I like CV, a.k.a. Collaboration Video, and maybe it’s a part of penspinning activity I like the most. And lately seem like there is more international CV organizing, which I really glad since I will have more CV to join.

Well many of the organizers and editors of those CV are new faces, so it’s a good chance for me to tell about how I made my coffeelucky 6th, the CV I consider my best work so far for my 12 years of penspinning. As well as talking about making CV in general too. Hope you guys can find something useful from this article that can apply with your works.

Let’s talk about the video production in general. For common video making, there’s 3 big steps you should follow in case to make a good video.

Pre-Production Production Post-Production

For the Production, it usually means the filming process. While Pre-Production is everything that need to be done before filming, usually planning process, and Post-Production is the thing after filming, which editing is the main process here.

In CV making, there is also pretty much the same with the general production. Pre-Production for planning, Production for filming, and Post-Production for editing.

Pre-Production

is a process that you plan everything about your CV. You need to think about how you want your CV to be. Will it be the invited-only or 100% signing up? How mood and tone of the CV you want it to be, or any concept/theme in your mind? You may find the music you want to use in this process too.

As for coffeelucky 6th, like my 3rd, 4th, and 5th, I planned it to be invited spinners for a big portion, and some few signed up spinners to fill the gap. I also started listing the spinners I want to invite in this process too. As for the concept, I used “Journey”, which means the journey of my 12 years of penspinning, and tried to create an image of ‘old book’ as for a record of journey.

After you get the image of the CV, you need to think about the schedule. If you already have a date you want to release, you can try using it as a goal, and count backward. Usually the editing will take about 1-2 months (can be less or more during how hard the editing is and how busy the editor will be). So set about 1-2 months before releasing date a deadline for video submission will be good. Count back again for how much time you want to give people to film. For this process, about 1 months will be great for solid combos, you can shorten it if you don’t mind much about the level and want it to be more chill. Now you will get a time you need to announce your CV project, or start asking people for filming if you want to keep it secret until it release.

But if you don’t have any deadline to release your CV, you can just decide it by counting the date forward, e.g. it’s February right now while I’m writing this article and if I want to make a CV with 1 month for accepting submission and 1 month for editing, I need to set a deadline for combo in March, and finish the editing in April. It’s nothing serious if you don’t set the deadline for the editing since you have no real deadline anyway, but beware about the laziness that can make you never finish the CV.

For my coffeelucky 6th, I used the later method. I started organizing it in February, and wanted to give a lot time for filming to anyone who want to join (which is a sign of heavy filtering too), so May was a deadline for it, 3 months. I also gave myself about 2 months for editing so it will be finished around July, yet it finished before the deadline a little bit.

Production

This step will be different from general video production since you are not the one who film the video (or you need to film if you want yourself to be in a CV too, but it’ll be just only a small part anyway).

If you decided to go with signing up CV, you gonna need to announce your CV project in this step. Post it on penspinning communities to tell people about your CV, give them detail about combos you want, deadline, sending method, and others. You may need to advertise it a little bit if you want a lot of submissions, or ask people from many communities to post your CV on their boards/servers/groups.

If you go with the invitation, this is a step you ask people in your list to participate in your CV. It’s similar to announcing CV to public since you should give them the detail about your CV especially the deadline, but it will be more flexible because you can extend it a bit in case some of them cannot film in time, just remember that it shouldn’t be too long or else it will affect your schedule. And also keep in mind that you have to use the combo they give to you as guests/invited spinners. If it’s too bad and you really don’t want to use it, maybe discuss with them about filming new one or tell them directly that you cannot use it, I’ve never got something like that myself anyway.

After the deadline passes, you can now do the filtering process, there is many method for this, like you can give them score or ranking and put the top xx videos into your CV, or choose each of them that fit well in each part of the music.

Since I got a lot (40+ combos from 30+ submission excluding the invited), I filtered many and kept only some few that I want to put in my CV. But there was the filtering process I did while editing too, mostly from how the combo fit with the music.

Some minor process in this step is, I was also finding the music in this process too. I found Lurie from Rigël Theatre pretty fast yet continued it in case I might get a better one, but ended up using Lurie anyway, it’s really a great music.

Post-Production

The last step, yet the part that gonna take your effort the most. You should have everything now in this step, including the image of your CV, the combos you want to put it in, and also the music for the CV. And it’s a time to put everything together.

This video from Near describe about the editing process very well and recommend everyone to watch it, it also has something you may need to do since the pre-production step too.

For my coffeelucky 6th, I already have the image of my CV since the pre-production process, I also prepared other things while waiting for the combos too. So after the deadline of my CV passed I started editing right away.

I started with the combo ordering (and some more filtering in this process), which you put the combo along with the music and see how they look. Left some space for the title and ending.

After I satisfied with the order, I added the background of the video, which are old paper photos that labeled as non-commercial reuse so I can use them freely in my CV. I adjusted the size of each combo in this process, crop them into 4:3 for frame-in-frame part, and 16:9 for fullscreen part.

It will look pretty okay for CV right now, so time to improve it with some effects and transitions. I added some light particles effect to make a CV not too bland. Added the names of every spinners and looked into how it will show up on each combos. Some like Huwng’s and Padrace I used simple fade-in with a few slide motion at a point that have some dynamics in music, while some like OhYeaH! and DArKT I just made it show up at the same time with combos.

For the transition between combos, I tried to use simple but various kinds, focusing on just fade-in fade-out with slide motion. Some zoom in effect when the music is intense, as well as some few straight-forward cut between 4:3 and 16:9.

I made a title and ending simple to match with the music, as well as don’t want it to be much flashy so it’ll look more like a record from old period.

After that now it will look like a complete work, but I recommend you to watch your own CV at least one more time. Maybe rest for a few days if you are not in hurry so you can reset the editor pov and can watch with other pov to see how it really is. Think about what it lacks of, what you should add more to make it more complete.

I found that the background is too bland and roomy, so I decided to add a very big letter in the background, it’s a capital letter from the font called Old English Text MT which has nice design and goes well with the concept of CV. I put the capital letter from the first letter of each spinner name (e.g. S from Sirapob) or the first capital letter from the name (Z from oZone). This fill the space nicely and not too flashy to distract people from the combo.

I also added some roman number in the background of many combos, from I to V, as a gimmick that say that this spinners also participated in any other coffeelucky series. e.g. there is III, IV, and V in OhYeaH! background since he participated in my 3rd, 4th, and 5th. oZone has II for his combo in coffeelucky 2nd.

Now your CV is 99% complete, the last thing you need to do is checking if everything is alright. Watch your own CV in every detail to see there is no misspelling, no unwanted effects or videos, no weird resolution or framerate.

What to do if you found any of them? Just fix it, and it will be finished. Upload to your channel, share it everywhere, and enjoy seeing people watching your CV.