The making of a video: Behind the scenes
One of the things I was fascinated with cinematography when I first started looking into it, was the art of making something seemingly boring, into an epic story. To achieve this, it requires meticulous planning and countless hours of filming and editing. If I had a penny for every time I heard “when’s the next season of Casa de Papel coming out? Why it takes them so long?”, I’d be a millionaire by now.
To put things into perspective, an average 30-second commercial takes about a week to produce, film and edit before it’s ready to hit your screens. And that’s when a whole crew of professionals who know what they’re doing gets involved. So how long does it take a one-man-band to create similar videos from an idea to posting o YouTube?
My creative process
You’ll hear many creators say that the fastest way to make any kind of video is to edit to the story and the music. But before you get to editing, you need to have a solid story and a theme. It typically takes me about 4 days to make one of these videos, as I like to spend at least one day focusing on each step, to refine it and perfect it to my liking. Those steps are: creating the story, finding the right music, filming, and editing.
Creating the story
It typically begins with an idea for a video. It could be something unique, something that I saw elsewhere and wanted to try it myself or bring one of my wife’s dreams to life (she has a lot of them). I take time to document my thoughts on what the story would look like and the theme for my video. I use pen and paper to write down the storyline with an emphasis on the key scenes I want to include. From there, I start doodling storyboards of what it might look like, and come up with a list of scenes, in including focal ranges, light sources and camera angles.
Finding the right music
Once I know what my story, scenes and theme are, I start looking into the music. I’ve subscribed to one of those music libraries so I have a plethora of options. Finding the right tune in there, however, can take ages. I usually have an idea of what the main tune should sound like, so I look at relevant categories. Once I find something that starts getting closer to what I had in mind, I use it as a base to dive deeper. Since I know what I want the scenes to look like, I try to imagine the track while playing the scenes in my head. After a few hours, and after I find my theme music, I look for complementary/secondary tunes that can help boost the overall experience, or be used as backups.
Filming
Narrative or short films can take a lot longer, depending on the story, but a typical 1-minute product video takes me about 2-3 hours to film. That’s a lot for a 1minute video, right? No. Because you’d likely need to use all the scenes and shots you planned for, you need to take time to make sure you capture every move and every angle perfectly. On top of that, you need to have at least 25% of extra scenes as a backup for when you edit. And every ‘cut’ requires you to go back to the top and rearrange your ‘set’. Check the video above to see how long it took me to film 15 workable shots in total.
Editing
Once I have all my shots, I move to the final step of my process. Editing my footage. This part I enjoy the most and I take the most time making sure I convey the story I want. Everything you experience on screen and the feelings you get out of a movie or a video are outcomes of this final step. So it’s only natural that it takes the most time. I usually start by adding my pre-selected track as the basis on my editing software. I then import all my clips and selecting the ones I want to use. I then start chopping and stitching them together before I move to my transitions. When my story starts making sense and it’s at a good stage, I move to sound design that adds a new dimension to my video footage. When I have a finished cut, I start correcting and coloring my footage. This whole process takes me about a day to complete as I like to take my time to ensure the cuts are spot on and the colors depict the theme and the mood I want to convey.
If you consider that this is not my day job and I have to do this over the weekend, sometimes the whole process can take me weeks to complete. It’s a long, but a rewarding journey that boosts my creativity. It’s just very time-consuming. But we’re in lockdown mode, so time is all we have.
Now that you know how long it takes to make a short YouTube video, next time you impatiently wait for the next episode of your favorite TV series, take a second to appreciate everything that goes in before it hits your screen.
Till next time…
Check out my other videos.
