For todays post I will be sharing the process and product of our new topic which is “how can we communicate what is happening in our communities to the world through technology”. This project felt longer then most even though it only took about three weeks, during that time I put a lot of effort into the planning of the video and of course the final product as well. That’s all I have to say for now so here is the process.

The first task was to create a simple film about gold ( there is a separate post coming for gold). All I had to do was take what I knew and then create a film about what was happening before the gold rush in B.C. my video just focused on the trade between First Nations peoples and the HBC. The thing I got the most from creating this short film was that I could judge where my video making skills where at that time, and where they needed to be for the final product.

I knew that my skills in making video where good at the time but based on what our teachers wanted I knew that I had to find ways to be more creative with my shots and plot.

Moving on to the next part which was finding out how the people in my community were dealing with COVID-19, with this information I could decided how best to show their situation in a video format.

When interviewing some people I knew, I found out that I lot of them had been more involved in the community because of COVID-19. Some had started talking and communicating with those  who they had not heard from in a long time, and others where doing whatever they could to give back to the people around them by helping out. Overall I could sense that because of the pandemic, people had started bonding more as a community, and this would be my topic for my video.

When planning out how I would show the event in my video I used a simple story spine. I found that this was the most effective method to plan out everything I needed to show. It took time but I got all of the events I wanted to show planned out on the story spine along with additional interviews and other pieces of evidence. I had everything I needed for this part, and when completing this step I realized how much I could show if I used the right techniques when filming, I put this information on one of my planning drafts.

Here is the fun part of planning out the video, the music. Since my teachers wanted this video to be entirely my personal creation, I had to create some music to go along with my video. It was important to mould the music to fit my video, if the tone of the music does not fit the video, then it throws off the whole feel of the final product.

Using the Everyone Can Create Book I was able to understand how to adapt the music to fit the video and also how to plan what type of music should be included in the video. From there I created to small sample of the actual song I would use, the tough part here was that the rest of the song had to match the sample, so I tried to use the same instruments and live loops to create the rest of it. 

Now we have reached the most important before filming, the story board. For this story board I had to plan out all of my main shots as well as the camera angle and which way the camera would be moving. Personal imaging which way the camera should move was easier than I thought it would be, but trying to estimate how much time each scene would take up was much more difficult. I found that when I was actually shooting the movie, I had to do things on the go and change parts as I was going along because it would fit the film better. I put these things in the story board so I could go over them when I was done filming.

The rest of the story board went smoothly and before I knew it I was on to filming.

I had about three days to film the whole thing because I also did some extra work on the story board after it was approved. All of the filming went very well and I got more shots than expected, some of them did not fit the story I was trying to tel though so I had to get rid of quite a few of them, which lead to my video almost being to short. 

The last thing I have to say about the movie shooting was that I took a risk right from the beginning, and that was putting myself in front of the camera instead of being the directory for the whole thing. I know many other people who love to act but I am very different from those people, not being behind the camera makes me worry about how the shots will come out and if they will flow together ( also I can portray about two emotions).

In the end the video came out a little different from what was originally planned but it still looked very good and I was very pleased with the work I had done. I think this project allowed me to creativity show the story of my community although it would have been more fun if I had more people to act so I could spend more time directing.

Here is my final product for this project, enjoy the video.

That’s all for now.