In the Name of Nationalism

Hello fellow humans, and welcome back to my blog for a post about nationalism, video editing, and a ton of research. Sounds interesting, right?

Before I can properly begin, I assume some context would be appreciated, so let’s get that over with. First: I’m going to start at the end with the final product, a YouTube video on Polish nationalism (a topic of my choice). Second: This video is pretty much the entirety of the project, so I will go into detail on every part of its creation. Third: I don’t like lists of 2. With all that out of the way, we can start with my video on Polish nationalism:

Hey, welcome back! So after watching the video, you should have a fairly good idea about Polish history and, surprise surprise, I had to research everything in that video¹. So, let’s start there.

The research was, by far, the hardest part of this project, and also the most crucial to making sure we wouldn’t be lying for four minutes. To guide our research we developed six questions about our chosen countries, each covering one of the 6 topics of question: Who, What, Where, How, When, and Why. My questions mainly focused on how location and borders affected nationalism and the formation of Poland.

With my questions set in place, I started my research by finding as many possibly useful sources as I could, and organizing them on a Milanote Board². I’m not sure if I was doing something wrong, but for some reason, I ended up having a hard time finding “normal” sources (Wikipedia, Britannica, just plain websites, YouTube videos) and instead collected a ton of books and papers³. I did eventually get organized and ready to start answering questions.

The actual answering questions bit was interesting, as once I answered one, all of the others sort of answered themselves as I worked, so I was jumping around, writing down relevant information (which is why you might see some repeated information). After a few days of research, my board looked like this and I was ready to begin writing a script⁴.

Well, I didn’t actually start writing my script. I started by blocking out the main points I wanted to talk about, and creating a simple reference for what would be onscreen at the time⁵.

With that out of the way, I could actually start writing my script. This didn’t actually take that long, even though I did have to make sure all my sources were cited, and do some extra research while writing it. Script in hand, I started trying to record my audio, as I had decided not to actually appear in my video. Ten takes later I was done, and after another hour or so of cleaning up the audio I started editing. Initially, editing was slow, as I had to create a lot of custom images and videos, but eventually, I got into a rhythm and was able to finish my video in one or two days. Not appearing in my video, along with the apparent lack of media related to Polish history⁶, but I learned a lot about DaVinci Resolve (my editor) in the process and overall things went pretty well. Five hours of editing later, I had my finished video.

Overall, I’m quite happy with it. The creation did feel a tad rushed, and my research processes were far from perfect (and there was a whole issue with DaVinci not exporting audio correctly, which is why I had to reupload my video), but it could have gone way worse, and I think I now have a pretty solid understanding of this, so I’m happy.

Thanks for sticking along for this journey, or skipping to the end. So long for now!

-Finn.