­­For my Call to Action video, I decided to utilise the really positive feedback I received from assignment two and channel both ideas into my rough cut despite initially only looking to develop one of them further. For my rough cut I was fortunate enough to be able to film my talent (Fhermary) and be able to interview her formally, and be able to prompt her further on certain parts of her responses. As I didn’t give her the questions ahead of time and, her answers could of gone in various directions so I felt that being able to film her and essentially direct her was really beneficial to the success of her responses and the impact of the video.

I filmed my talent on and iPhone 11 which has a really good working camera, I filmed her in 4K at 60f/ps. Things I was mostly worried about for the shoot was definitely lighting and audio, filming is something I can easily control and didn’t have too many worries about despite not having a tripod. For the audio I did a test run and just filmed her for ten seconds answering a response and played it back before filming the rest of the interview. As for lighting I got a bit lucky, it was a generally overcast day which means perfect balanced soft light which worked well for where we filmed (inside her apartment.)

I had to move around the space to try and find the best lighting, angle and take. The main aesthetic element I wanted to achieve from this was simplicity. I didn’t want anything to distract the viewer from the main part of the video – her message. The way she is dressed and styled in opposition to the space is perfect and I was really happy with how this turned out aesthetically. Content wise, the way I formulated questions for my video was based off a few past conversations that I’ve had with Fhermary and important notes that I took away from the film Femi. It was difficult in a sense to try and move my questions and her answers away from immigration and more towards her personal story of identity and belonging.

Some aesthetic inspirations that I drew from were from some projects that I assisted on at an internship I completed over the summer at a production house. They worked on a lot of ongoing projects that were made for the social impact space, I took a lot of what I learnt with them and tried to channel it into my video as best I could with the current restraints.

Something I definitely struggled with for this was deciding which direction to take in terms of the cut. It was either take small elements of her responses and combine them into one really broad video or hone in on one element. I consulted with my group, as well as a few other friends for help on this by sending them videos of my cuts for feedback and advice. This is something I’ve never experienced before with any project as I could always just show people instantaneously at uni, it was definitely hard to wrap my head around for a few days and adjust to. However their feedback really helped me look for a new angle and make the cut I did today.

The After Effects typography stuff is again something I’m still trying to learn and get my head around. Something I did differently in my rough cut to my experimental videos was just trying to learn and master a few different techniques and make them my own instead of religiously following a tutorial on YouTube. As well as this trying to make sure things were formatted correctly, this is something I definitely want to try and improve on and tweak before the final cut is due.

A key learning that I’ve taken away from this experience in trying to make films for a social impact space that 60 seconds is a really short time frame to be able to communicate your messaging to your audience. Producing wise I think it’s really important to pick the right talent and to know exactly what you want to get out of them and the angle you want to get out of the final cut. As well as this I think that making a schedule and giving myself time to complete this rough cut and all the elements surrounding it definitely is another aspect that I attribute to the success of this video. Overall I’m really happy with my rough cut, despite not getting the chance to do a colour grade and audio mix I feel like the roots are there for a really good final product.