Class of 2020 farewell was an event led by G-11 students. The event had many parts, from the games to the food, so teams were divided and assigned tasks a month prior to the final day of farewell. I volunteered to be part of the video-making group, as I have an interest in it. We had to make videos to highlight both the present and past experiences of the batch. While making these videos my main goal was to sharpen my video-editing skills and become creative with the resources that I had at my hand.

The first thing to do was to delegate smaller tasks within the team. I chose to be the editor of the videos shot, while others in the group had tasks of recording and planning the video. I knew that I am a novice in video-editing, so I had to take help from online resources to improve my skills.

Once the videos were shot, and I began editing, I found that the length was dramatically exceeding the originally anticipated length. To solve this, we had to cut many parts of the recordings to keep the video interesting throughout.  Another challenge was that we had a few new tasks that came up very close to the final day. We received baby videos of the batch from their parents a day before, so we had to be pretty quick to complete the editing. To fasten the process we divided the video into simpler tasks, which included clip selection, overlay effects, and cutting of the clips to make the process time-efficient. In addition, we had to cancel a video a day before due to technical issues, that was particularly difficult, because we had spent a great deal of time in gathering many clips of it.

We had planned the video-making process, but we weren’t able to always adhere to it. When organising team meetings, we found that we were usually unproductive, so instead we all decided to work alone and update progress of the tasks with each other. However, we were very organised as a team because we had properly split tasks and helped each other throughout the journey.

The video editing for me became difficult to continue when the number of teachers in the video kept on increasing, as all video clips had to be trimmed, the process became tedious. So instead of doing everything in one go, I worked on the video for 1-2 hour sessions.

As a group, we weren’t working at our best in the beginning, but as we came closer to the final day, we synergized well and maintained tabs on each other for the progress. Since, I was working with my friends, I found it easy to work with them collaboratively as I have a rough idea about their strength and weaknesses.

I would say that the final product we made was way better than we had anticipated. During the process, I learned many new things about video editing- from my teammates and online resources, which then aided me in making a more polished video. My highlight of the experience was the two day period before the farewell, when we all came together as a team and tackled many new tasks as a team, we had fun but were still productive. If I were to change anything, I would just push myself and the group to start working in a top gear a little earlier instead of working on full-throttle towards the end, as it just reduces the stress and gives more time for improvements. Overall, this brought me a great sense of achievement, as I pushed myself to continuously improve the video until I was not satisfied with the final product.

Link to the teacher video