don't wanna jinx this, but...

I promised my boss I'd have an edited video for him by tomorrow, and I think I've finished a day early, having learned a bunch about how editing works in iMovie, which is a simpler editor to use than DaVinci (a much more powerful editor). I'll be working on DaVinci, too, but there's more to juggle, which is why I began with iMovie—my training wheels to learn the very basics.

A lot of this was learn-by-doing, but Skillshare definitely helped; one teacher has a half-hour course on the very basics of iMovie, and I've already watched the entire, basic-level course for the DaVinci editor (I'll need to rewatch it: my brain is like a sieve these days).

I decided to film myself making boeuf bourguignon, or beef Burgundy. Confession: I rarely ever find and use actual Burgundy; I just use whatever's cheap and available (not too cheap: I generally don't go below W20,000 a bottle). I had a lot of footage when all of the filming was done, and one of the first choices I had to make, as a budding editor, was what to leave out. I also practiced a ton of little skills as the video came together: cropping "Ken Burns"-style (which is a moving crop that gives the illusion of zooming and/or panning), deleting the ambient soundtrack, adding music and other sounds, adding text/titles, doing fade-ins and fade-outs, watching my pacing, adjusting video speed, etc.—it was quite a workout, but I'm glad I went through the process.

The resulting video, embedded below, is pretty damn lame, so feel free to critique it (constructively!) because, at this point, I could use all the help I can get. You'll notice there's not a word spoken. What my boss eventually needs for me to do is to get good enough to make language-lesson videos (see this Talk to Me in Korean video as an example), which will mean lots of dialogue, snazzy transitions, nifty alert sounds, animated text and graphics, etc. It's gonna take me a while to get to that level, but by summertime, I ought to be good enough to make very basic versions of the videos the boss is aiming for. 

Anyway, it's a relief to get this done a day early. I might celebrate with a short walk tonight out to the Han River and back (about 9K). I've held off on doing the 35K walk until I got this editing done, and I still think I'd like to work on my taxes before I do an extended walk. That's going to mean either visiting the tax office (which isn't far from where I live) or figuring out how to do everything online, which might be easier and cheaper in the years to come (assuming the procedure doesn't change too much over time).

Right, well... enjoy the following video, my first-ever iMovie production, made with my Samsung Galaxy S21 phone, a cheap-ass tripod, my Mac desktop, ambient apartment lighting, and iMovie software. Back in 2008, when I was trying to walk across America, I had made a small video on a small Asus laptop using Windows Movie or whatever it was called; I recall that platform being fairly easy to use. But it's been years since then, and I'd forgotten everything, so consider the video below to be my new first-ever production. It's pretty bottom-of-the-barrel, so optimistically, this means I can only go up from here.

You can now hit the "CC" button during playback and see English subtitles.

You'll have noticed that the title cards in the video are in French and Korean. If I can figure out a way to add closed captions or subtitles for my anglophone audience, I'll let you know. I might just have to go back into the video itself and add the English that way. I should also confess that a lot of the video segments are cropped close because, when I was filming, I wasn't wearing any pants, and I didn't want my naked, hairy legs to scare (or inappropriately arouse) the ladies. A lot of bare leg got accidentally filmed.