Over the week, Jia Jia and I met up twice to get some filming for our sketches done. It’s great that we’ve been constantly working as team, coming up with ideas and making mutual decisions. We managed to refine the ideas for our sketches:

We want to explore how an informational video is made both interesting and appealing to watch. By focusing on the narrative/non-narrative structure of Marques Brownlee’s video review on the iPhone 6, we hope to achieve a better understanding of how video reviews are moulded and constructed.

1. In the case of Brownlee’s video review, one product is filmed against many different backgrounds, and from multiple angles.
2. Cinematics in the production stage play a role from post-production to promotion of the video on YouTube. Here we explore a viewer’s natural response to the attractiveness of a thumbnail on YouTube.
3. Video reviews have certainly evolved over the years. There are many differences between reviewing it using pictures found online, as compared to physically possessing the product.
4. From how we see it, personal opinions play an important role to ensuring a good video review. But what if it were done without it? What if the video only contained a whole lot of facts and information?
5. Conversely, what if there were ONLY personal opinions?
6. How is a video review constructed (from start to finish)? There should be a template. Eg. Physical aspects, internal specs, demonstration, comparisons and personal opinions.
7. The product being reviewed can be compared against a different brand in the market.
8. How does this work in terms of a viewer’s loyalty towards a certain brand, and in guiding a buyer’s decision-making process?
9. There is the inclusion of on-screen text to clarify certain information.
10. How far should the terminology used go? We can explore the types of people who would watch videos such as this.

As we were refining these sketches, a problem we encountered was coming up with more ideas to fit the list-of-ten criteria. We watched Brownlee’s review on the iPhone 6 a couple of times more, scanning through parts of the video that would be able to give us more ideas. I’d say that there is a lot to online video; that there is a more complex aspect to it rather than it just being a file uploaded to the Internet for others to watch. Despite that, it can be difficult to break things down when we are not naturally inclined to inspect all the little elements each time we see an online video – all we do, at least most of the time, is just sit back and watch.

It is interesting, however, to consider understanding how an online video works. What makes it what it is, and what makes it appealing to watch? I have personally worked on a few videos back in college, and I have been at points where my group mates and I would be dry on ideas. The conditions were different, however. Back in college, I had to come up with brand new ideas to promote projects I was working on; here, we unpack a specific video and explore its hybrid narrative/non-narrative forms. We take a step back and begin to really understand it as a whole.

Jia Jia and I began to broaden the ideas we already had, expanding them by looking at each one from different perspectives. We tried to source ideas from the world around us, reminding ourselves of things that had happened in the past. We also watched a couple of other videos just to freshen up, and even looked at a couple of other video reviews. By doing so, we were actually able to come up with ideas 3, 5, 8 and 10.