Client:
Nordic Council of Ministers' Office in Estonia
Premiere: 9th of September 2021 in Fotografiska, Tallinn
Cinematography, video editing, graphics and animations: Kadri Nikopensius
Interviewers: Sigrid Salutee, Veiko Klemmer, Grete Kodi
Set photos: Kertu Kärk, NCM Estonia
The Estonian office of the Nordic Council of Ministers (NCM) is celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2021. This video gives a comprehensive overview about their activities, biggest projects and future aspirations.
Preparations started with making a mood board: an approximate relative to a storyboard. It suited well with the project format, because it was supposed to be close to a documentary – an overview of the office’s historical and today’s activities. The drafts for graphics were very close to the final result.
We did a couple of meetings and I did photos of the locations. After that I made floor plans for the camera and lighting. A shooting schedule was necessary, as we were interviewing several people during four days in three cities.
Photo: Kertu Kärk, NCM Estonia
Film shoot took place in three different locations and in three different cities. We had a tight-scheduled four days. I had help interviewing our guests and I myself was doing video lighting, camera and sound recording.
For lighting I used two Flexlight bicolor 600W. I love how much soft light they give and they are less time consuming set-up wise. Especially when shooting alone.
For shooting I used Sony a7s III and Sony FE 70-200mm 2.8 GM OSS lens mainly. I shot both 25fps and 100fps raw video.
For audio I used Sennheiser EW100 G4 radios and a Zoom H6, manually monitoring behind the camera with my good old Sony headphones.
Photo: Kertu Kärk, NCM Estonia
The editing process was the most time consuming part of the process. It took overall 11 drafts to finalize the two versions of the video. One guest interview was 45 minutes on average, so there was overall 7 hours and 30 minutes of material, altogether with short beauty shots.
Another step is music. For me, sound and music defines the tempo and flow of the film/video. Sound defines the wholeness of the video. Using specific music in specific places is a treat to do. I love spending time looking for the right music for a specific part in the video. When it fits just right, I start working on the editing a bit more, to make it whole.
The graphics I made are partially inspired by my previous work. I love using bold lines and strokes also in my regular art and I wanted to implement these in my designs as well. I used pencil strokes to fill positive space and thick colorful borders to bring out important elements and characters. I love using paper textures and tried to implement them into the designs.
This is a very overlooked step in the video making process. It’s a hidden step, in a way, because the video is basically ready, but still needs a grade, sound mix and a few more touch-ups. For example, subtitling is an important step nowadays. More and more clients want to show their video to a broader audience live and in social media: to foreign speaking viewers and also to disabled viewers.
Grading, sound mix, sound effects and mastering takes a portion of time in the process. Especially when dealing with RAW/4K files. As an editor I’m not a big fan of 4K myself, although it offers great possibilities editing wise. So it’s smart to approach each project separately, whether it’s really necessary to shoot 4K or not.
For this project I shot it in RAW HD, already knowing how I was going to edit it. But because of motion graphics, animations and the length of the project, the exporting process takes its own time.
