WTF? Manual Head Lymph Drainage! Just watch it! You won’t regret it!!

After my hiking video, my mother in law, Val Ford approached me with this idea. Val is a massage therapist and is studying some more holistic approaches to health. In the interest of building my skills and a career in this field, I decided to take on this project. Val wanted to allow her patients a way to give themselves needed lymph drainage in between visits. Val would actually like 2 videos. One explaining lymphs and lymph drainage, and a second one that the patients can rewatch doing the routine on their own. 

There were 2 major hurdles I had to overcome. 1. How to take 2 hours of dry medical related video and cut it down to 3 min. I had to do this without losing the context of the subject and still holding your attention too. 2. My audio was real ruff. I recorded audio separately, but ended up using the camera’s audio, because there wasn’t a huge quality difference between the two. I spent hours upon hours in audition, trying to reduce the extra noise. I wasn’t able to cut out the noise without affecting the dialogue in a bad way. I ended up doing all the noise reduction in Lightroom and the rest of the audio balancing in audition. 

 I probably have a couple hours of footage. I could have easily built a 20 min video. In the constraints of our timeline, I had to really chop up the video. I had to break it down to the heart of the content. I ended up with about 35 clips worked together. This was quite the challenge! With all the cuts, I had to do my best to make the video “flow”. I used a lot of different transitions that I felt worked well with the video. I also tried to cover up as much of the video as I could with graphics that I am pretty happy with. I got all of the static images from Adobe stock on their free trial offer. The white image, with the green lymph system, and the moving arrows was put together by me using After Effects. I think this animated graphic goes along way, helping people to understand the lymph system in the head. I’m new to animation.  I’m sure you will notice when you watch my video. If I can get anyone past the title. So instead of actual animated graphics, I did what I do know how to do. Animate text. Not my first choice, but it did the job.

I hope to keep making some similar videos like this for Val. I like that it pushed me into a subject that doesn’t really interest me. I had to do what I could to make it interesting, without having a subject that most people already think is interesting. Hope you watched and enjoyed. Thanks if you did!