Yes, I intentionally recorded the audio before I’d had my morning’s coffee. I thought it would make the passion more acute, if I were longing for it as I talked on the subject.

I filmed most of the footage on my iPhone camera, using the stand seen in my film about the Spider bluetooth keyboard, which I use for easy, portable typing. There’s some jiggle from the fact the stand was on top of the refrigerator as I filmed the coffee-making process. The rock-candy simmering was filmed with PhotoBooth, which caused the image to be reversed. It’s only noticeable in the text of the sugar bag, I hope. In retrospect, I could have filmed in iMovie, but I’ve been leery of using it until I have to – it’s frozen or crashed too much in the past.

This was edited in iMovie without any mishap, however. With this project, I learned to use the clip split tool and became more familiar with the crop and speed manipulation tools. The most important aspect of the crop tool I learned was to crop a clip BEFORE splitting it, because lining up the cropped area precisely is a pain in the derriere. The crop tool is very useful on zooming into the areas that really matter, instead of having lots of unhelpful or distractingly cluttered negative space.

My favorite piece of footage from the entire two weeks of working in video is the last one in this movie. It was fun to realize the potential of having a small, lightweight quality camera in the form of my phone. It can get into small spaces where bulkier cameras can’t reach. After having fun with the coffee cake shot, I thought more creatively about the method of taking shots. I realized, though, that for many shots it’s impractical to have sweeps or zooms and the camera needs to be passive to best convey the information presented.

The morning after all the video editing was done, I woke up and used the voice memo app on my phone to record a single mp4 of audio while watching the silent movie on my computer. An essential part of my filming plan was to have the audio of the original clips silent and have spoken explanation and possibly music instead. This shortcut was necessary to give myself more flexibility when filming. Living in shared accommodations means there is always something going on – TV, Videogame, Movie, Music, Conversation – instead of requiring my companions to cease their activity whenever I wanted a good shot, I could merely cut out the unnecessary environmental activity. This decision also allowed me to freely adjust the speed of clips without distorting my narration. For instance, I realized when editing that I’d never be able to fill all of the several minutes of coffee brewing with compelling narration, so I sped it up a great deal. In doing so I retained the step in the timeline, but didn’t make it more important by dwelling on it.