Video
How did your author the video you recorded for upload to Instagram?
For my last post, I wanted to focus on both the negative and positive designs around us. As it was a rainy day, there was no better design than the umbrella – where would we be without it? Feeling limited by the tools for authoring in the Instagram app, I decided to look into their other products, in particular, Boomerang which ‘is perhaps the most unique… app’ (Leaver, Highfield, Abidin 2020, p. 69) as I hoped that I could produce something innovative rather than just adding a filter. Boomerang was simple to use, just point and shoot but like Instagram, you don’t get any advanced editing features, instead, the focus is more on making short looping videos.
One difficulty I had was setting up the shot which required two people to make the video, one holding an umbrella and the other filming. One advantage was the ability to transfer the clip to Instagram’s video editor, where I was able to add a filter to make the film feel more dark and cold, reflecting the weather. The video was filmed vertically so I added a square crop making it easier to watch. Unforutualy Instagram cropped out too much of my video and I had no way to fix it – just another constraint put on video editing! I feel Boomerang is what Instagram is missing, fun and easy editing tools. The effects made the video seem more engaging compared with ones in previous posts.
How did you publish the video you recorded for upload to Instagram?
I decided to shoot outside which made it more challenging due to variables like lighting and weather and unlike my week ten blog that had a controlled environment. This forced me to take many varied shots until I got the right one and Boomerang made this easy as I was able to save the video to my camera roll. Throughout my blogs, I have mentioned lighting a lot because the limited amount of editing tools makes it near impossible to fix, frustrating when ‘Instagram is for aesthetic visual communication’ (Manovich, 2016 p. 41).
Something I noticed when publishing was the audio was permanently muted by Boomerang. I believe the video could have benefited from sound, possibly storm effects to create atmosphere. To make my caption more prominent, I focused on the issue that good design often goes unnoticed, unlike bad design. So I captioned my post “umbrellas don’t get enough appreciation” because without them we would be worse off yet no one ever talks about how convenient they are. I find its a good analogy for Instagram the constraints stand out while the affordances seamlessly occur in the background.
How did you distribute the video you published on Instagram to other social media services?
I felt my video was more casual than professional and unlike my other posts has a stronger focus on ‘visually document[ing] and shar[ing] an experience’ (Manovich, 2016 p. 52), so I thought I would make hashtags that reflect that. Some of these included “#umbrella, #lifesaver and #apperication which I choose according to popularity. These hashtags had an interesting mixture of both casual and professional photos attached. “Umbrella” had a lot more professional photos most likely taken with a DLSR camera with professional editing software, whereas “appreciation” had more casual photos sharing their experiences from their phones.
To distribute my videos on Tumblr I decided once again to upload my video manually as it allows users to watch it without the need to go to Instagram. I find that distributing between platforms by linking accounts isn’t as easy as I thought it would be although it makes sense, as companies are competitors and don’t want you to leave their platform. I wasn’t able to link my Flickr and was forced to manually upload, however, I remembered it used to be possible to link Instagram to Flickr, only now it’s the other way around, Flickr posts can be automatically sent to Instagram. It seems one of these platforms has decided to remove sharing capabilities, another downside to linking accounts, as they can be removed without warning.
References
Leaver, T., Highfield, T., Abidin, C., 2020. ‘Chapter 3. Ecologies’, Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures. Digital Media and Society, United Kingdom. pp. 64-79.
Manovich, L. 2016, ‘Part 1. Casual Photos’, Instagram and the Contemporary Image, University of San Diego, USA. pp. 24-57.
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