At first hearing that I had complete creative freedom to create the reel in my vision I was astounded, excited and a little afraid.

I jumped into the pool with both feet. I immediately went to work on finding music that I thought would fit into what I had in mind. I hadn’t gotten the chance to take an in-depth look at all of the footage I received from Jackie but what little bit I had viewed had given me some ideas as to how I wanted to proceed.

I didn’t storyboard the reel which normally would have been a great thing to do and I think definitely streamlined my process as far as how it was going to be I was going to piece it all together. The primary reason I didn’t do that was because I wasn’t sure what I had within my footage to do with as I might storyboard.

The first thing I did before I touched any of the footage I had obtained was to go on the hunt for music. I searched the internet for a few days and had not found anything I liked when I went to my coworker Jackie again and asked her if she knew of any sites I could find some really quality music for the reel. She recommended the site Pond5. Pond5 is a site that sells music, templates and other things for commercial use. The items are not free. The prices range from $5 and up. I went under the category of encouraging and began bookmarking basically all of the songs that spoke to me and that I felt would be a good fit for a charity but also it’s concert. After several listens to various  songs for the next two hours I chose a song that I listened to several times. I knew it was the one because as I listened to it ideas began to flow into my mind of how I wanted the reel to look, mind you I still had not looked through even a quarter of the footage i had received.

With music chosen I decided to use Premiere to and began importing my footage. A great resource for me as I felt a bit rusty in my Premiere Pro skills was the New York Public Library Lynda.com login. It’s a really great free resource that anyone as long as they have an active NYPL library card can access thousands of Lynda.com tutorials through the NYPL website. It was great because I watched bits and piece of a couple tutorials and picked up shortcuts and tips that saved me quite a bit of time.

Once I imported my footage I began scrubbing through it to see the parts I wanted to use and placing them into my timeline. Because of the plethora of feel good moments I had chosen I decided to place everything down and then peel back. It was after I made this decision and that I received the link to the Justin King “Road to Sixteen” reel that I mentioned in a previous post that Pat sent me. It was with watching that reel that I came to a very critical decision regarding the length of the reel. I decided that it should be no more than 2:20. The previous reel was almost 4 minutes long. Which meant I would have to cut my chosen musical piece which ended at 2:46. This doesn’t seem like much but after listening to the music I had decided that the end part was going to play a very important part in the final version of the reel so it was vital that I keep it.

This is when I realized that with great freedom also comes great responsibility and that this was only going to be first of many possible challenges when it came to this task.