the boss weighs in

My boss called today, after a two-day silence, to weigh in on my recent iMovie video. "Are you ready for my critiques?" he asked teasingly. I rolled my eyes. As it turned out, he had nothing too cutting to say. The beginning 15 seconds, where I pan across ingredients, struck him as too frenetic (I kind of agree), and he didn't like the fact that there was no music for that part. He would also have liked a voiceover, but as I told him, that's something I'll be working on for the next sample video I do, along with some other stuff like animated text, sound effects, visual effects, etc. He also suggested something I'd been thinking about myself: instead of that frenetic pan across all of the ingredients at the beginning, why not have a series of freeze frames to allow people to see all of the ingredients at a more leisurely pace?

I didn't think these criticisms were all that stressful; the only one I mildly disagreed with was the one about the lack of music at the beginning. If you listen carefully to the first 15 seconds, you'll hear that I did, in fact, incorporate a background noise, which iMovie called a "starship rumble," similar to the all-pervasive ambient noise of the Enterprise in "Star Trek: The Next Generation." I had put this noise in to suggest a buildup and to create anticipation: after the 15-second mark, the music suddenly starts (I'd found a free music clip at one of those websites offering free music for video-making); once the music begins, that's how we launch ourselves into this short adventure. My boss isn't the most artistic guy, so I don't really expect him to get the psychology of this. Still, I realize that, if I'm making videos for myself, that's different from making videos for the boss's company: his word and his creative vision ("creative") will have to be law. And frankly, I'm only at the beginning of my video-making journey, so I need all the advice and criticism I can get. This adventure could lead anywhere, and the sky's the limit.