Saqib Siddik

Although this project was actually completed several months ago, I never got around to posting it on this site. Better late than never, right?

To give you some background, the Muslim community in Louisville, Kentucky has grown rapidly over the past few years. The local community has taken up the challenge of building a new community center and school from the ground up. When finished, the complex will be the first of its kind in Louisville. In order to help raise funds for construction, community leaders decided to take a progressive approach and have a fundraising video produced on behalf of the project. I was fortunate to be given the contract to produce this video.

The first step was to meet with community leaders and identify their goals and vision for the center and the video. Next, I wrote a basic treatment to give them a feel for how the final video would turn out. The aim was a 5-7 minute video featuring interviews with community members and supplemented with B-roll of the construction that had already been completed.

The video was shot on a Panasonic DVX100b (in 30P mode since the video would be going onto youtube), an Arri light kit, softbox, Sennheiser mics, sound mixer, and a van full of grip equipment. I had a crew of four working under me. We shot for two days at several locations, including a house and the construction site itself. Completing the final edit took two weeks.

The biggest challenge was taking 7 hours of video and cutting it down to a concise 5-7 min piece. Also, the narrative had to be constructed from the material gathered during interviews. I used Avid Xpress Pro to edit. My approach was to first organize all of the video clips into bins based on content. I was detailed on my clip descriptions so that I could read what each person was saying without having to play the clip. After logging all clips, I printed out the contents of each bin. Having a paper hard copy made it easier to wrap my brain around all of the content. From here, I opened up a word processor and began writing a script based on the clips I had. In hindsight, my modus operandi was very similar to the way television journalists write stories for the news.

Once the script was complete, I started arranging clips onto the timeline. Next, I used B-roll to fill in the gaps in the appropriate places. This is not as easy as it sounds because you have to know when to show the speaker and when to show the B-roll. Sometimes, you can really emphasize the point being made by showing B-roll over the audio, and then cutting back to the speaker right before they make their point.

After I had ~70% of the clips in the timeline and was really starting to feel the story taking shape, I went searching for music. I found some great clips on musicloops.com by composer Mark Petrie. After laying these into the timeline, I was able to finish the edit and match the music. The last step was to add the short Islamic prayer (“In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful…”) to the very beginning, all in keeping with the client’s goals.