Jawaad Ahmad Khan

WORK TIME: 1 hr.

FINAL PROJECT TIME: 26min. 21sec.

CAMERA: Sony HDR-UX10

EDITED WITH: Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9

This is a Khutbah (Friday sermon) given by my father, Naseeb Khan, on October 16, 2009 at Nur-Ul-Islam masjid. In the Khutbah, he speaks about the topic of mediocrity and how it seems to have become accepted in the Muslim community. Being late to events, halphhazard planning and accepting less than the best are issues discussed.

SET-UP:

I finally found my tripod, after it had been missing for a long time. This, like many of my videos are unfortunately turning out to be, was a bit rushed. I got picked up from school to go to Jumu’ah, and my sister and I had to pick up our nephew (from my other sister) to take him to Jumu’ah, and there, I borrowed my sister’s camera. Then we went to Jumu’ah. I took a corner in the back left of the Masjid, right in front of some chairs (awkward spot when people began to sit in those chairs). Initially, I was going to sit and have the tripod at half-height, but within seconds of my dad walking up to the minbar, a brother stood up to pray, so I pulled up the tripod to full height and re-adjusted the camera in a matter of moments. In the first couple minutes I’m still moving the camera (which is why the introductory titles seemed kind of long).

Then, my camera would auto-focus, and there was a very sunny window next to my dad’s head. Whenever I placed my dad on the left side of the screen, he became dark, and the windows was in focus, so most of the time, I had to put him on the right side of the screen, even though his hand gestures and such were moving further to the right.

EDITING:

Sony Vegas. For one of the first times, I tried my hand at basic animation in Vegas. It wasn’t too flashy, just a rotation and growing of the title text. I also wanted to bring out a “shock factor” with the title and its text. I used different fonts and rotated it to emphasize it. “Medocrity EXPOSED!”

I used some b-roll to cover up for the guy praying. It’s funny, as my dad began talking about how some Muslims can be rude when we are supposed to “act well towards people” (Hadith), the guy prayed right in front of the camera. How rude. (I forgive him for the sake of Allah, no worries).

I’d originally exported this out at HD, but when it first uploaded (and it was about 1.13 GB, large file sizes) it had some problems and only showed the first three minutes. So, I had to go back and re-render about four more times, testing and trying different formats for smaller file sizes. I ended up just rendering it out as a measly, non-high-definition 640×360 pixels. Oh well, still looks good Alhamdulillah.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

I might begin to develop this into a bit of a project with my father’s Khutbah’s. He doesn’t regularly give Khutbah but he does do it quite often. As he’d said a bit earlier just today, he might begin to write an article to accompany his khutbahs, and I was thinking I could post them up on his website along with the video or audio of the khutbah. I don’t know. Just another possible project in the works.

YOUR FINAL THOUGHTS:

So, how was the video? Any thoughts, concerns? Want to speak directly to the speaker, do so in a comment and I’ll try to get him to respond.

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