For the last few months, me and a few others have been making a documentary for the Olathe Northwest Band. This project will be around 30 minutes long, the largest project I've worked on.
I've learned a lot from this project, from ways to improve editing skills on long projects to putting a sock on a microphone is a pretty effective wind muffler and band kids don't have much of a social life during marching season. I've spent countless mornings and Saturdays filming, spent full days interviewing, and stayed after school until 9 editing too many times. But, this really helps me to adjust to what true people in this industry do. During marching season, the band has practice starting at 7 AM and going until the end of 1st hour every weekday but Thursday. They then have to play at every home football game (there were only 4 this year) and every Saturday they had an all day event of some sort, parades and competitions mainly. After going with them to a few of these, I realized what they truly go through. Getting to school at 6 AM and going on bus rides up to 4 hours to participate in a 10 minute performance only to get home sometime past 10 PM. These kids are COMMITTED. Their last competition, Neewollah on October 31st, some arrived to school by 5:45 and loaded the bus headed for Independence, KS, 4 and a half hours away. Once there, they changed into uniform and practiced, and because our band is the biggest in Kansas, we were the last band in the parade. After the parade, they got free time for around 3 hours, able to enjoy this small town's fair and festivities. Once back, they loaded back onto the bus for a ten minute drive to the local high school's football stadium to compete. The whole season, they had come so close in all of their competitions. And finally, at Neewollah on Halloween night, they took home the gold. Best Drumline, Best Drum Majors in class, Best in class, and Best Overall. Once they got back to the buses, they had dinner and took pictures with the trophies. They were so relieved, and wanted to get home. These kids chose to skip all Halloween festivities at home to represent their school and came out on top. This project was a blast. I learned a lot about documentaries, friends, and the band. I will take so much from this experience, and I hope someday I will be as committed to making movies as these band kids are to what they love.
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Wow. This is the first real video I made, and it was made the day after Christmas in 2011. Looking at, it doesn't look very good. But saying that two 12 year olds made a two minute video is kinda impressive.
I had just gotten a Sony Bloggie camera as my first video camera, and we decided to make this little short video. My friend Drew McCall, the one in the plaid shirt, is who really got me interested in video. At the time, his brother was in the eComm program I'm in now, and was always telling us about how awesome it was. Now here I am, a blog camera and 2 GoPros later, with a Canon 70D. Now I can make quality videos. Every time I watch this, especially with Drew, I can't help myself from laughing. Since this was made in the 7th grade, we really had no pre or post production at all. We had a funny idea, and went from there with it. After filming, we plugged the little camcorder to my laptop and edited in the legendary Windows Movie Maker. I learned quite a bit making this, everything from shooting to editing. It was really the first movie I made, and Drew talked me through the whole process. Since then, Drew and I's friendship has grown. We are now in the same video class and we've been working on a band documentary together. Overall, I learned a lot from this project and have improved immensely since. |
About MeMy name is Graham Petter. I am a junior at Olathe Northwest High School, and I am into cars and films. Archives
December 2016
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