By Kayla Moore, DLINQ Intern
Background: This is a guide on how to create a video. These steps can be applied to any video creation software. The content of my video is about the connection between rural poverty in America and the LGBT community, and it was originally created as a project for my summer volunteer work. The video below is a product of the following steps.
RESEARCH YOUR AUDIENCE
Although this step may not seem important, it’s vital that you know who you are creating the video for and what appeals and engages them. As my video was originally going to be created for my summer volunteer work, I knew that it had to be about rural and/or urban poverty. I also knew that I wanted to see if that topic aligned with the LGBTQ+ community. Thus, I decided that my audience was college students (or those of the same age) who are interested in learning about America and its LGBTQ+ community.
DECIDE ON YOUR CORE MESSAGE
Here you must decide on your end goal by answering the following four questions:
- What do you want your audience to do after watching your video?
- What do you want them to think?
- How do you want them to feel?
- What is the one thing your audience needs to know to encourage them to think, feel, and act that way?
I wanted my audience to visit my website to learn more information after watching the video. I also wanted them to think that the video was interesting and feel curiosity while watching it. To encourage them to feel and think that way, I decided to target (or imagine) an audience who doesn’t know anything about the topic.
BUILD A VIDEO STRATEGY
Next is to build a video strategy, or in other words, answer these two questions:
- How will you create your video content?
- How will you target your audience and distribute your video so it reaches them?
This step was easy for me as I already decided on creating the video using Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects. I admire explanation videos created by the channel Vox, and it’s known that they use those programs.
For the second question, I didn’t answer it as my group and I decided to not create a video for the volunteer work. Therefore, I didn’t have to figure out how to distribute the video to reach my audience.
WRITE A VIDEO PRODUCTION BRIEF
The video production brief is a document detailing everything you wrote for the previous steps as well as a deadline.
- Objective: Create a video that not only interests college students but also gets them to visit my volunteer group and its website.
- Target Audience: College Students (or people of the same age)
- Core Message: The queer community is deeply connected with rural poverty
- Deadline: July 23, 2021
DEVELOP A CREATIVE APPROACH
Developing a creative approach is developing the idea or concept of your video. As I previously mentioned, I admire the Youtube channel Vox’s videos. They usually explain conflicted topics in an easy-to-understand way through data visualizations (here is one example), video or audio interviews, and animations. Additionally, they always make sure to give accreditation to the interviewees, animators, etc. I wanted my video to be the same way.
WRITE A SCRIPT
Below is a transcription of the script in the video.
The LGBT community has made significant progress over the past years in the fight for equality.
Such as with the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” in 2010, and the legalization of gay marriage in all 50 US states in 2015.
But another important issue—ending the high rates of rural poverty in the LGBT community—remains outside of the media and public’s attention.
“Rural Poverty” is “Poverty in rural areas, including factors of rural society, rural economy, and political systems that give rise to the poverty found there” (Mvorganizing.org).
According to a 2019 study by the Williams Institute on LGBT poverty in the US: “LGBT people in rural areas (26.1%) have the highest poverty rates, compared to LGBT people in urban areas (21.0%) and cisgender straight people in either rural (15.9%) or urban (15.5%) areas.”
When looking at the above image, that means that out of the 50 states in the US, 20 states have a statistically higher LGBT poverty rate according to the Williams Institute.
One reason why, used to be because of the lack of Employment Non-Discrimination Laws.
Employment Non-Discrimination Laws are laws that make discrimination on a person’s demographic characteristics illegal. This is represented by The Equality Act. The Equality Act is a bill that protects LGBT people by prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity not only in employment but also in housing, credit, education, public spaces and services, federally funded services, and jury service (HRC).
And according to Freedom for All Americans, an organization that fought for full non-discrimination laws in all US states, in 29 states LGBT Americans weren’t fully protected. This fully aligns with the study by Williams Institute. When looking at the top 10 states that have significant differences between the level of poverty for LGBT people and cisgender-straight people according to the Williams Institute in order from greatest to lowest: Illinois, Hawaii, and Iowa are the only states with any kind of LGBT non-discrimination protections, even now in 2021.
States without full LGBT non-discrimination protections allow LGBT workers to be fired legally, it allows transgender persons to be denied comprehensive health insurance, and allows LGBT couples to be evicted.
Yet as The Equality Act was passed as of February 25, 2021 (Congress.gov), this may no longer be the case in the future.
Although one avenue has been blocked, other avenues into poverty, especially for the LGBTQ community – childhood poverty, familial rejection, mental health issues, and substance abuse issues – along with the causes of rural poverty – low agricultural production, climate (change), sickness and mental health, lack of sufficient housing, unregulated landlord/tenant arrangements, and outdated economic policies – still need to be addressed.
I would like to state that although I have researched this topic, some sources are not as credible as others.
Additionally, I say LGBT instead of LGBTQ+ throughout this video as the Williams Institute study’s findings came from LGBT people.
CREATE A STORYBOARD
A storyboard is a document that visualizes what the video will look like. I chose to make it in Canva as I can add videos and images into the storyboard which also completes the preparation of finding content for the video. My storyboard is shown below.
PLAN AND SCHEDULE SHOOT
PLAN AND SCHEDULE SHOOTHere is where you would organize all equipment (e.g. get a camera, schedule when to shoot, etc.). However, I used this step to draw out the animations and plan how I will animate them in Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects.
RECORD VOICEOVER
You can record the narration and then trim the video content to match it, or vice versa. Either way is fine, but I thought doing the narration first and then editing would be easier. I recorded it straight into Adobe Premiere Pro with my bluetooth earphones connected to my computer.
EDIT THE VIDEO CONTENT
As the title states, here you need to edit i.e. trim the video content. My content is mainly made up of non-copyrighted free-to-use videos and images, but it was hard finding them especially without a watermark. Below are the websites I used to find the videos and images:
Beautiful Free Images & Pictures | Unsplash
Here are ones I didn’t use in this video, but can still be used:
Please note that it may be hard to find videos with people-of-color as the main character. While searching for footage of people doing the actions I narrate in the script, I found that there were many free online videos that had non-people-of-color as the main character. If having only videos were non-people-of-color are the main character bothers you, I highly recommend just continuing to search or to film your own footage.
CREATE AND ADD GRAPHICS AND SPECIAL EFFECTS
I was surprised that it was relatively easy to create the graphics and special effects in Adobe Premiere Pro. However, it did take time to learn. So, here are some things I learned that may help with shortening the learning curve:
- I had the problem of wanting to shorten the animation in Premiere Pro but shortening it just cut off or messed up the animation timeline.
- I used … which sped up the animation, but that only works for some animations. It would be better to just select all of the animation’s points and move them closer to the start of the animation, or move each point closer together.
- Sometimes, the preview screen in Premiere Pro and After Effects would appear black.
- Solution: For my computer, it was changing the 100% go ¼. Thus, it took less energy to show the preview screen as it changed the pixel number/percentage.
FORMAT AND PUBLISH
I used a Youtube tutorial to figure out how to format and publish my video.