Recording Yourself On Video With Zoom

I created this page in hope that it might help somebody (Julia) who has some excellent footage but wants to add something to it – perhaps some additional video footage at the start and finish, or perhaps just some additional audio, placed over the top of it.

I decided it might help to show Julia a video I had made for somebody else (Menka, as it happens), and to which I had added a bit of footage to make it less samey.

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Sample Video

Here’s the video I made for Menka, using Zoom to share my screen and to make the recording.

3 mins 10 secs

You’ll notice that I speak without moving my lips. That’s because I recorded the audio while sharing my screen, and staring at the same picture all the time was Very Boring Indeed.

So I laid on top of the audio some off-cuts of myself footling about just before the real work started.

You may be surprised to hear that I got the idea for this from the German adventure movie Das Boot.

The director of the film started running his cameras while the actors were getting ready, doing breathing exercises etc – and he decided that they looked better doing that, for a scene of high tension, than when they started acting.

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How I Made It

And (at risk of getting far too self-referential / meta / recursive) here’s a video I made, attempting to explain how I made the video above.

4 mins 13 secs

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Explaining It All To Julia

And (at risk of getting FAR too self-referential) here’s a video of me explaining it all to Julia.

27 mins 30 secs