My very first video project (a music video, no less!)

I don’t exactly have permission for all the stuff I used, so this is a friends-locked post. But I thought some people might like to see my very first video project. It’s not very polished, and I kind of cobbled it together with material I had, rather than planning it out and shooting footage to specification, like you’re supposed to do.

Here’s the story behind it. In June the Pepperell library hosted a local group of model train enthusiasts who came in and set up a bunch of their miniature dioramas in a big connected loop, with the tracks going all around. They were letting the kids run the train controls and it was very informal and fun. I went to see it, and on impulse, I took out my digital camera and went all the way around the display filming it. So, I had about six minutes of footage of this train display, and since I took it with my digital camera I didn’t have zoom capability or any finesse–but the digital camera takes nice video.

Then, there’s this Arlo Guthrie song about trains that I absolutely adore, “The City of New Orleans,” and I bought an MP3 download of that from Amazon. I needed a class project, and I decided to put the model train footage together with the song, and some stills and titles, and see how it would come out. The trickiest part was the beginning. Arlo Guthrie’s trademark is that he starts his songs with long spoken introductions, telling a story, and I wanted to time the video so the spoken intro had stills and titles, and then the video started when the music did.

I actually thought that I accidentally deleted all my class files when I was changing the backup flash drives around, but then I discovered that I’d copied the class files onto my hard drive after all and forgot about it. This video wouldn’t play on the big Dell laptop, which tells you how maxed out that machine was.

Here’s how it came out.