As you might know I did a 4 year long apprenticeship as a computer system and software engineer. During this time I was also working at a local company called motionstudio. It was a small company founded by two young (about 14 year old) local guys.

One of the co-founders, Marc Wieland used to be an apprenticeship in a video production company, but he switched to web design during his training after his former employee went bankrupt. At motionstudio he used to build websites for customers with the infamous CMS WordPress.

During the years Marc got quite involved into the WordPress community, but he also never lost the interest in movie making and is still actively working in both areas to this day.

Despite the fact that I personally was never a big fan of WordPress (or any other CMS) because I feel more at home in the realms of backend development and got only into actual web development a few years ago (I worked mostly on desktop applications and Network administration during my training), I joined Marc on a few trips to various WordCamps around Europe.

So when Marc asked me to help out in the video team for WordCamp Bern that he organised, I hardly could say no.

What are WordCamps?

WordCamps are community events that are often stretching 2-3 days. Those days will be filled with talks given by people from inside and outside the community such as core maintainers, users or industry professionals. Even though the talks are interesting, they are not the main reasons people attend WordCamps. The real value lies in the social interactions with other community members.

This kind of socialising is often done during the breaks or at the ContributerDay, a special event held before or after the actual WordCamp that gives people the opportunity to sit together with maintainers and other established members of the community and start doing technical and non technical contributions to WordPress.

The video team

As the video team our main task was to record all the talks of all running tracks (multiple talks where given at the same time) on video and publish them later on WordPress.tv.

Since we had some experience with recording talks and video productions on this scale we challenged ourself to produce a small video about the ContributorDay. This gave us the opportunity to unleash our creativity and try out some new stuff, if we mess up we would just not release the video since we never officially agreed on doing so.

I had some experience as a camera operator but I've never done much post production before. So I figured that it would be fun to let Marc be the camera operator for this short trailer and take over the entire post production myself. This small clip kept me busy the whole day even with the support and nice footage I got from Marc, for him this would probably have been a 30 minute job.

So in the end..

I figured that I'm not gonna be a professional cutter any time soon, but It was still a fun experience and it felt great to publish something at the end of the day.

If you are into web development (with WordPress or not) make sure to checkout the video versions of the talks at WordCamp Bern 2017.