Well folks welcome back to another blog post! This weeks topic is very every interesting. It’s about videos! Yes, you read that right. For the last few months in maker we have been making videos.

The driving question for this post is: what makes an awesome video? Well if you want the answers keep on reading!

 

Here I have broken the process of creating a video into the four steps I think of when making a video.

The first part of making a video is not even touching your camera yet. First you have to sit down, and create a way to map put your story/content. We, my class and I, have been using a story telling diagrams to map out possible video ideas and story boards. Having a good story is important, otherwise the video really won’t be that good.

An example of some of the advanced planning I had to do was for the Alberta Identity Video (blog post here), where I had to plan out where I was going to film interviews with the people we met on the trip.

The second part is considering the shots you want to get and all the different angles you want to use. I think a good example of this was one of our first video projects. In that video, we were supposed to recreate a short horror film.

You can see the original below and then our remake:

A big part of the video was planning out all the different angles that we had of our main character.

Another example would be the live event video (here’s the post), where I had to be very aware of the angles I  was using in the video (at one point I had my iPad perched on a ladder):

 

The third part is filming. Now,you can pick up the cameras. What I learnt from the videos we have had to make is that when filming, you need to be very aware of you surroundings. If you have a weird background or strange noises, it might ruin the video.The problem being that it takes away from the story, the illusion that you are creating for your viewers. You really want to take into account the lighting of your shot as well as that can major affect the story.

For example, In a couple shots of our enchanted  forest video, we got some loud truck noises in the background a couple random shots with people who aren’t supposed to be in our video. (The video is included in the Alberta Field Study Blog post, here) You can see that below:

 

The fourth step is editing. This is a vital step. In this step you are putting together the footage, editing scenes that might be too long, changing scene, adding music, sounds, etc. Editing is a great opportunity to maybe go back and fix a couple mistakes that you may have made. Like, for example you can try and change the lighting if you noticed it isn’t quite right, by using a filter. You can also enhance your movie with editing, like adding music.

I think a very good example of this is our silent film in a ghost town (click here for blog post). In that video we had to use music to create the mood of our video because there was no noise otherwise.

 

To sum up all these steps in a more visual/audio way, I have created an iBook.

I also found neat little video that talks about a few tips on how to make your videos look more professional.

In conclusion: When I used all of those steps and practiced using all of those steps, my vides got progressively better. You can see one of the first videos I made this year and the last to compare.

Reflection

This project/unit was really quite interesting. I was terrible at making videos, and by no means and I perfect yet, but I think I have learnt a lot more things about filming. For example I did not use to take into account the amount of footage we would need, and all the different angles. I also learnt quite a bit on stories and how to structure a story, how maybe even add interviews into the videos. I hope you enjoyed reading! Thats all for me folks!