((( Lesson 49 )))

So after a 7 week gap, I have uploaded my latest English lesson. This is the 49th  in my series of English videos and it is slightly different from all the rest. The main difference being its length. It runs to 33 minutes, which is quite unusual for a Youtube video, never mind one which has been made in High Definition. This lesson took me three weeks to make, in which time I wrote the script, set up the 32 scenes that would make up the lesson, and many re shoots of stuff I was unhappy with. This is also the first lesson where I have heavily used Green-Screen Chroma key effects. I had used it briefly in the 'Death' lesson, but at that time I had no real green backdrop and my lighting was pretty bad to say the least.

During May I invested in a set of professional studio lamps and a huge studio green screen backdrop. This now allows me to make 'composite' shots. This means that I can now layer many different clips of video over each other to produce a totally unique moving image. In fact the method is the same as they use in many big budget movies these days. So part of that three weeks production was taken up with getting used to using the new studio set up.

I also bought some new video editing software, which takes the number of editing tools to five. This allows me to swap and change between different features and hopefully add some interesting moments to the lesson. Music has always been an important part of my video making and now I have many more options for producing my own music. The main 'food' theme was written and produced by myself and this was the first time is had ever made a full length tune for a lesson. Filming took many days and editing took around six days to complete.

The hardest part of making these videos is the adding of screen captions and subtitles. For lesson 49, it took two days to create just the subtitles!  Of course this is a big task and there was bound to be a mistake or two. I was rather annoyed to find a spelling mistake had made it to the final edit. The word 'dessert' was spelt as 'desert', which has a completely different meaning to the word I wanted to spell. I felt quite sick in my stomach after realising it...after all I'm a perfectionist and I hate making mistakes....very much!

This is one of the dangers of running words through a spellchecker. Normally I do all checking by hand...but because the subtitles and captions text came to over 2000 words, I decided to run them through the spell check. Of course the misspelled 'desert' is a real word, so the spell check ignored it.

Of course I realised this mistake after uploading the lesson to Youtube, which had taken 14 hours!  So that error will be there to stay. This is a good lesson for me...Do not rely too much on time-saving programmes, as they can bring you more problems later.

I will begin preparing lesson 50 soon, and I have something special planned for that one. I will be off on my travels for the next instalment. (Not abroad sadly!)

Hope you enjoy the lesson....

(Misterduncan)

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