Illumination Video Challenge
How I Doubled My Brand’s Video Content Catalogue in Less Than Three Weeks
All the tips you need to know to motivate you to make videos
Yes, you heard me correctly. As of today, I am now the proud owner of two. Yes, two; count them. Entire, whole videos. Effectively doubling my content catalogue.
Both videos were made after some prodding, this time by B. A. Cumberlidge. who set down a two-part writing challenge to write a story, and then create an associated video. I combined the challenge with Earnest Painter‘s prompt about an “Emotionally Frustrated Artist” and went from there.
To me, Earnie’s prompt asked for a bit of humor to be injected, so I went with a short tale in poem format about Stan, his newly deceased ex-wife Trudy, a destroyed boat, and Stan’s mixed feelings about the whole affair.
For part II of Brian’s challenge, I decided to read my poem aloud on video. The first little bit is a shot of me introducing the clip and the rest is voiceover accompanied by photos. Lanu Pitan commented on the story and asked if it was prompted by my past?
While I didn’t have a specific event from my firefighting days in mind that prompted this story, we did have many a marina fire in my town, so you could probably say the tapestry for the tale was already laid in my subconscious. Given Lanu’s question though, I was inspired to use some photos from an actual marina fire I was at in my video.
Tree Langdon ♾️ commented on my other video and asked me which software I used to make it. On that one, where I strictly did a voiceover while showing actions on my desktop, I used the meeting software Zoom, which allows you to have a meeting by yourself and record it.
I bet you didn’t know you could have a meeting by yourself. Oh, the possibilities, right? 😜
For this one, I knew I wanted to incorporate a video clip and mesh it with photos. I wasn’t sure Zoom could do that, so I went with Adobe Spark. I happen to have a subscription to Adobe, which includes Spark for free, but I had only used it couple of times. Once for a similar video for a college class, and to create some tiles for Instagram for our rental house advertising.
So, that said, I can consider myself to be pretty much a newbie on the software and it worked great. Fairly intuitive to use and blend different components together. The only issue I had was that the volume on the video I imported was lower than that on the rest.
I tried boosting the sound on the video and re-importing it. That helped, but not quite enough to match. Since I am not going for a daytime Emmy or anything, I just left it as is.
I am going to upload the video to the ILLUMINATION YouTube Channel.
Part of the challenge issued by Brian is for ILLUMINATION writers to consider creating a video and uploading it on the YouTube channel also.
I can tell you from experience that it is not especially difficult, and it is worth the time it takes just to play around with different software. A good way to expand your mind and capabilities a bit.
Check out Brian’s challenge here:
Write a story, make a video. You can do it!
Okay, now without further ado, here is my video:
I am going to tag the same folks as the written story here as well: P.G. Barnett, Sherry McGuinn, Tree Langdon ♾️, Desiree Driesenaar, Rasheed Hooda, Joe Luca, Arthur G. Hernandez, Charles Roast, Holly Jahangiri, Britni Pepper and Infiniti
I am looking forward to your video foray into the realm of the Emotionally Frustrated Artist!
If you like this, you might like some of my other recent writing:
A link to my daily feature including new challenges:
A recent poetic response to a prior challenge:
And another more spontaneous poem:
Timothy Key spent over 26 years in the fire service as a firefighter/paramedic and various fire chief management roles. He firmly believes that bad managers destroy more than companies, and good managers create a passion that is contagious. Compassion, grace and gratitude drive the world; or at least they should. Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and join the mail list.
