Social Web 3.0

The Idea.

Let me describe the set up: Our church has a group called The Door, which meets together the first Tuesday of the month. This month, it was on April Fools Day. On top of that our college pastor, Jeff, was on vacation in Hawaii. We decided we wanted to prank both the college students, and Jeff, and record it for YouTube. We told the students who came that we were going to prank Jeff’s office. They were split into groups and given 10 minutes to prepare, with 2 minutes to implement their idea. We also added a card indicating that Jeff was expecting a baby girl, just to add to the prank.

The Set Up.

I got to the church early to set up the camera and get ready for filming. I placed the camera in a location that could both capture the majority of the office in it’s field of view and not be discovered. Originally I planned to go in between groups to turn the camera on and off, but after the camera didn’t record the first group, I left it running. Once the groups had finished, I returned with the camera and we let them know that the camera was a prank, the video from which would be published on YouTube. From there, we said that we discovered the card in Jeff’s office indicating he was expecting a baby girl and said we wanted to film us all saying congratulations to him. Finally, after the students had left, I filmed the intern and a student leader revealing that the card was a prank as well.

The Editing.

After I had collected all the footage I’d need, as well as the picture showing the location of the hidden camera, I still had to edit it. I had a lot of blank tape between the second group and the third, and a lot of the video was just plain boring. In the end, I had maybe 20 minutes of video, which is totally unacceptable for YouTube. YouTube limits videos to 10 minutes, thus technically limiting it, and then there’s the fact that no one wants to watch 10 minutes of boring video.

I used iMovie to edit the video, since that’s what I had on hand. I began to pull out the clips that I actually wanted to use into the video. Once all the clips were together, I watched though it to decided what more I could cut from it. After that, I added transition effects, some titling, and music.

Know Your Audience

In the end, I included more footage than I could have, but mainly because of the audience that would view it. Although this video was going up for anyone with an internet connection to see, most likely only people involved were really going to watch it. For that reason, I included a lot of inside jokes that lengthened the video, but also made it funnier to the people who would be interested in it.

What would I do differently?

The big thing that I would change is the titling in it. The smallest I viewed the video was about 3 inches wide at a high resolution; when the video is viewed at high resolution, the titles are very easy to read. However, once I exported the video to YouTube, which presents the video at both a smaller size and smaller resolution, a lot of the titles became unreadable.

With all that said, here’s the video for you to watch.