What can you do in 30 minutes?

After a few years of making videos for conferences it’s good to go back and do something new (to me). To promote teamworking and to illustrate the concept of collaboration, teams at this conference were given two hours to come up with and shoot a one minute film. They then were given 30 minutes with one of us editors.

Sometimes it took 40 minutes, but I helped make three interesting films.

When you’ve got such a short amount of time, you need to concentrate on the basics. I didn’t name clips or reels or bins. It was capture “Untitled” and “Untitled1”, detect DV starts and stops, pick takes, set ins and outs and put shots into order. Then there was just enough time to add captions and graphics, a soundtrack and… next team please.

When you’re under that sort of time pressure, you have to go with your gut went choosing the shots and how long to let them run. You won’t have time to go back and sort them out. You have to trust that if the same editor sets the ins and outs, then the feel will be consistent through the film.

The lesson – if you can get good results in three hours, get making films. Don’t forget The Big Things. They seem to make a new film at least every day…