We have just finished a 2 day video training workshop for a group of Electrical Engineering students at Bristol University.
The department of Electrical Engineering would like their PHD students to create short flims showing their work, progress and how the university is helping to further advances in the communications industry.
Most of the group (made up of PHD students & Postdoctoral researchers) had very little experience of filming so we took them from the absolute basics of video and sound recording through to filming out on location and then editing the footage. They have access to a range of cameras from Canon 5D, Sony F900 to the latest RED Scarlet cameras and RED zoom lenses and lots of Kino flo lamps so they are pretty lucky guys! We brought up a range of equipment including the Sony PMW200, Blackmagic 4K camera, Canon 5D3 and Go pro 4k along with tripods and rigs, monitors, sound recording and sound mixers and boom poles and microphones, radio mics and headphones, redhead lighting and soft boxes, reflectors and other grip kit to give them a range of equipment to experiment with.
Our picture on the left shows the students during a practical session. They had been split in to groups to experiment with speaking to camera and two groups ended up interviewing each other. We also ran an editing workshop session and discussed grading, codecs and encoding for the web,
It was fantastic to watch their confidence grow.. we hope that they learnt a lot that can be used to create some great videos in the near future.