Numero Quattro

This week I wish that I had more time to work on my Genius Hour project. Have been really busy with work for all of my other classes and have found it a bit hard to carve out some Genius Hour time. Wish I had been more productive, but I did manage to get some things done. I was late on updating my ‘Tune of the Week’ on my blog, but I just did that now. The track, ‘Go Lassie’ is out of Ireland by Cian Finn working together with Scottish soundsystem Mungo’s Hifi. A very nice tune to get on wax if you can find it. But that 45 won’t come cheap! So what did I actually get done thus far this week on my Genius Hour project? Well, I have revised some of the narration bits that I wrote down to describe the artists. The tricky part is to not make the description for narration too long as I just need short descriptive bits of text to include in the film. I still may have to pare these voiceover bits down. I also have been fooling around in the Final Cut Pro X program this week. I have created a new project, entitled ‘Lively up Yourself’ and have started to import a few B-Roll clips. What are B-Roll clips, you may ask? They are clips that are not primarily important to the development of the story, but are used as images to bridge scenes together. For example, I imported a few shots of records, record covers, some forest imagery, a shot of a map of Africa, a shot of a map of Europe, etc. I also imported some A-Roll clips into Final Cut. I have one music video by Italian reggae star Alborosie as well as another music video by Spanish group ‘The Emeterians’ imported into my folders in the ‘Lively up Yourself’ project that I have created. Within the project, I have created a few separate folders (A-Roll, B-Roll, Live Performances, Music Videos, Filler, etc.) so as to keep everything highly organized. With the importation of clips into Final Cut, everything must be really well organized, or things can get really messy. I wasn’t sure how to import clips into Final Cut at first, so I checked out a few videos on YouTube on how to do so. Technically Exposed is a YouTube channel that has some really helpful videos on how to use Final Cut and I took notes from one of their tutorials to learn how to import and organise footage and create folders and libraries. A problem that I ran into while attempting to transfer YouTube clips onto my computer was that you need a clip converter to do so. I did not have one of these so I had to do some web research on how to get one of these and which one is the best. I tried a few of them, such as ClipConverter, but a problem that I discovered is that when downloading content from YouTube, videos containing music are often forbidden from being downloaded due to copyright issues. So I had to watch more videos to come across how to get YouTube videos containing music into my computer. I discovered the program VideoDuke - a program which is specifically designed to transfer any YouTube video (whether it contains music or not) to your computer. VideoDuke offers you two free downloads of videos. The bad part is that you have to pay for the program after that. So I am considering whether or not I am going to pay for the subscription. It is not very expensive, but I am going to try a couple more clip converters and see if I have any success with them. So that is where I am at this week. I need to work on the film some more this weekend for sure. I need to figure out more of the intricacies of Final Cut by playing around with it. It is a very time-consuming process. Essentially dedicating one or two hours of my time is a waste as it takes much longer to figure things out. So I need to dedicate some serious hours to it this weekend. Hopefully I can find the time and then get the editing process started!