Workshop Video Montage @ LUCAS

Date

Friday 14 June 2024

Time

09:15 - 13:00 hour

Address

P.J. Veth
Nonnensteeg 1-3
2311 VJ Leiden

Room

1.07 (Digital lab)

AI Image generated with Stable Diffusion.

Workshop hosted by the LUCAS cross-cluster research theme “The Role of Experience in Arts of Criticism, Rhetoric, and Aesthetics”

Attention all! Do you want to bring your research to life and captivate your peers? Our upcoming video editing workshop may be just what you need to transform your research into an exciting and dynamic visual story. Video abstracts and video essays are powerful tools that offer a new and exciting way to communicate research findings and academic ideas. By combining visual and auditory elements with written content, these formats allow you to convey your work in a more engaging, dynamic, and accessible way.

Videos are more than just a trendy form of content creation. A time-based medium, video allows you to work with text as it unfolds over time. Play with timing, and evoke a rhythmicality of audio and images running alongside your text at their own pace. Take a transmedial approach to your ideas! Videos are a productive communication and research tool for academics, easy to learn, and you don’t need to appear on screen for a web lecture, unless you choose to do so. Some possibilities include:

Video conference abstracts are a great way to communicate the key findings and contributions of a research paper in a short and engaging format. Instead of relying solely on written text, a video abstract can visually demonstrate the research and highlight the most important and impactful aspects of the work.

Video abstracts can also make the research more approachable and understandable to a broader audience, including those who may not be as familiar with the specific terminology or technical jargon used in a paper.

Video essays allow you to explore complex ideas and arguments in a thought-provoking way. Based on your writing, they allow for the use of a range of creative tools, such as visual metaphors, music, and animation, which can help to expand ideas and emotions in a visually rich and more powerful way than written text alone.

Video montage allows you to bring to light affective, experiential, and embodied qualities in your work or materials that are often left dormant in traditional textual research. Use montage as a fresh and experiential research tool to approach your work and materials affectively and with precision, while staying true to your academic bearings.

With video, you can visually demonstrate your research findings, capture the nuances of your experiments or fieldwork, and create a powerful emotional connection with your audience, and with your work. Whether you are a seasoned researcher or a newcomer to the academic world, this workshop will equip you with the skills and tools you need to create captivating videos that will leave a lasting impression and impact on your audience. Join us for a unique experience that will take your academic work to the next level!

Editing process

Workshop participants will learn to use DaVinci Resolve, a free-to-use video editing software, available for download via this link, that has been used in numerous Hollywood productions (including La La Land [2016], Star Wars: The Last Jedi [2017], and Roma [2018]).

We will utilize four of the seven tabs to conduct a simple, yet effective, video montage: the Media, Cut, Edit and Deliver tabs. Employing a “Kitchen” metaphor, participants will learn how to “Cook” their video. The Media tab is the “Pantry” that stores all the media, the ingredients if you will, for the video. It acts as the import hub for all the files you select. The Cut tab is the chopping block, where the media are trimmed down to the right size. The Edit tab is the pot where the footage is “seasoned”, guaranteeing proper placement and allocation of the material. The Deliver tab acts like the oven. It is where we set our final video project to render and export: we set the appropriate settings and let the computer and software “cook” the video for us.

Previous workshops iterations have welcomed speeches, songs and poems as the choice of soundscape to utilize as the backbone of a first video. (Feel free to view a previous project here.) You will be able to select videos, stills and sound effects from libraries with thousands of free to use stock images and sounds, such as, pixabay, freesound.org and archive.org, and combine them, if you like, with your own audio, footage, slideshows, and diagrams, to construct your video montage or still image film.

No prior video editing skills are required, so if you’re looking for a new and exciting way to explore and communicate your academic ideas, why not try your hand at montage for a video abstract or video essay? Don’t miss out on this exciting opportunity to learn how to harness the full potential of video editing for your academic work!

Practical information

• One 4-hour hands-on workshop
• Minimum 5 participants, maximum 15
• No prior video editing experience is necessary
• The workshop itself will be given on 14 June 2024, 9:15–13:00, with the option to continue working on your project at the Digital Lab into the afternoon
• Either install Da Vinci on your own laptop, or use it on the PCs in the Digital Lab.
• “What do I want to convey with my video?” Commence thinking about your video creation, and feel free to bring in some pre-prepared material, for example:
• An abstract or text to use as a theoretical basis, for your video essay.
• A 2-to-3-minute speech or talk done by you or somebody else as an mp3 file.
• And of course, bring your own visuals, if you want to include those!  

More information and registration

You can contact [e-mail] for more information. If you are interested and wish to join this workshop, please sign up by sending an email to [e-mail].

About the instructor

'Ultimately my conviction is that, if the first homo sapiens that manipulated fire had not shared the knowledge of how to create and wield flames with their brothers, sisters, sons and daughters, humanity would still live in darkness. Therefore, in my world view, communication is perhaps the most important societal building block. My name is Miguel Mira, and I have taught over a dozen workshops on film montage. At LUCAS I am researching the cinematic implications of Virtual Reality (VR). I have made it my life’s work to research the intersection of art and technology, and find it an absolute privilege to help people communicate via digital technology.'