Kicked Off Campus: A Positive?

When deciding what to cover as a positive from the Covid-19 pandemic, only one thing came to mind: living off-campus. While there were many opportunities taken away as a result of the pandemic, the opportunity to live off-campus quickly became a highlight. The process of filming and conveying the true extent of the benefits of this opportunity, however, was a challenge.

I initially viewed living off-campus as a negative. The sudden difficulty of being told to find a new place to live was stressful and frustrating for not only Trinity students, but students across the country, as seen in the extensive news coverage. What resulted from this frustration was the ability to see the benefits of life as a student off-campus. 

Conveying this initial frustration and how I ultimately viewed living off-campus positively raised challenges but also provided the video a story-like structure. In particular, finding creative ways to convey some of the positives I felt, even if they were intangible or abstract, was the most challenging. While brainstorming, I quickly learned it would be better to focus on tangible aspects of living off-campus as they were easier to film and provided a more straightforward explanation.

These tangible benefits were the easiest portion of my video to convey, as the B-roll was straightforward and matched the narration. Aspects such as having a kitchen and having the freedom to be active when I wanted were paired with a B-roll of my kitchen and a local walking trail. Using a variety of shots in a montage format paired with matching narration worked the best, and allowed me to incorporate multiple aspects of a good video in a manner that supported my overall storyline. 

While the B-roll/narration format worked well in some aspects, it also presented some challenges. In particular, finding B-roll outside of what was being told in the narrative was the biggest challenge. The tangible benefits of living off-campus could be easily filmed, but only covered a small portion of my overall narrative. To counter this challenge, I used photographs that portrayed much of what I could not film for B-roll. If done again, eliminating photographs in favor of footage would be my focus.

Overall, this project gave me a small taste of how difficult it is to put together a strong, appealing video. As a consumer, it is easy to critique the videos of others. When making a video yourself, however, you quickly learn how difficult it is to create a video that comes close to the one critiqued.