My entrepreneurial friends Piper Salooga and Sara Eizen, who both run their own interior design firms (Natural Balance Home and Office and Nest), teamed up with the Seattle Art Museum to host an event on March 11 at the museum gift shop. Full of can-do, they grabbed a Flipcam and decided to shoot their own video to promote the event. Then they called me and said, “Hey, we’ve got all this video…but we’re not sure what to do with it.” Here’s the result of my first editing project using someone else’s totally novice, handheld video. Not bad, huh?

Color grading (the dreamy tilt-shift in the intro and filmic-color throughout) was applied with Magic Bullet Quick Looks, an awesome plugin for Final Cut. For the music I used Sonicfire, a killer music-for-video service that lets you choose from a huge rage of beat-matched tracks. The killer part is that you download the track, then select exactly how long you want it to be, and it automatically outputs the precise length you want – with exactly the instrumentation you want (ie, you can lose the vocals, kill the drums, etc – all the the instruments are on their own layer). For $19 bucks a pop. Killer.

I used two special effects transitions – a whip-pan effect from Digital Heaven, and a flash filter that you can learn how to do in this video tutorial.