The Priory's Transformative Education

For St. Andrew’s Schools’ 150th anniversary, I, along with two other students, created a video showcasing St. Andrew’s Schools’ teachers and teaching practices. This project was for a filmmaking class, taught partially by volunteers from Hawaii Women in Filmmaking. This video is part of a series of three videos showcasing St. Andrew’s Schools’ past, present, and future achievements.

How hard is filmmaking, anyway?

In this project, I was involved in all stages of the video, from drafting scripts and storyboards, filming and interviewing teachers, students, and faculty members, and editing video in post-production. The two biggest and time-intensive parts of the project was the process of interviewing and editing the final video for this project. Many of the interviews that we shot did not make it to the final cut, as it did not fit into the rest of the interviews that we had already selected. As such, we had to schedule more interviews to make up for the lost screentime or to clarify information with the interviewee. In post-production, a big challenge was finding appropriate b-roll to cover-up jump cuts in the interview. Occassionally we would need to schedule more filming times just to record b-roll of a lab or classroom in session. Despite the many re-schedules, I thought this was still a great experience to learn the more finer details of filmmaking.

Through this experience, I gained substantial knowledge in both the process of filmography and the more technical details of creating aesthetic b-roll and interview videos. A few things that stood out to me in particular were the amount of interviews necessary during the production stage and how framing can really affect the way interviews are perceived. As mentioned earlier, we had to schedule above and beyond the amount of interviews we had planned to schedule due to changes in script or unclear footage. In regards to framing, it really does make a difference on how a video is cropped, as objects or other people in the background can take focus away from the interviewee. In addition, cropping too close or too far away can make the viewer feel either uncomfortable or too distant from the footage.

Check out the video below: