Exploring Nature throughout the Pandemic

The video project I created focused on nature. Throughout the pandemic, I had a greater appreciation of the outdoors, and I believe many other people's experience has changed as well. Because of this, I wanted to share my own encounters with nature as well as a few of my friends. 

Throughout this process, I have learned the importance of a variety of shots. When we were first going over this project, I wasn't too familiar with making a storyboard and the different types of shots. For example, in The Basic Building Blocks-The Different Shot Type Families reading, the author explained the Long/Wide shots. I was able to use these quite a few times, specifically when I had people in my shots.

In the reading on page 7, it states that in the long shot "larger human figure takes away from the environment, however, a fair amount of the characters' surroundings are still visible." While the majority of my shots were very and extreme long shots to show the full photos of activities outside, I used long shots mostly when I was interviewing people. I wanted to do this so that the audience can focus on the interviewer, but still be able to see the background.

From a creator's perspective I have more value for the little details in the video, and "showing rather than telling." For example, just adding mild background music and cross trimming made my transitions smoother and the overall video looked cleaner. 

In my draft video, I originally had a voiceover that explained extra information that was unnecessary. For instance, I originally introduced Molly Sheridan, one of my interviewers, by saying lots of information about her. By just adding text on a photo of her that states her name and year at Trinity, the audience was able to still interpret this information without my additional comments.

While the consumers may not notice the importance of these little changes since they are only seeing the final product, they will still be able to determine whether this is a clean project. Also, since this video is only about 2 minutes long, it is important that is easy to watch and simple to understand by the audience.

While I believe I did have different types of shots, I think I could have played more with close-up shots. For example, when I was explaining who I was interviewing, I could have added a close-up frame of my interviewer from different angles. 

I think that when I added the photo of the interviewee's it gave the audience an idea of who this person is, however, I could have done a better job of creating different shots rather than just a photo. If I could have implemented this, I think the audience would have a better understanding of who I am interviewing and the video would just be better as a whole. 

Overall, I believe that my final video did a lot better job at incorporating the A and B roll and having smoother transitions from my explanations and pictures of outdoor activities to my interviews. At the end of the video, I had a video of myself explaining the importance of going outside and looking forward to the future. I wanted to do this so that it could leave the audience on a positive note and hopefully encourage them to appreciate the little things, such as exploring the outdoors.