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How long could it take, right?
I recently had the distinct privilege of working on our first ever video/motion graphics case study here at the office. The initial idea came up almost on a whim during a team meeting, a rather unobtrusive “Wouldn’t it be cool if?” sort of thing. I did some video editing back in high school and early college, so naturally, I jumped at the idea, stating with ever so much naiveté, “Sure, just give me a Friday afternoon and I’ll whip something together.”
Now, those of you who’ve worked on video projects in the past already know that I was proceeding toward dangerous ground at a breakneck pace. Indeed, in hindsight I don’t know how I didn’t manage to catch my own error. I’ve actually done a number of motion graphics pieces for Sametz, just in the form of flash banner ads—not full-fledged videos. I’ve had 30-second ads take as long as 5–6 hours to nail down, depending on the complexity of movement, pacing, dynamic content, and of course, size optimization.
Given that, the moment I saw our script yielded approximately 3 and a half minutes of voice over, alarm bells should’ve been sounding left and right (and perhaps above and below for good measure). Never mind the fact that we hadn’t storyboarded or gathered consistently high-quality materials to fill the timeline. Pre-planning? Who needs it, right? (Hint: see the author).
So once that Friday afternoon came around (oh, it feels ever so long ago), I nonchalantly asked fellow developer and Digital Media hit man Luke if I could borrow his laptop to make use of our shiny copy of Final Cut Studio 2 and the plethora of software it contained. Hour one seemed solid: I reacquainted myself with Final Cut Pro and opened up my vast directories of work related to the project to search for materials.
Hour 2 was slightly less encouraging, as I realized even without transitions of much merit, the material I had would only be sufficient to fill about 1/3 of the time line.
Hour 3 found me gaining the understanding that in order to make this a one day job, I’d be cutting substantial corners.
During hour 4 it dawned on me that we hadn’t spent much time discussing what resolution and aspect ratio we wanted this thing to be.
Hour 5 saw me showing a rushed, sorry piece to members of the team with an unsure look on my face. The experience prompted us to realize that this was not, in fact, a whim, but a project which would require a sizable time investment (this realization occurred in the form of a loud, simultaneous “Oh!“).
So an hour-long meeting commenced in which three of us took it upon ourselves to plan our several days of work to get the project up to snuff. Yesterday, after I’m not sure how many hours, the video went live with much positive feedback (yay team!). But I will take from this an important lesson, video editing is some serious business:
(Here’s the video link.)
I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s made this kind of mistake. If anyone has any similar stories, please do write them into a comment. I could use the fuel to rebuild my self-esteem 
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