Good Morning and Merry Christmas from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 with a side project. Let’s get started!
My church has a still life Nativity we’ve been helping with since I was a kid. In our production, the story of Jesus’ birth as read in the books of Matthew and Luke is broken up into several scenes with a matching audio track lasting around a minute each. After years of my scene director calling dibs on me as a wise man searching for Jesus, I wanted to see the production edited up as a video.
It’s been another five or six years, but we finally managed to get our camcorder and tripod on the set. My father was kind enough to film all the scenes on our breaks between shifts.
For an open source video editor, I found OpenShot to be around my skill level. I took a video editing class in high school, so I’m comfortable moving things around between layers on a timeline. While I could have done with a better visual representation of the audio, it was heaps better than when I tried Windows Movie Maker.
I only had a couple technical issues this time around. The old version in the Ubuntu repositories didn’t run once installed on my father’s new computer. I found an appimage file which both has a newer version and actually launched. My second problem was how my father’s fancy new (probably still drop damaged as it turns out) computer was struggling with the preview. I found a recommendation aimed at Windows users about bumping up the audio sample rate to match a new native frequency, and that helped me.
Editing itself took a bit longer than I expected. Long story short, I couldn’t edit out all the chimes meant to tell visitors when to advance to the next scene, the addition of two scenes to the audio track last year was rushed, the lighting was poor more often than not… The list goes on. I did the best with what I had. And for the effort invested, I’d say it did pretty well.
Takeaway
My original vision I still wish to pursue is to have a special session where attention is given to the lighting and the same actors play the same parts when they show up in multiple scenes.
Final Question
Creative writing prompt: How would you infiltrate Santa’s workshop to plant the plans for a new toy?
I look forward to hearing from you on my Socials!