The making of a collab video
What am I doing? How do you do this? Where are my glasses?
The last time my students played together as an ensemble was a contra dance in early 2020. We’ve done a lot of individual playing during on-line lessons, but I realized we needed to do something to bring us together as a community again. With World Fiddle Day around the corner, I started planning a collaborative video project! It was a lot of work, but the results were wonderful and helped us feel connected again.
Let me know if you need any help making one! Happy to answer questions, if I can!
~Gretchen
THE PLAN
Organizing scenes of the video on my living room wall.
I searched for a tune that all my players, at any level, could play. “Mairi’s Wedding” was a great choice with its happy melody and simple drones/harmonies.
My goal was to give each one of my students equal screen time. I divided the tune into sections and started mapping out the tune out. What a puzzle!! (See photo.)
I decided to keep the tune fairly short (2 minutes) since I was collecting footage from 34 players and didn’t want my computer to crash with too much material.
PLAY ALONG TRACK
To keep us all in sync as we filmed individual parts, I made a play along audio track of me playing for them to use while filming. Since they would listen to this recording on headphones while I recorded our Zoom session, I “coached” them throughout the audio. I yelled, “SMILE!!!…coming to the last B part….look HAPPY!!…..hold, hold, HOLD this last note and LIFT your bow!” Much to my delight, when you watch the video, you will see them BURST into random smiles!! I must have just nudged them to smile on the audio track in their headphones!!
Collaborative videos I’ve been a part of make use of a “click track” and “marker” for alignment purposes. The “click track” (aka a metronome) keeps all players playing at the same speed. The “marker” (often a movie “clapboard”) is a crisp, loud sound that leaves a visual mark on the audio that is used to line-up multiple videos.
My students understood that they had to play the tune at the same tempo, but the “marker” concept was more of a mystery. On our audio I said, “1-2-3-SNAP-1-2-Ready-PLAY!” When I said the word “snap,” they were to snap their fingers (or say the word “snap” out loud), get into playing position and play when I said “play.” It was only after I showed them the photos below that they really understood how a marker worked.
RECORDING
My big question was, “How am I going to get everyone to actually DO this!?” My answer was to record our lessons! This saved me chasing them down and them from having to figure out how to send a big video file. It was nice to help them set up their recording. I made sure they were “in frame” and kept them in a cheery mood as we filmed. We had fun and each recording session took less than 15 minutes during our lessons.
I went into this knowing that the video quality was not great on Zoom, but I didn’t care. I figured the videos would appear relatively small in a collage and be clear enough.
I also knew the audio quality was not great on Zoom. This was more of an issue than I had hoped (grrr, glitches!) but with some Garage Band editing in combination with a good quality soundtack I fiddled, I think it came out ok. I really felt like all of this was worth getting an easy video from each of them.
Since I had mapped out the video very carefully ahead of time, I knew exactly when each person would be featured on screen. I made a list of which As/Bs I needed to capture. This was great!!!!!!! I hit the record button, took notes and knew immediately if I got what I needed. They were able to relax (I promised I wouldn’t use any mistakes!) and it saved me hours of rewatching videos. When I edited, I looked at my notes and went right to what I needed.
VIDEO EDITING
Once the recordings were done, I spent every free moment of the next two weeks cutting the video. I have a lot of experience editing, but have never worked with this many moving parts. Wow! It was a meticulous process. I usually work in iMovie, but my son Syl suggested Filmora for this many split-screen images. Since I had an unusual number of players, (34) I wasn’t able to use the collage templates Filmora offered, and ended up creating my own custom grid for each scene (with many texts to Syl, who is a cracker-jack editor!!) I reduced the videos by 50%, 25% and 17% to fit into each scene, and then nudged a few into place, as needed. Tedious, but the overall effect worked well.
SOUNDTRACK
I ended up making two soundtracks. For track one, I made a basic soundtrack with me and the best quality audios from a handful of my students. I used this soundtrack as a base from which to line up all of the videos. You can hear this during the “credits.”
Track two came after all the videos were perfectly placed. I wanted to feature the sound of each player who was seen on the screen. Initially, I thought I could use the original video sound. I hoped that when the player appeared on screen, I’d simply turn up their volume. Well. That didn’t work. Much to my chagrin, there were varying degrees of lag —meaning what you saw was a split second behind what you heard — meaning nothing lined up correctly —meaning back to the drawing board!
Since I was forced to shut off all the video sound, I had to line up everything up visually. I listened to my soundtrack, watched each muted video, and lined up their fingers and bow with the music I heard. This was not actually difficult, just time consuming.
Secondly, I had to lift the audio from each video clip and create a special soundtrack that highlighted specific players on the screen. This was t-e-d-i-o-u-s, but worth it. I really wanted to hear the players play when they were seen on screen. In essence, everyone is lip syncing with themselves!
And heck, since I was forced to do all this extra audio editing in Garage Band, it was easy to do some light audio clean up. If there was a recording glitch, I turned it down to get rid of it.
VIDEO THUMBNAIL
Sometimes when you spend so much time making a video, you forget that it will live on-line as a still image. I made sure to capture a screenshot of each fiddler to create our video “thumbnail.”
One of the sweet parts of on-line lessons was having the pleasure of getting to know the many beloved creatures who live with my students. Below is Isaiah with Daisy the dog who made me laugh when she watched lessons, and Arline with Nigel the mourning dove who brightened every lesson by perching on her shoulder and singing along! You will probably not be able to hear him, but he is singing along in our video.
THE SCREENING
This whole project was meant to raise our spirits, so I thought it would be fun to have a private screening before our work went public on World Fiddle Day, May 22, 2021! I invited everyone to a Zoom party where we watched the video and I shared how I made it. (I created this blog for the screening!) They came dressed for a party and it was great to share this moment together. #MovieStars
Who are these movie stars!! The Madstop Fiddlers enjoyed celebrating with a private screening!
SELF-PROMOTION
With the video complete, next came the “sharing” part! Self promotion can be tough, yet as a professional musician I am called upon to do this on a regular basis. I make it a point to help my students with every aspect of being a musician that I can, so I talked with them about finding a comfortable way to share their work. Here are some of the samples of facebook posts we tossed around!
~
Do you know what today is?? World Fiddle Day!!! Here I am fiddling with The Madstop Fiddlers!!
Happy World Fiddle Day! I had a great time making this video with The Madstop Fiddlers!!
My fiddle teacher talked me into doing this and I am glad she did!! LOL It is awesome!!!! Happy World Fiddle Day!!!
Check me and The Madstop Fiddlers out in this EPIC video we made! Happy World Fiddle Day!!!!
I did a thing. Yup, that's me at :48! Happy World Fiddle Day from the Madstop Fiddlers!!!
#worldfiddleday #madstopfiddlers #fiddle
TA DA!
Here it is! This community of musicians has kept a smile on my face during this difficult year. Hope you enjoy some of their fiddle cheer! Happy Fiddle Day to you today and everyday! Enjoy!!