Try making a ‘highlights reel’ using the Vine app, how does the 6 second constraint effect the creative process?

For this sketch I made a relatively quick  highlight reel of the main moment of the game.  Here I am simply exploring what kind of styles are suitable for certain online services. This sketch in particular is short, given the time limit of a Vine.

The space between each scene is left to our imagination to fill up as vine takes two scenes and join them together, that bigger then time gap, the more audience will think about what happened next and then join it all to form a single idea.

In my opinion something like this affects the moments i want to highlight in the game due to the time constraint and i have to cut up the video making it choppy. This way of making a “highlight reel” might be similar to the GIF sketch however, unlike the GIF sketch, it’s not as smooth.

For this sketch, instead of video, we use gif, which is a type of photo format however it plays about 24 frames per second so runs like a video on an endless loop.

These GIFs are structured like jokes on the internet today, with the barest minimum of set-up e.g.: An old man on a robbing a bank, two dolphins arc graciously from the ocean’s surface—until a clumsy third dolphin arcs directly into the second; a man pushes a stalled van off of train tracks right before a train blasts past.  GIFs get to the point instantaneously, and at the exact moment when one feels the impulse to rewind and watch the climax again, the loop restarts right where it should.

Hence, by having a highlight reel as a GIF, it loses it’s essence after a while, just like how a joke loses it’s punch line if it’s being repeated too many times. On online platforms such as 9GAG, 4chan etc, you can further manipulate the context of the GIF, by the title you give it: http://9gag.com/gag/azE4GNp

Due to constraints of file size, my gif is not able to be uploaded onto 9gag or 4chan.

https://twitter.com/Apple_tyh

For this sketch, I used twitter, to upload screenshots of the game and place them together in a sequence to see if I could create a highlights reel out of nothing but images. Highlights reel are parts of footage in a game that showcase certain events or moments within that session that viewers may find entertaining.

By using just images from found footage, we are dissecting the game, however, we’re trying to put the puzzle pieces together to form a type of narrative out of it by structuring a  highlights reel from the screenshots. As Basset said in her reading of “ANTI-NARRATIVE: GAMES, BLOGS & OTHER NON-LINEAR FORMS”, Games typically do not have a narrative to it but when you try to add form, like what Bordwell and Thompson’s define ‘narrative’ as in regards to how relations are organised between shots then organising the screenshots together to create a highlight reel is a narrative.

The only downside to this concept of a highlight reel is that it’s difficult when you want to screenshot the moment during the game.

In most games, we’re limited by the amount and type of content we observe, hence we’ve decided to move from the linearity of games such as Counter Strike and onto a much more diverse, open world game – Grand Theft Auto V.

In this sketch playing with our theme ‘manipulation’, I did a voice over for a silent game video

This sketch is a simple one, I’ve tried to use the environment in the game and see how i could manipulate the video by adding a voice over to it. This sketch also looks at the idea on how we look at ‘planning’ within a gaming video, how we can utilise the way the game is made to be played and see if we can create something else rather than what is given to us.

1. Select a highlight and upload it to Vine or another online service, does it work better as a microvideo than a short facebook/youtube video?.
2. Try making a ‘highlights reel’ using the Vine app, how does the 6 second constraint effect the creative process?
3. Convert a short highlight to a .gif file and upload it to a website such as 9gag that supports .gif files – how does this change the way the video feels? are .gifs more suitable for showcasing this online video example?
4. Using twitter, take screenshots of the game and place them together in a sequence, see if you can create a highlights reel out of nothing but images? 
5. How does changing the context of a highlight effect it? Select a highlight and see if you can add music or change anything about it that could potentially make it something completely different – if you can, explain what the video has become if not a highlight?
6. Experimenting with sound on how the context of the video will be changed by it.

For this sketch I’ve decided to experiment with how music changes how a vine is potrayed.

In this sketch I’ve placed music track over the original footage to see how it would affect the structure. Thankfully the music was provided freely iMovie. Rather than exploring how I can apply this to a Vine-like structure, I decided to see how music affects the footage.

First of all, the choice of music I made falls into an “action” sound effect as do many other action movie when running away from baddies, they play similar sounding music in them I believe this is because the music is fast tempo, general that really work well with the sudden change in content within the video. I’ve also learned that in order for a video like this to really work, you’ll need as much time as you can get which doesn’t really I find doesn’t really seem appropriate for a Vine. The reason for this is because footage like this takes time to build up so as to make a larger impact.

Music was taken from the playlist iMovie provides.

Sketch 3 Idea:

How would it look like if we were to record a simple 6 second video everyday for a couple of days combine them in the end?

For this video, i explored a little more on the aspect of “dragging out of content” from sketch 2 and try to work around my limitations, aka time. As you can see each scene is all very short in order to fit as much content within a short time frame.

What work for this video was that the narrative, even though random, the narrative that it is  video looking into the life of someone because of the many different content in the video. what did not work, i  feel was that each scene is too rushed, and in one part of the video i tried to do it several times to prolong the scene but it looks messy.