London Study Abroad Documentary Finished!

London Centre Spring 2013
"Can't Say Goodbye" 

Filmed and Edited 
by Kayla Sprayue

Finished and uploaded today!

This documentary is 3 months of study abroad condensed into 9 minutes. I collected footage while in England, which was fun, but turned out to be a lot tougher than I'd anticipated for several reasons. I only had my little Nikon Coolpix L120 (basically a higher end point-and-shoot camera) with me. The resulting footage isn't exactly HD quality, and its very difficult to get it to focus correctly while recording. I had limited access to a nice Canon DSLR through the college I attended in London, but I'm happy with the shots I got with that camera. Unfortunately I only ended up being able to use the Canon a couple times - when I visited Rochester Castle for example.

I also didn't have a tripod or mic, and was usually rushed during filming. Not all the students liked being on camera, so I struggled to get footage of everyone looking like they were happy and enjoying themselves. But even with all of that, I still managed to edit together something that I'm quite proud of. At the very least, it allows me  and my fellow students and professors  a great way to look back on this past semester. Not only can I use this to share what I did with my friends and family, I am also getting credit for it in a class. 

I also overestimated the amount of free time I would have to edit the footage while in London. Originally, I'd plan to do a series of video blogs - releasing one every few weeks while I was over there. But with the workload from my classes I ended up editing only one other vlog while abroad. I asked professors for an extension over the summer to finish the editing, so that I didn't have to spend all my time editing while in London. This allowed me to do fun things like my homework and sleeping instead.

It took me about a week to edit this together. The music is all from Nerdfighter artists, used with permission by DFTBA.com. Enjoy!