Hi welcome back to my blog. Today I’m going to be talking about our recent witness to history project. For this project we had to complete a video essay talking about how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected our community. In this blog post I’m only going to be focusing on what I think are the most important milestones which are milestones 5, 2, and 1.
For milestone 1 what we had to do was fill out our need to knows and make a short fake trailer. For this milestone I’m mostly just going to focus on the trailer we had to make. For the trailer we had to set it during the goldrush. For my video I decided to make a horror trailer with a twist. My trailer was in the style of grindhouse trailers from the 70s (this was a mistake but I will get back to that). The first thing I did when making my trailer was write a script.
After that I made a shot list so I could figure out which shots to get when to get them. After I did all of that it was time to get my props ready and film. The filming went relatively well I had some issues with locations to film and props but we did end up getting all the shots we needed. Now it was time for what in my opinion was the hardest part of this assignment post-production this is also where the whole this was a mistake thing comes into play. Let me explain one thing that I didn’t mention earlier was that we had to do all of our editing on iMovie and use one of the pre-made templates. Let’s just say I had forgotten about that so I did all of my editing on premiere pro. So other than that it went pretty well and here’s the video.
For milestone 2 what we had to do was pick a storytelling method and make a story spine. The storytelling method as picked was Freytag’s pyramid which looks like this.
Now that I had picked the storytelling method I was going to use I had to fill it in. If I’m being honest this wasn’t the hardest. After filling it in I handed it in and got my feedback. I then fixed up my story spine and resubmitted.
The final milestone I’m going to be talking about is milestone 5 the actual video essay. This was probably the worst I have ever done when It comes to finishing a video. I say that because of how long it took me to finish compared to the quality of my video. The reason my video took so long was the fact that I was trying to film chronologically instead of filming the easy parts first/ the shots I could get at the time. This was one of the big reasons why my filming took so long another reason was because I had my editing deleted so I had to re-edit a few times. In the end I had a decent video that took 2 weeks. If I were to do this again I would probably make an in detail script and shot list like I did for my trailer.
In conclusion I think there were many ways I could have improved if I had just done a little more planning. For the competencies of this project Which are how might I use technology to learn more and how might I use technology to connect to the world. I think I met Which are how might I use technology to learn more because through making my video essay I did online research and learned more about filmmaking. For the second competency how might I use technology to connect to the world I think I met it because I learned more about how the world and the people around me were reacting to covid19.