Over the weekend we wrapped up some of the finalizing touches to our expanded garden. Planted some new vegetables. Sewed some seeds. We even added some newcomers to this year’s lineup: blueberries and strawberries!
What was supposed to be a just a few shots for a b-roll sequence ended up turning into an unexpected mini vlog. I mention “mini” because I wouldn’t say it’s really long enough to be a proper vlog, while at the same time it’s not short enough to pass for a quick speed edit.
At any rate, I’m quite happy with the way this one turned out.
I won’t be breaking down each and every individual shot unlike my other b-roll posts, simply because there’s just way more shots to go over in this video compared to the others.
Instead, I think I’ll just highlight some of the main takeaways and focus points from this video.
The music selection is probably the first thing I want to point out. I usually choose my music before I shoot anything. But this time around, I wanted to switch it up a bit and try something new. I challenged myself to just shoot first, then choose music second.
For context, music is what usually drives my initial inspiration to bring a certain image in my mind to life. I’ll usually see the edit in my head while matching it to the music I’m listening to at that time. And by the time when it comes to shoot I’ll already have a rough idea of what I want to do.
Because of this, I went with a track that was a lot more ambient. Ambient tracks are great especially for nature type videos. What I also like about them is that they’re what I like to call “beat neutral”. Basically, I’m thinking of a song where regardless of how and when you make a cut to a shot, it won’t affect the rhythm or flow of the sequence. If there’s a word or phrase for this, do let me know.
I’m used to making videos with high energy tracks and like to cut on beat, so this gardening video was a fresh departure from that.
In this video, I also tried the unthinkable — mix footage from different devices *gasps*.
My main steez is the DJI Osmo Pocket all the time. But after recently picking up my iPhone SE, I’ve been itching to see how well its video could integrate into my main projects. I was actually surprised at how well some of the shots turned out. If you have a sharp eye then you’ll know which ones are the iPhone shots because quite literally everything is in focus.
I’m now thinking I might do an “iPhone only” b-roll sequence in a later project.
The last thing I wanted to point out was the color grading. I unintentionally left the normal color profile setting on when I was shooting and didn’t realize this until after the fact. So when I went to bring all the clips into post, there really wasn’t much I could do with the color. However, I did color grade it slightly to bring out the greens more. I wanted to emphasize the green since the majority of the subjects in the video are plants, so I wanted to make sure they look poppy 🙂
This content is part of an ongoing self-challenge to create b-roll for 30 days. I must emphasize the absence of the phrase “consecutive days”. If this were the case, then I would have already failed this challenge. But I am committed to seeing this through! If you’re interested, follow my tag #30DaysOfBRoll on my blog here.
I also have a YouTube channel, which is where I will be uploading my videos respectively. If you wanted to have a sneak peak at what I might be publishing next on the blog…
The Sapporo Nomad 
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