Ok, so my senior thesis will be a highlight reel for the TCNJ Ultimate Frisbee Team. If you don’t know what a highlight reel is, it’s essentially a video that contains all of the team’s best plays and moments that happened during the season. In my case, the content will be from the Fall of 2019, Spring of 2020, and hopefully the Spring of 2021. Even without the possible footage from the spring of 2021 I still have enough footage to still make the highlight reel and have some length to it. Of course, there will be background music, nice transitions in between some videos, and nice edits in the video. I am also including a player intro consisting of the “kill line”, which are the people you put on the field when you need to win the game. Right now, I have gone through every game and single-handedly picked out all of the highlights from each game. I have also finished five out of the eight people that will be in the intro.
Now I’ll address the problems, setbacks, or things that make it or are currently making my thesis more complicated. I may possibly be unable to get more game footage than this because of the coronavirus possibly canceling all future tournaments for my senior year. As I addressed before, I have enough footage to make the video but, would always love more and it’d help of course. The next thing has to do with only the intro, again because of corona I have to ask the people included in the intro to send me videos of themself. This causes a possible resolution problem that I haven’t had to deal with so far, and me having to ask them to redo it multiple times either because it doesn’t look right, or they didn’t take it with their phone sideways. Also, because not everyone has a green screen and I can’t just casually whip out a green screen and drive to everyone just to take their videos. I have to mask the background out of each person’s video which, takes a lot of precision, time, and patience. If you did have the question of why I’m not doing everyone, this is the big reason why. I also have other ideas that I would love to add to the videos but, that strongly depends on COVID and if we can get at least scrimmages to happen.
I cant wait to see the finished project! What if you had the players go out and spend like $5 on green poster paper? Would that help you save some time instead of masking out the background? I know its not the same as the real deal, but maybe taping the green poster paper to their walls could help you out tremendously!
I think you have a solid idea of what you’re working with and what your struggles are to be honest. I agree that due to COVID video shooting involving other people is much harder than normal because of the amount of coordination that usually goes into something like this is no longer possible at this current time.
You’ve probably considered this already, but if you already have quite a bit of footage available to you, would it be possible to use some of it to help with making the intros for the last 3 people? If you’re going about the intro in a different fashion than ignore this, but I think that could be one way to maybe side-step the problem for now. In terms of working around resolution problem and multiple takes in the case of something not looking right, I’d say don’t sweat those details unless it majorly affects the overall presentation of the highlight reel, or you could even add it on as an additional bloopers sort of deal. You’re main focus should probably be to continue what you’re doing of course and don’t allow yourself to get bogged down by the minutiae, though theoretically speaking you can look into upscaling for improving/band-aid’ing any resolution problems you might have.
Keep up the good work dude.