t have to enlarge the images too much – doing so really made some look bad.

Editing (as always) in Premiere Pro, the voice over track was laid in first, and then we went in and placed the pictures in one by one – not doing any animation on them at first, just creating a storyboard track. Once that structure was determined, the hard part started…putting it all together: animating the pictures, adding in any graphics or sound effects, adding any stock footage, finding the right music for the piece – trying to create an individual work that fits into an overall larger picture.

Below are two of the eight we created. Working with Your Social Marketer is always a very fun and rewarding experience. 100 ACRE FILMS looks forward to the next project with them. Hope you enjoy these clips. If you head over to the HHSA YouTube channel, you can see more of the work we did.