The Struggle

I thought for a brief moment that I may never get footage of any decent quality to use for this assignment.    The most basic issue I ran into was background noise.  Have you ever tried to get real silence.  It seemed like there was real silence.  Then when playing back for 10th taken that is finally correct you notice the background noise.  I really seemed to have learned to live with the crackle of the baby monitor to such a degree I didn’t consider it until I heard static in my perfect take.  Then there’s the central air…and the puppy.  The puppy is yipping, the pupping is drinking, will it show up in the video?  So many variables.  Ok, I believe I’ve eliminated them all.  Wait, it was my phone that creating the static!  Ok, Christine let’s try again with your phone.  

After all of these trials and tribulations I finally had good sound for me recording.  The initial part of my reading hard some static and little motion in the camera but I thought that that could work as an accidental artistic choice to make the reading seem more dramatic.  

Lighting, set and costume all provided issues.  In my previous videos the backdrop just did not work.  I constructed a small set in my house by using old curtains as a black background.  I dug out a halloween decoration and costume to create some atmosphere.  I wanted to get into the video more and make it a little more entertaining and fun.  I think that the set and costume definitely helped with that.  I did not want to shoot during the day because the candles would not make a dramatic enough effect.  After going to edit my first nights footage I decided that it was too dark to see anything and that the background static made the audio annoying to listen to.  I was going to have to reshoot a day later.  This time I decided to leave a light on shining into the room to create a bit more light.  I think that this helped because the drops I held up became more distinguishable.  I debated if more light would make the image more interesting by showing the robe more clearly.  I decided that the darkness illuminated by candles feeling, although it created a lot fo pure back space, gave the best look.  

After a realizing how easy voice overs where I started to gain more confidence in the project.  By creating my own meme I got to add a small bit of humor to the project.  I liked the voice overs because I could simply read my notes which resulted in only having to make a couple takes as opposed to the many I had to do for the video scenes.  I was able to get perfect takes and show off some great art.  

Brevity was an area of struggle on this project.  I tried to be clear and succinct.  I had someone watch the video afterwards to make sure they could understand it all.  I was successful or so they said.  There is so much more I could have said.  I would have like to have added more humor but I didn’t know where I could cut info without losing a major element.  There were a few things After having uploaded the video I think maybe I should have touched on this or that.  However they may not be that important and would just have bogged down the video for the casual viewer. I would have liked to have included music but I worried it would drown out the speaking as I get nervous about being clearly audible after my previous feedback, and I did not want to make the video any longer with purely musical sections.  

This video very purposely had no interviews.  I had considered throwing in interviews with a couple friends but I remembered how hard working with interview footage was for me last time. I wanted to focus solely on the mechanics of editing and visual presentation this time. Interviews were too uncontrollable.  When I couldn’t edit to get exactly what I wanted I could just reshoot myself or change my voice over.  Interview footage I would be stuck with using what I had.  I think for a longer project interviews would be good but for this it was important to control every second on screen.

Sight and sound both resulted in struggles on this assignment but I think that the video shows a serious improvement from my last video.  I look forward to seeing what I can create going forward.