Week 9: Practising Instagram – Video

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Haha😆 自己養到自己變豬🐽 蛋餃真係好好食🤣 #eggdumplings #quarantine #fataspig #foodie

A post shared by Quarantine Master Chef (@easycook425) on

How did you author the video you recorded for upload to Instagram?

For my second post on Instagram, I recorded the process of cooking the ‘egg dumplings’. The recording is before I took the picture of the dish. I tried a different style of recording such as the opening and ending, which I imitated some Youtuber that he/she would close up an object before they finish the video, however, when I put my iPhone close to the hot dumplings, then the lens blur out because of the steam and my hand was so hot. Indeed, I cut that scene as it was blurred. Indeed, the stability of the video is unsatisfied as I do not have a tripod with me so I tried my best to stay still while I am video taking.  The process of videography has to be fast or else my dumplings would be overcooked, so it only spent me for 5 minutes for different video trials.

For the editing, at the beginning, I tried to use Adobe Rush installed on my phone, nonetheless, the result was not good. Instead, I keep the filter and correlation I have made in Rush and made further editing in iMovie. I added background music to the video which the BGM was originally from iMovie, there is no need to download in the external website, besides, I cut some of the scenes to shorten the video and added some fade-in and out so to make the video looks better.

Comparing the authoring of photo and video, the video was more time-consuming. That’s the reason I won’t upload videos to my personal account. Instead, I uploaded an Instagram story to this account, which is more convenient and I used an effect from Instagram. I only need to hold the button and release it when I want to end the video. The constraint of it is I could not film several footages, I only can make the video in one shot.

Instagram story

How did you publish the video you recorded for upload to Instagram?

Yet, same as publishing the last post, I prefer to use other editing apps to edit and film the video instead, as if I published on Instagram I only could film one shot and restricted by the filters and the length. Also, I could not cut the footage for further editing. Despite, the length of this video is only 8 seconds, but I feel editing on other apps and filming by camera phone is more flexible.

After I chose to publish this video I included a caption – ‘Haha (exciting emoji), gonna become a big, btw egg dumplings are really delicious’ as it can relate to my previous post and express my feeling, so as to show I am engaging with my audience.

For the publishing of the story, there isn’t much for me to do. I swipe left to insert a filter I like and typed two hashtags which are #eggdumplings and #quarantine.

How did you distribute the video you published on Instagram to other social media services?

Same as the previous post, I inserted hashtags to broaden the exposure of my post with #eggdumplings #quarantine #fataspig #foodie. Since the first publishing, it has been around 2 hours, regrettably, I do not have any followers yet, but I do have one viewer which the report showed was from the hashtags.

On the other hand, I shared the video on my Facebook and Snapchat. I did not share the video directly from Instagram as I would like to have another caption with my Instagram page link inserted and some hashtags. As I have mentioned, the purpose of distributing on Facebook is to gain awareness and forward people to follow my Instagram Page. Yet, I discovered that Facebook does not provide many functions to edit the video before publishing which I could not choose the cover of my video. Besides, I shared the video on Snapchat, my friends could swipe up and link to the Instagram page and the process to publish the video was like an Instagram story. In my point of view, it is more convenient than publishing on Facebook, as the time uploading the video was a bit long (I am not sure whether is because of the network problem) that it only spend a second for me to upload the video to Snapchat.

 

Snapchat                     Facebook

Donald Norman: Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself.

Practising the affordances of Instagram for the first week, in terms of distributing the post, I think Instagram is a good design overall (for both photo and video), as it provides user like me a platform to make hashtags, forward and directly share to other platforms and networks such as Pinterest and Facebook. Nonetheless, the process was effortless and convenient. Not including my personal account as the follower, the account-@easycook425 only has 1 follower, but as I got my hashtags, the report showed there are 10 people read my post. Yet, the distribution is quite positive. However, as a user of Instagram for nearly 8 years, I still feel dissatisfaction towards it, as there are too many constraints while using the app for authoring, leading me to use other apps for editing. Yet, I would still give a try for my next week’s post, so please look forward to seeing my next post!

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