The world is going through an interesting time. Self-isolating, and not meeting people has become the new normal, and its very rare to find someone who’s daily schedule was not altered by Covid-19. That’s exactly what this project was about. “How can we, as video storytellers, tell stories of our community during this period of physical distancing?” That was the driving question for our latest maker project, “Witness to History.”
Our task for this project was to make a video essay about how a certain community has been affected by self-isolation. I decided that my community was going to be the Deep Cove basketball community. I saw this as an interesting topic because many basketball gyms have closed down, yet many players continue to play basketball in unique and interesting ways. Of course, I’m not gonna tell you these ways right now. You have to watch my video to find those out!
We kicked off this project by watching and learning about video essays. We watched three different videos. The first two were about how to structure a video essay, and what makes a video essay engaging and interesting. The last video was an actual video essay, talking about how a banana company started a war. This milestone really helped me understand what a video essay actually is. Understanding what a video essay was helped me structure my video essay, and being able to structure my video essay made it much easier to record, edit, and all in all create a good video.
When I say structure a video essay I really mean creating a story spine and storyboard. Creating a story spine really helped get ideas onto “paper”, and I had a lot of ideas, considering basketball is one of my favourite things to talk about. This made it even easier to make a storyboard. Storyboarding my video made it very simple and easy when it came to filming. I knew what shots I had to get, and I managed to get most of them in one day. A lot of my videos came from other people though, because after all I am trying to show how a community was affected, not just me.
I think it was in editing where I hit my first major setback. I was going through my footage and I realized that I had filmed with my iPad, where my sources used phones, meaning the videos would be different sizes and cropped differently. This meant cutting out any film I had that was cropped different, vastly reducing the length of my video. I couldn’t get rid of every video that was cropped differently though, and you may notice that in the video. But, by the time I had finished my first draft of my video, it was wayyyy too short! So, I scrapped my first draft, and redid it. I fit in an interview with my school basketball coach, and one of my teammates. Not only did this give a whole new perspective to the topic, it brought my video to 2 minutes and thirty seconds! This was much better than before, by over a minute. It was still really short, but I felt like I had captured and explained what my goal was originally.
I think this was one of my better videos overall. As I have constantly said before, I find that when I am talking about something I enjoy talking about, or one of my interests, I find that the final product is of much better quality. I don’t think you can find something I’m more interested in than basketball, so I really enjoyed this project.
If I had a chance to do this project over again I think I would try to interview a few more people. My two interviews were a little last minute, as I originally hadn’t planned on interviewing them. I feel like I had planned it out, I could have incorporated their answers into the video much nicer and the interview would really compliment the video and give it a bit more accountability.
This project was a good opportunity for me to practice any knowledge I had of videography and combine it with one of the things I love to do. I think that combination is really good when it comes to school work. You find something you like from the project and then find something that you can practice or improve on during the project.