https://www.instagram.com/p/CFpqMqujwHa/

All images and/or screenshots used below are my own and were taken during the production of my work.

Introduce your video work in relation to responding to the conceptual brief and the guidelines on form.

For my video work this week, my aim was to respond to the conceptual brief to guide the content of video production for this assignment, which is ‘‘Space and time for contemplation beyond our everyday life”. I have found myself reminiscing on travel as a way to escape our lockdown situation. I was lucky enough to visit Bali earlier in January, and looking back at the footage I feel as though I am transported back into those moments away from home. Being in nature was a way of reconnecting with myself and experiencing ‘normal’ in another country making it different from my everyday. Looking towards working with the gallery, I envisioned how I could explore the bushland environment in a similar way to address their mission statement of contemplating beyond the everyday. In terms of form, the guideline for this work was to create a video work that starts from an audio recording. My work begins by focusing on the sound of a waterfall which then leads into a voiceover about exploration. The intent of this is to draw in the viewer through creating a calming atmosphere that aligns with the scenery that is shown. 

What did you learn from the authoring and publishing process?

During the authoring process, the main thing I learnt was how to be selective with the footage I had to work with. As I had a large volume of content and the videos were tied to memories of my trip, it became quite difficult to narrow down the shots I wanted to use. I collated clips from my Camera Roll and imported them into Premiere Rush on my mobile device. I began by sketching out how the sound would lead into the video itself. I chose a creative commons track that features Alan Watts, which is copyright free (licensed under an Attribution 3.0 Unported license). I created several videos with the voiceover track I had selected, with the waterfall sounds in different orders. In this way, I was able to experiment with sound. To amplify the sound of water, I represented this visually by layering the videos on top of each other within the sequence. I then cut together the rest of the clips to the duration of the audio track. I exported the video using the 1080p Match Framerate preset to then be published to Instagram. I chose not to go with heavy colour grading, instead I added a slight filter in-app in order to bring out some more of the environment’s green colour.

While publishing, I kept auto-play for my video on as the default which allowed the video to loop continuously for the viewer. I made sure to give credit for the sound used in the caption of my video, as instructed in the caption on YouTube and creative commons license. After my attribution information, I included hashtags to distribute the content further, such as #calming and #pandemic which are relevant to the context in which the video is being posted. My takeaway for publishing this week is to stay consistent with replying to comments after the video is uploaded, and to interact with others on the platform rather than simply broadcasting my content.

What went well? 

I was fairly satisfied with how my video turned out this week, I think the audio added to the atmosphere of the final video as it has quite a motivational message. My aim is to encourage others to look back on their own lives and appreciate the opportunities they have had to explore outside of the house. I was able to incorporate the process of sketching into my making process, by playing with the placement and volume of sound at the beginning of the video. By focusing on one idea and exploring it multiple times, over and over, I was allowing myself to just be creative. Moving forward I like the idea of exploring trial and error within my own work. As a whole, I am becoming accustomed to authoring and publishing videos for the platform.

What did not go well? 

I had some issues navigating editing on the Premiere Rush app itself, as my options were quite limited in terms of the effects I could use. There were some clips I was not able to motion stabilise as it was simply not a capability of the app. In addition to this, the app would freeze and crash a fair amount of times during the editing process. To navigate this in the future I may have to switch to desktop editing instead of mobile editing for Instagram or utilise a different post-production app. Some of the sound transitions were also a little choppy due to the limited options for sound editing, which hindered my emphasis on audio for this week.

What could you do better? 

I believe I could have experimented with audio even further, by layering only sound from the original clips in an elaborate way but was limited by time constraints. This might be something I can explore in future video works. I also think that due to the popularity of Reels recently, the post could have gotten more attention if it were posted in that format on Instagram. I am able to change the sequence dimensions within Premiere Rush, so this would have been an easy fix.

Respond to the studio prompt question ‘How do the affordances of Instagram affect the way video content is authored?‘ What insights can you add in response to this question?