Frame by Frame: OPTA Videos, Part 1 — Planning & Prep

(Time to Read: 5 mins.)

(This is part one of a three-part series cov­er­ing video pro­duc­tion for an elearn­ing project. Part 2 cov­ers pro­duc­tion, aka “shoot­ing”, and Part 3 cov­ers post-pro­duc­tion edit­ing and pub­lish­ing.)

VCC’s OPTA pro­gram trains stu­dents for careers as Occu­pa­tion­al and Phys­i­cal Ther­a­pist Assis­tants. The train­ing pro­vid­ed by the OPTA pro­gram blends online activ­i­ties with in-class and onsite prac­ti­cal skills. It’s a high­ly visu­al and hands-on pro­fes­sion.

OPTA Depart­ment Head Car­men Kimo­to and her instruc­tors had gath­ered feed­back from course eval­u­a­tions and stu­dent focus groups that showed a real need to aug­ment learn­ing using videos of mus­cle func­tions and prac­ti­cal skills. Their Stu­dents had told them that they want­ed video con­tent in their cours­es, so the team decid­ed to devel­op videos to give their stu­dents the kind of three-dimen­sion­al, spa­tial, and kinet­ic infor­ma­tion that illus­tra­tions or dia­grams just could­n’t pro­vide.

Car­men and one of her instruc­tors approached us to ask for advice in cre­at­ing a series of instruc­tion­al videos. In the past, their fac­ul­ty had shot video sequences using mobile devices, but now they want­ed to make a new series of high­er-qual­i­ty videos that could bet­ter address their stu­dents’ needs.

Our cen­tre has often been involved in video pro­duc­tion for aca­d­e­m­ic events at VCC, whether record­ing guest speak­ers for CTL­R’s “Lunch and Learn” work­shop series, or being invit­ed into class­rooms to doc­u­ment indi­vid­ual instruc­tor lessons and demon­stra­tions. Over the years, we’ve assem­bled a mobile col­lec­tion of con­sumer/pro­sumer-grade video gear suit­ed to cap­tur­ing teach­ing sit­u­a­tions wher­ev­er they occur on-cam­pus.

For OPTA’s video projects, I assured Car­men that our cen­tre had the nec­es­sary video equip­ment and expe­ri­ence to help them plan, shoot, and edit their videos. If they want­ed, I was also ready to train them in the pro­duc­tion steps we’d be tak­ing while we worked togeth­er, so that there would be some knowl­edge trans­fer to guide them when plan­ning or shoot­ing future videos. Hav­ing in-house tech­ni­cal resources near-at-hand allowed Car­men and her team to focus their time and lim­it­ed bud­get on devel­op­ing their con­tent and adapt­ing their demon­stra­tions for the cam­era.

High-level Goals: Time, Quantity, Quality

The three clas­sic stages we’d orga­nize their video projects around would be Pre-pro­duc­tion (paper plan­ning), Pro­duc­tion (shoot­ing and record­ing), and Post-pro­duc­tion (edit­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion).

We start­ed work­ing out a list of high-lev­el goals and com­ple­tion dates: this was all about under­stand­ing the size and scope of their video project. They need­ed to cre­ate twen­ty videos of three to five min­utes each, which gave me a ball­park idea of how many min­utes of fin­ished video would be required. From there, I could start scop­ing-out how many hours of work we might be fac­ing.

To shoot the actu­al scenes, the OPTA team sug­gest­ed using a large lab room where they’d demon­strat­ed to stu­dents in the past. They sent me pho­tos of their room and equip­ment, and we did a walk-through tour of the large room to see how much space there was to move around and where the bright­est win­dows and elec­tri­cal out­lets were locat­ed. The space was ide­al in that it had floor-to-ceil­ing win­dows that let in a lot of nat­ur­al light. (If I can shoot using nat­ur­al light with­out set­ting up a light­ing kit, I always will. It just makes every­thing so much faster and eas­i­er to man­age.)

Finding the scope of work

The OPTA team want­ed to know how many videos could be record­ed in a day, so they could plan their staff sched­ules and know when to book the room. It helped to intro­duce them to the idea of a “shoot­ing ratio”.

Back in the late 1980s and ear­ly ’90s, I took part in two edu­ca­tion­al TV series for BC’s Knowl­edge Net­work. In one project I was part of an onscreen art class, and in anoth­er project I was a behind-the-scenes com­put­er ani­ma­tor. I learned from our Direc­tor that for each 10 hour shoot­ing day, his team could pro­duce one hour of fin­ished video for broad­cast. In that project, each one hour fin­ished episode would take ten hours to shoot, so that series was work­ing with a shoot­ing ratio of about ten to one (10:1). (In fact, it may have been more like 15 to one, as scenes had to be re-shot and added to each episode.)

The shoot­ing ratio is just a start­ing point to help you scope-out the amount of work and time that will be need­ed. Using a shoot­ing ratio of 10:1 on the OPTA project, I could make an edu­cat­ed guess as to how many video shots might be com­plet­ed in a four hour shoot­ing ses­sion. This helped the team decide how many shoot­ing ses­sions might be need­ed over­all, so they could sched­ule the lab as a shoot­ing space and to arrange for addi­tion­al staff to help. We came up with a thumb­nail esti­mate that the 59 min­utes of fin­ished video we’d need to cre­ate might take us eight to ten hours to shoot over­all. (This did­n’t include time need­ed for reshoots, or for post-pro­duc­tion things like edit­ing and titling — just in-stu­dio shoot­ing of the raw mate­r­i­al.)

Sketching out the “What” of it all

Ear­ly in our first few dis­cus­sions, I intro­duced the idea of scripts and sto­ry­boards. The SMEs in OPTA knew exact­ly what con­tent they want­ed to cov­er and the order of the videos they’d need, accord­ing to their course guide­lines and teach­ing expe­ri­ence. But each video would still need to be bro­ken down into sep­a­rate scenes to deter­mine what kinds of cam­era shots might be best, or if spo­ken nar­ra­tion or text over­lays would be need­ed. A sequence show­ing the anato­my of the head and shoul­ders might not be pos­si­ble in a sin­gle shot; you might want to use mul­ti­ple shots look­ing at dif­fer­ent parts, and maybe a close-up or two. All of this could be spec­i­fied before-hand on paper, in a sim­ple and rough way.

Car­men, Kris­ten, and I worked out a sequence of shots and num­bered each shot for easy ref­er­ence. Often, a sto­ry­board helps to visu­al­ly describe the shots of a scene, using lit­tle sketch­es. For exam­ple, when the cam­era needs to be far away to cap­ture some broad con­text, or clos­er to show more detail (see below).

Since many of the shots OPTA need­ed would show a posed fig­ure from the same ori­en­ta­tion, we real­ized that it was faster and eas­i­er to describe shots using text, and no images (“medi­um shot, fac­ing right”, “CU of arm”).

The guid­ing doc­u­ment for the OPTA shoot evolved into a series of box­es with­out draw­ings, but with impor­tant writ­ten descrip­tions and lots of room for hand-writ­ten notes. It became our main shot list, used by the “floor direc­tor” to call out which shot would be record­ed next, and to tick-off com­plet­ed shots or scrib­ble in minor notes for lat­er action. (Who was our floor direc­tor you ask? We’ll get to that next.)

With all the shots spec’d out on paper, and peo­ple and a shoot­ing space reserved, the next step would be to start shoot­ing footage…