Garden Documentary

I created a 2 to 4 minute documentary on the San Diego Botanic Garden, using original source materials, edited and created in Adobe Premiere Pro. The documentary is meant to entice the viewer into visiting the garden and showcase it’s beautiful plant life. The composition was crafted to flow and sound like an actual nature documentary by using clean titles, beautiful video clips and photos, a British accent voice over, and soothing instrumental music. Original video clips and photos were taken while visiting the garden using my cellphone. There was some trial and error in getting the large 9:16 video clips to fit the project size requirements of 720 by 480. This meant that most visuals had a bit of a macro look and gave a peek into the small details of the plants. I think this made for a more visually interesting composition. Transitions between source clips were added to smooth out the flow of the composition. The beginning and end of the clip was given a fade to keep the composition moving without any abrupt changes. Lumetri color effects improved the look of the clips and custom placed keyframes within position and scale worked to pull everything together.

To begin, a few original source materials needed to be crafted. A few videos and photos that were taken at the San Diego Botanic Garden were brought into Premiere. In and out selections were taken from the source material and placed into the composition. Clips were adjusted for position and scale to keep the focus visually interesting and photographs were given keyframes in position and scale to imitate the look of a video clip. Dip to black transitions were placed at every merge of clip and photo. Keyframes for opacity were placed at the beginning and end of the composition to create a fade in and fade out look. The source video clips had improper lighting so a Lumetri color effect was added. Titles were created with an essential graphics preset and edited for looks. The font, color and size was changed to work with the theme. To make end credits and text box was filled and centered, then keyframes for position were added to give the rolling look. For the soundtrack, a few text to voice clips were created using naturalreaders.com. Voice over sound bites were then placed with matching clips. A few different free YouTube sound library sound effects and songs were collected. Small clips and pieces of sound were pulled from various songs and re-composed together with sound transitions and volume keyframes. A few sound effects were layered over the songs at key points. The music clips were placed on the timeline to match the video and smoothly flowed from one to the next. Volume was adjusted to fade in and fade out.