We started the week 9 workshop by having a film festival of all the project brief 3’s. They were all really amazing.
I observed a spectrum from students who made a very broad profile of a person, asking generic questions to get an all-around view of them, and students (like me) who focused on a very specific aspect of a person. I feel that the latter is a safer choice, as you know that there will be some structure and that the material will be interesting. The former, the broad approach, could produce pieces that lacked direction or a particularly interesting “narrative”, but it also gave some of the most genuine responses. I saw this in Euen’s video about an old florist relative of his, and her teary reaction when he asked about her retiring was very touching. It was made better because up to that point it really didn’t seem like she was being pushed in a certain direction.
I think the best approach was a balance between the broad and targeted approaches. One of my favourite of the videos, James’, was incredibly entertaining and engaging because we got insight not only to the interviewee’s very interesting hobby and aspirations (motorbike repairs), but also a real insight into his personality. It felt as if we really knew this guy by the end of the video. In comparison I feel my video was a bit too clinical, although the subject matter I was looking at was never going to be particularly cheery.
After this we got put into groups and discussed our plan for our audio recording. James had the great idea that we could look into ambience, the things which we don’t consciously listen to, and their effect on us. I thought this could be linked to some of the Dan Brown psychology tricks that I had seen online, which could be linked to subliminal messaging and advertising. I’m sure this will be discussed more in future workshop posts.
Finally, we learned how to use the zoom mics and went out and recorded some things. I thoroughly look forward to learning how to wrangle audio. I recognise that audio is probably more important than the image of a video, but as someone whose primary camera is my iPhone, I have no idea how to record audio well.
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