How did you author (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
For my second Instagram this week, I recorded a video of the most iconic doors in Melbourne, the classic PTV Tram. I’ve never posted a video on Instagram before, and next week I think it will be interesting to use the stop-go video recording feature of Instagram, which affords users the ability to easily create one video from multiple clips.
This week, I found it much harder to find an interesting video of a door, until I hopped on the tram and heard the sweet scrape of the PTV doors. I recorded the video on my iPhone SE before uploading it to the Instagram app via the camera roll upload feature. I wanted the video to be quite short, before quickly being told that I was unable to upload a video under 3 seconds to Instagram. So, I took a longer video and decided to include the wait that we all have to endure as the winter wind and rain fly through the tram doors, sitting there thinking ‘just shut that damn door!’.
Anyway, on Instagram I cut the video into a square, although I could’ve posted it in its original vertical format. I played between mute and sound on but I wanted to capture the noises of public transport. I usually customise my own tones to create a more customised kind of filter, rather than applying a straight filter. However, I found out that this is not actually possible with Instagram videos, and you actually need to select an option from their suite of filters.
How did you publish (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
After authoring I uploaded the video to Instagram with the caption, ‘The most iconic doors in Melbourne’, because in my mind they are probably the most commonly used doors in Melbourne running all hours of the day and night, and weaving their way across the city. I used the Melbourne city tag at the time of publishing too.
How did you distribute (the photo or video) you published on Instagram to other social media services?
Once the video was authored and published on Instagram I was able to distribute it through the hashtags used I used in the caption, #melbourne #melbournetrams #melbournelife. I wanted to use different hashtags to my previous post to see if the post would garner any more likes, however I think it may be too early to tell. I also realise that I probably need to use more hashtags if I want them to be effective.
By adding the Melbourne geotag during publication, I am able to (in theory) distribute my post to Instagram users who are not following me, but may be following the geotag or browsing through the posts there.
Despite Instagram obviously offering the in app distribution features, mentioned in the week 10 online lecture, I forgot to distribute my video to other social platforms at the time publication. Instead, I needed to log into Tumblr and Twitter separately, which was much more time consuming and generally frustrating since I forgot my passwords, had to re-download apps and so on. The automatic distribution feature streamlines this process and makes it easier for me to quickly distribute to different social platforms.