Woodlands Primary School Video 2020

This was a project for Woodlands Primary School, for their Year End Video for 2020. It was completed in December 2020.

It was a challenge to work around Covid19 restrictions, planning the video shoots with social distancing in mind, always ensuring our masks are on, and constantly maintaining a 1 metre distance when filming, and exercising extra caution as it is a Primary school and there were plenty of children around. Parents and teachers were duly concerned about their children amid this pandemic.

Our second obstacle was that our key interviewees were children below the age of 12, who were not used to being in front of a camera, and it was especially trying when they had to read scripts which were multiple pages long. The young children had much shorter attention spans compared to our usual interviewees, and at times some interviews took almost 2 hours to complete.

The videographer overcame this obstacle by constantly encouraging the children, and joking with them to create a more comfortable atmosphere. If the children were still unable speak, or recall what they had in mind to say, we utilised a teleprompter for them to read from.

One other major obstacle was that we had to create and stitch together a video that was almost 50 minutes long, and more than half of the video footage was not taken by us. In terms of specifications, the video quality was inconsistent. Creating a video that would flow nicely is very hard, especially when the video is long.

To overcoming this obstacle, the editor planned the flow of the video by consulting the client, recommending styles of video direction and music choices prior filming. During the shoot, we filmed additional footages or backups to bridge the footage between what was received from the client and our own footages.

We learnt that a close working relationship with clients, and forecasting the problems that may be encountered was essential for overcoming the roadblocks anticipated.

The client was pleased that we were able to meet the deadline to have the video ready, amid all the obstacles and they could showcase the video to all students and their parents in time before the end of 2020.

Final Video Output: https://vimeo.com/497135347