Sometimes, it’s interesting to just sit back and listen to someone talk about something they’re passionate about. Brandon is a 19-year-old architecture student. Here, he explains how life with an architectural influence has landed him where he is today.

As mentioned in the video, my portrait is of an old friend from high school that I haven’t seen much of lately. I chose him as the topic because of the fact that I haven’t had much contact with him in the past year and a bit, and so there is a lot that I don’t know about him. I generally find him a pretty interesting person, because he always seems to know what he’s talking about, and so I was hoping to portray that through this project.

I chose to have the interview completely audio based because I felt that there was much more freedom with the way it could be edited. If it was done with video, cutting out a lot of the ‘um’s and ‘uhh’s would have created some discontinuity and awkward jumps. In the end, this decision proved more convenient than originally intended. I found it much easier to manipulate the found footage around his words without worrying about having to cut back to the visual part of the interview. This also gave me some more space to include some original footage too.

Editing this video also gave me the chance to experience the creating of a soundtrack. Since I was hoping to have some musical cues to the dialogue, getting some royalty free music off the internet was out of the question (plus, I also usually try to avoid using other people’s music as much as possible). Coordinating everything was a very difficult process, especially due to the fact that Premiere measures the time differently to Audition. If there is a way to change that, I haven’t discovered it yet.

This wasn’t an easy task, especially to organize, but at least it was good to have some form of challenge. Probably the most difficult part for me was the planning stage. I spent way too long trying to decide who I was going to do the assignment on, which ended up significantly slowing down productivity. On top of that, I ended up having to completely restart twice after missing some information on the criteria sheet. In the end, I finally started getting somewhere with about a week and a bit to go.

Probably the most important thing I learned during this creative process is to make sure of all restrictions before planning. I usually tend to get attached to ideas, so finding out that I can’t exactly follow it makes things a little more difficult for me. It also takes up a lot of time having to completely restart when the initial idea doesn’t fit to any of the criteria. Another thing I learned is that I can’t spend too long sitting on decisions. I spent so long looking for someone to do this project on, and before I knew it, there was a week and a half to the deadline. Also, It’s good to be aware of surrounding noise when recording. I had to set up multiple interviews because the microphone picked up birds or doors in the background.

Overall, I’d say that everything went well in the end. I just need to be a bit more organized next time.