As the title suggests, my video project is all about the legendary Wimbledon 2008 final match between Federer and Nadal, which has widely been regarded as the greatest tennis match of all times. There are a lot of reasons for that statement, to the point that there is a 2-hour documentary just on this match, whose snippets of videos I used to make this video. There are tennis footages from the past, commentaries from other tennis players and the clips from the actual match. What I find particularly like would be the last few minutes where the best valley shots from both players are shown – some brilliant shots are there for us to get amazed over – and also that championship point from Nadal – absolutely a delight to watch (if you’re a fan of him of course!).

I really enjoy working on this project with Final Cut Pro X, and it is truly great and easy to use so I didn’t really have major problems working with it. However, I do have some issues trying to trim the videos and combine them together with a smooth transition. Also, making sure the audio is balanced all over is also a great task to face, but glad it all worked out great as it did! 😉

https://app.vyond.com/videos/138e5e1a-b028-4f24-8037-21b6df878997

(If you could not see the video and instead see a log-in page (which I think you will since my free trial with Vyond has ended :P), please log in as followed:

Email: thuanh99@student.fdu.edu

Password: abcABC12345 (and no, it is not the actual password to my email so don’t bother trying :’) )

Here are some main screenshots from the animation:

Following the theme of tennis, I chose to tell the story of Esther Vergeer – a legendary wheelchair tennis player who has been widely called “the most dominant player in professional sports” due to her great dominance in wheelchair tennis world. This animation is a decent narration of Vergeer’s life and career, following the main character when she was a little girl. I tried following the style of dramatic video-making of many great thriller directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, by highlighting the moment of when Vergeer realized that she could not feel anything in her legs, that her life was about to change forever. (The attempt was, obviously, not very great, but I tried ;_:) Overall, I hope that the audience could feel inspired by Vergeer’s story after watching the video.

Something I remember having a lot of trouble with is to be familiar with the tool we were given to work with for this project – Vyond. My theme is tennis, and I guess Vyond just… have not had enough assets for tennis? So I really struggled trying to find replacements for the tennis props in Vyond, but luckily things worked out great!

Since my theme is tennis, obviously I was going to make a Tennis e-magazine for this project.

The content of the magazine was a compilation of the latest tennis articles around the time I started making the media. It was right after the finals of US Open with the champion being Rafael Nadal (for males) and Bianca Andreescu (for females), so it was very fitting to make the headline (the biggest news) on my front page about their wins. Then I dedicated the first two pages to be all about the newest champions because I imagined when people picked up an actual magazine most of them would want to find out the most about the headline news firsthand. The remaining pages are all about the topics I personally would like to cover, such as the benefit of running in tennis, introduction of clay court, overview of two of the most incredible tennis players ever existed – Roger Federer and Serena Williams and finally, the topic of building one’s legacy in tennis.

One little setback that I have encountered while making this magazine might sound a little captain-obvious-ish, but actually I had trouble finding a picture of the athletes to put on my front page. Since the current pictures I could find had background elements to it, it is not easy to make it blend into my front page’s current background. My best friend helped me with this by telling me there was an option on Google Images that you could click for transparent backgrounds. And that really sealed the deal, I finally got the nice look for my front page now 😛

For this project, I have chosen the theme Tennis. For it is truly one of my passions, as well as something that I feel people should appreciate more.

This infographic is all about the life and career of Rafael Nadal – one of the best tennis players in the world right now. He is one of my biggest inspirations in life, for his amazing fortitude and attitude. He taught me that it is not over until it is over – meaning that we should never give up at any points, just keep fighting and fighting until the very end. In a tennis game, skills are definitely crucial, but what even more crucial is our mental strength.  Even at the age of 33, having to face many great players of younger generations in tournaments, he still stood his ground strong, won so many grand titles and humbled those who were cocky. A prime example is the latest match in ATP Finals Tour 2019 between him and Danii Medvedev. It was thought that Nadal might get a bagel (a 1-6 loss) in the last set and lost the match, he was still more calm and focused than the younger guy, thus, fought back to take the points and finally won the match, to the audience’s astonishment.

A difficulty that I have faced in the process of making this infographic is probably figuring out how to highlight the phenomenal numbers in the infographic, since there is a plethora of information presented for my topic. What I did to solve this problem is writing down the main points I would like to present, then ranked the points in terms of significance. The most important one would be highlighted bold with the largest size, and same do other. This method really helps since it helps strengthening my focus as well as that of the audience to the topic.