Over the past few weeks I have been working on a short factual video that focuses on teenage smoking, it focuses less on the facts that most anti smoking videos focus on and focuses more on teenage specific points such as how starting from a young age can lead to the inability to quit and how much of the little money some teens get is spent on smoking. I feel like I successfully met the video brief as my video is two minutes long and I feel like smoking is a topic that affects the youth in contemporary society. I feel like a lot of teenagers don’t know the negatives of smoking and especially don’t know how hard it is to quit once they have a habit of smoking or a routine. Their smoking routine becomes part of their everyday life without them realising and they have trouble breaking the routine, the aim of my video is to show teenagers how hard (or not) it can be to quit depending on the type of person you are.
I feel like a strength of my video is the way it starts, writing fades onto a black screen which shows the viewer one of the main points of the video, a lighter is sparked and the dark video starts playing where the lighter is the only light source and the left side of the screen is still pitch black, I feel like this gives the illusion that there is a video playing without any light before the lighter ignites. I personally think it is a good way to set a dark mood at the start of the video and I’m happy that it turned out exactly how I wanted it to. I feel like the first 30 seconds (my introduction) is a strength of my video and as I tried to focus on making it look visually good rather than having lots of information in this part of the video, I still have important information but it is in short phrases allowing the viewer to focus on the visuals, the questions I focus on are answered in the second part of my video, the interviews.
I feel like one of my weaknesses is the variety of shots during the interviews, for both interviews I had one medium shot directly in front of the interviewee, although the interview part of my video is only about a minute long and it changes from one interviewee to the other after every question, watching it back I feel like I could’ve added some variation by also filming a close up or medium shot from a different angle. Changing to an alternative shot once or twice during the interviews would grab the viewers attention as they notice a slight change, whereas they might lose focus when looking at the same shot. Although these shots aren’t a necessity it would still be nice to have them to slightly improve the interviews.
When I filmed the first interview it was the first time filming on the lens that I used, little did I know that it didn’t have image stabilisation, I also didn’t use a tripod meaning the footage was really shaky to the point that I couldn’t use it. The feedback I received from my peers was pretty obvious so I went back and filmed the original interview again and the rest of my footage with a tripod which fixed the issue, however it only fixed the issue because I only used still shots, if I needed to film moving shots I would need to use a stabiliser or use a different camera/lens that has stabilisation.
I feel like I managed my time and resources well, I decided to use my own equipment meaning I could pretty much film whenever I wanted to. I tried filming my first interview as early as I could but I found a problem with the stabilisation (or lack of) on my lens, after acquiring a tripod I filmed the interview again and filmed most of the cinematic shots as I thought they would probably be useful for my video, which they ended up being. This first part of filming was all done off-sight and I only had one interview left to film, I did this a few days later on-sight along with some more cinematic shots most of which I didn’t end up including, within a few days I had finished all my filming and was ready to edit. I didn’t have to revolve my filming around the time I had the equipment as I used my own, this meant that when planning to film I didn’t have to make sure the actors are free on the same day I have the equipment and vice versa. I feel line this helps me focus more on other work that I also had to complete.
I showed my video to a few of my peers and received feedback about it, I found out that people think that the questions being displayed on the screen looked good and “made it look professional”, they also thought that the text at the end was impactful and memorable. They also enjoyed overall the way it was filmed and edited however they did say that I could’ve improved it by using a larger variety of shots throughout my video. This is also what I personally said I could’ve improved on especially during the interview part of my video, in future when filming an interview I will make sure to use multiple angles as using just the one does get boring and repetitive, I feel like in this case as it’s such a short video it wasn’t long enough to really get boring but if it was a 5 minute interview with just one angle it definitely would. If I was watching an interview that only had one camera angle I feel like I would start to lose focus (unless it’s on a topic or person I’m really interested in) and I’m going to assume that a lot of people are the same so in future interviews I will use multiple camera angles.
Igor Regdos College 