For the second assignment Ally, Ciara, Izzi and myself formed a small group to create videos for the four prompts of word, portrait, joy and hurt. We ended up deciding that it would be best to join two prompts together to ultimately make two videos that can complement all four prompts, this was our first step in creating our videos. We filmed both videos on the same day but in different locations in the city, they had similar elements but overall became two very different videos.

For our first video – word and portrait, we had a lot of ideas but not a lot of time to execute them so we had to work within our constraints to get something filmed. Humans of New York was one of the main concepts/projects we connected with and talked about whilst filming as a type of inspiration for the sort of videos we wanted to create. To incorporate the idea of ‘portrait’ into this video we decided to find and film strangers and eventually ourselves (due to a lack of volunteers) and their different attributes that made up their portrait. Finding strangers to be filmed and/or photographed is a critical aspect of Humans of New York which is almost half of their idea, finding a story that goes with the individuals is just something that follows it. This could have been the way they stood, the look in their eyes, the calluses on their hands each person that was filmed had different characteristics that made up their individual portrait which is something we wanted to showcase. To merge the prompt of ‘word’ into this we searched for a phrase that could work with the idea of showing off someone’s individual portrait, this would be used as a voiceover at some point in the piece. We got every person who was filmed to say the phrase “Change the world by being yourself” into the microphone which was then used as a voiceover throughout the piece. And at the end of the piece was merged together by taking one word was from each person filmed to make up the whole sentence.

Within our second video we also used the Humans of New York influence but went for a different approach. Whilst filming this video we had technical issues with the camera and microphone this could mainly be attributed to the fact none of us had ever used this specific camera before. To resolve this we used an iPhone microphone and matched it with the video recorded from the camera. We thought by merging hurt and joy together could show how entirely opposite they are. We did this by placing a person in front of the camera and without any prompting and asked them two questions which would (hopefully) get an honest reaction out of them, and give an answer that would most likely vary from everyone else. The questions were along the lines of “What makes you happy/brings you joy?” and “What makes you sad?” Asking questions to get a story out of people is another idea that we loosely took from the Humans of New York blog which is a concept that makes the responses from the individuals that we interviewed feel more authentic and relatable. The idea that we wanted to show from this video was to juxtapose how everyone has their own memories and feelings associated with different things that bring them happiness and sadness. It’s all up to everyone’s own interpretation, which can really be showcased by picking complete strangers off the street to film – or in the Humans of New York’s series, photographed.

Overall I think we worked really well as a group, using Facebook as a communication medium and each doing a part in bringing the whole assignment together, whether it be filming, editing, creating the presentation etc. We only had a short time frame to create and make the videos but I feel as if they came together pretty well to communicate our ideas and make something different from the rest of the class.