Creating the Women of Vision Videos

We're on Day 6 of our Women of Vision Video creation.  By Day 6 I mean that this is the 6th dayI have spent sitting in a small editing studio in South San Francisco with the video editor.  The editor and our producer have actually spent even more time doing this since in between they implement all the changes, adjust the soundtrack, etc.  And I spent my time interviewing winners, writing scripts, getting approvals and gathering photos from our winners.

So why do I love making videos?  There is something about literally having nothing and creating a fully rendered piece that will be shown to an audience that I find thrilling. It's also a little anxiety inducing since you have so many different people in the audience:  the winner, her family members, members of her organization, my co-workers and the general audience members.  And there are high expectations of the videos - that they will inspire the students to go on to amazing technical careers, that it will refresh and inspire the women in the audience to pursue their technical careers; that the men in the audience will be reminded once again how valuable the women's contributions are to technology and that the family and that they will please the winner.

With the creation of the videos themselves - it's all about the details.  As those who know me are aware - I'm all about the details.  We are constantly making edits to the video script to make the words flow with the photographs we use.  We endlessly debate what photos to incorporate and hunt for disconnects between the text and the image.  And occasionally we put in a photo that doesn't fit but is needed to help tell the story when the words do not.   And we call the winners when we have doubts about how names and places are pronounced.  And we're always looking for ways to enhance the visual image.  I've posted on facebook about our challenges with some of the Universities who have not been responsive to our requests for logos and photographs.  I find myself stymied when that happens since in this case - all the publicity is good.

The videos will be up on Youtube after the event in May.  I'll post links then so you can see them.  Back to editing.

Editing Videos

So, it's been over a week since the end of Women of Vision and the number one email question I get is - where is Padmasree Warrior's keynote video. We were able to post the three videos I created for the event the next day -but the reason we could was that they already existed in finished format.

So once I finished up the general clean up after WOV and pushed a few projects that had been sorely neglected forward, I set about doing video editing. Our great Video firm, Total Media Group, and our producer Megan initially had to take the raw video tape and convert it into a format that I could watch on my computer. Then they sent me the DVD which is 1 hour and 45 minutes in length.

First I had to determine what footage we wanted and how we would use it. For our MC it's good to have footage of just her speaking to use for reference as we write scripts next year and of course to provide to her so she can see how she did. Then each of the speeches need to be edited so they have a clean start and finish. And of course you also need to pull clips - brief bits of speeches that will have impact and resonate if included in a presentation or used as an example.

Now, you may not know this but Youtube can only handle uploads that are 10 minutes and 59 seconds long - so nothing you upload can be longer than that (to be safe I try and stick to 10 minutes 45 seconds max). This was good for most of the speakers but several speeches ran over that time - so once I've made the larger cuts - I always make sure we get cuts that include an entire speech in case someone wants to see it - then I have to go in and find what makes sense in a part 1, part 2, part 3 scenario. When does the speaker pause long enough or when have they completed a full thought or point. You don't want to cut someone in the 4th of 5 items they're listing if you can help it.

And finding clips means listening to many of the speeches over and over to see what stands out as impactful. What got a laugh, applause, etc. What makes sense and doesn't run too long.

I'm pleased to say I finished making all my editing choices this afternoon. The lists have gone back to Total Media Group who need to book a room and an editor and make all the edits, and create the videos. Then we'll load them all on youtube.

We also issued our post event release today - filled with highlights of Women of Vision - you can check it out on the ABI website - www.anitaborg.org.

Making Videos for Women of Vision

I spent all day Friday and Monday in an editing room working on the videos for our upcoming Women of Vision event. The work is intense but very sporadic. We started by watching rough cuts of each of the videos then going back through them and stopping and questioning almost every point and making edits. It's slow but fascinating work - and gave me time to get some other work done during parts where we waiting for our editor - Patrick - to make the necessary changes. Since I had written the script I knew what the video was going to say but it always amazes me how many different ways you can represent a statement visually.

One of our winners attended Princeton and while there wrote a compiler. So in that brief sentence you end up seeing on screen a shot of Princeton, the princeton logo and our visual representation of a compiler. Maybe 4 seconds on the screen but a good 45 minutes of work easily. And it was examined over and over. Another challenge is how do you represent someone from New Jersey vs someone from the Bay Area in their videos. I grew up in New Jersey and for the life of me I couldn't think of anything that would truly visually represent New Jersey easily - except of course for a New Jersey Tomato that would only make sense to me and not the rest of the audience. And of course how do you know if you are doing an accurate translation of a word (for yet another video) when you only speak one of the three languages you're working with?

So how did we solve those problems and many others? You'll have to come to the event to find out. Or keep an eye on this blog - I'll be posting links to the videos when they are up on Youtube.