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Project 2 Reflection

April 26, 2020

When I was deciding which story to tell, I originally was thinking about telling a story about my grandmother. I really liked the videos that used audio from voicemails/phone calls and I wanted to try to use that for my own video. I went through my voicemails and found some things I thought could work, but I know I don’t have very strong video editing skills and I was not really sure how I would technically be able to make this video or if I had the ability to do it on my own. I decided to go for another story, this time using voiceover since that was something I tried out for my Indigenous artist project. Every year at Binghamton I have had a 5th grade pen pal, and when we were coming up with video ideas I had just been assigned my pen pals for the semester. We had written back and forth a few times and I thought it may be an interesting idea because it was sort of like a phone call since it was a conversation between two people, but it was something I knew I could technically figure out how to use in a video. 

I have had a pretty difficult time with the technical aspects of things. As far as drafting ideas, my expectations met reality pretty well since I was able to develop an idea that was both personal and explored the idea of reality versus what we put on the internet. I got some really good input from other students during the drafting and critiquing stages, and I was able to shape my video around that. I didn’t mess with the script because it was directly the letters that were written, but I was able to get ideas of how to visually portray the message I was trying to get across. As for actually making the video, I had a really difficult time trying to get the images to line up with the audio. I wanted to include text from the videos, but I had a difficult time putting it on the images, so I just included images of the text from the letters instead of using it throughout the video. I also have a mix of screen recordings and screenshots, which is not what I envisioned. I wanted to have just one continuous screen recording of searching up the keywords on the two social media platforms, but I had a really difficult time doing that with the timing of the audio and dealing with pop-ups on the computer and internet lag during the recordings. I decided to use separate screen recordings and screen shots because I decided that lining up the audio and images was more important than the visual flow of finding everything on social media in one shot. Visually, I do not think my expectations ended up meeting reality, but I came into this knowing nothing about making films and I am pretty proud of how much I have learned on my own in a short period of time, even if it isn’t ideal. 

As mentioned previously, I decided what images to use based on what I thought were keywords, or words that translated well to visuals. I used the input from the other students during the writing critique stage to determine which social media sites I wanted to look the images up on and to determine which words were keywords. 

I used to consume video content on YouTube primarily, but now I mostly am using TikTok to watch videos. I think this has impacted how I watch videos because I find myself having a shorter attention span for long videos, and I also find myself enjoying and looking out for trends I see on TikTok. I share a lot more videos now that they are short and entertaining, so I find myself both watching and sharing more videos. I think this has also changed how I make videos because I never made any videos before due to how daunting it was and also my lack of film experience. TikTok has made filmmaking accessible to me and also encourages me to put my own spin on trends, so I am able to think outside of the box without having to come up with ideas totally from scratch, which allows me to make a larger quantity of videos and try out more techniques and ideas.