DOORS QUOTES // POST FIVE

Click above to view!

How did you author (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?

Upon knowing my task for this assignment was to post door related content, I knew I would eventually struggle with what ‘types’ of doors to post. Doors are everywhere, yet not many stand out. You seem to forget that door’s can be seen differently and found in the most mundane circumstances. Hence, this led to this week’s video of elevator doors. Elevator’s can be/are utilised in film in extraordinary ways. The doors themselves opening and shutting can lead to lots of experimental shot construction. I was inspired in the moment as I caught this elevator opening out onto level six on my iPhone 8 rear facing camera. As I knew I didn’t have much time to focus the shot, I centred myself as best as I could and pressed record. This video was actually captured the week before this one as I went up to class, once again generating most of my material in and around RMIT. Being in an elevator, especially with people, you are heavily constrained to how you can record a video. For instance if I was in front of the girl shown in the frame, it would have made the situation, for me personally, very awkward. Luckily I was behind her and had two classmates with me who understood what I was trying to achieve. The actual frame of this video was a lot longer than what it appears now on Instagram. I believe that during editing, the video must have got cut in size somehow. Speaking of editing, for this week’s video I followed the same technique I used last week: the film aesthetic. I achieved this through the same application titled “Chromic.” I knew that the Instagram app filter’s were going to look incredibly mundane on this dark grey elevator and I absolutely loved how the ‘FMO’ filter looked on last week’s video. This filter also created a red glow on the doors which I found to look a lot more appealing. Other than that, I didn’t edit this video in any other way. This video was strictly one shot, basically due to the timing of the elevator doors not being in my favour, and level six was my stop to get off. I wasn’t given a better opportunity to film other elevator doors without strangers overcrowding the shot or making me feel too uncomfortable to whip my iPhone out and film. Once again, I really liked the automatically chosen cover photo for this video (surprise, surprise). I really liked how the girl is seen to the side of the frame, yet the doors still remain the subject of the shot. Lastly, I couldn’t mute the video even if I wanted to as the audio adds so much to the content itself. It just gives viewers something more than just “noise” which is reflective of what my other videos have been like.

How did you publish (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?

For this week’s caption I wrote: “”A very little key will open a very heavy door.” – Charles Dickens.” When I found this quote by Dickens I was super excited, not only because I have studied his work, but because elevator doors are in fact heavy. There goes my idea of not relating the quotes directly to the imagery. Last week’s video did well in terms of likes and I believe that was due to the use of more hashtags. So, this week I decided to follow the same formula and add as many as I could think of in the moment of publishing. I ended up with fifteen in the end and the video received a bit of love. I also posted this video a lot later in the day when normally I post early afternoon. This would have meant users in my geographical area (Melbourne) would have been more active. In terms of picking this video to publish, I had to make changes to the length of the video itself. At the end of the original video, I laughed which obviously ruined it and caused a distraction. When publishing, I used the trim tool to cut away the laugh and have it end right after you hear “level six.” I have added the original video below to show the difference.

ORIGINAL VIDEO

(I apologise that you have to download the file, it wouldn’t embed).

How did you distribute (the photo or video) you published on Instagram to other social media services?

Last week I mentioned that I would aim to try and do more in regards to adding hashtags to my posts on Twitter and Tumblr. A limitation of the toggle sharing affordance on Instagram is how as a user you aren’t able to add tags or captions to those posts. Instead, you are forced to do so in the actual Twitter or Tumblr app AFTER publication. So, I went forth and added hashtags to my Twitter post, which ended up resulting in 34 impressions. The actual tweet with the tags included racked up 20 impressions. This is quite an increase in regard to how my other tweets were tracking. On Tumblr there were no interactions (from what I know of). As always I added the location on top of my post, this time geo-tagging RMIT University as my location.