How did you author (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
I recorded the video using my iphone 6s. It has both the front and rear facing camera, which is really convenient to take or record a moment whenever you want. With this video, I used the front camera to practice since it faces the doors directly and has better quality than the other. The video was taken in the Alice In Wonderland Exhibition. I just couldn’t help myself when I saw endless doors inside and knew I have to record it. When I recorded the video, I had to crawl into the little door hole while still holding my phone. I didn’t get closer to the doors since it’s already a perfect distance to record. However, in case I want to capture something from a far distance, normally I will choose to move closer to the object rather than using the zoom feature of iphone camera. I don’t use flash feature often also and I didn’t use it in this video. I just sat on my feet, recorded the whole thing in a low angle and couldn’t be happier with the result. That doesn’t mean I didn’t have to record it for a couple of times just to make sure I can select the best one out of it later. But to sum up, the result conveyed pretty good how awesome that moment was. And the sound was just there to makes it become even more perfect. As you can hear, there is a “knock knock” sound subtly echo in the space, add more mysterious vibe to my video. After finishing recording, I will definitely apply filters to my photos and my videos. The same with my photos, most of my videos are edited with VSCOcam app. VSCOcam allows me to customize contrast, exposure, sharpness, fade and other traditional editing tools as well as provide a great range of filters, even some specific film types one. With this little baby, I used filter AL1 “LED Soften” as the base and then adjusted the contrast a bit. I think it suits the gothic dark vibe pretty well.
The biggest differences in authoring video by using Instagram app compared to recording by the basic camera function of iphone is Instagram provides you multiple choices in the way of recording and the limited length of video you can record. With basic camera function, you can just click the red button to start record and you can keep it as long as you want (and as long as your capacity is not full yet). While with Instagram, you are in for a treat with variety ways of recording a video, waiting for you in a silver plate. People usually go for normal way which requires you to hold on the button to record. As soon as you want to stop, you just have to stop pushing the button. Another popular choice is “boomerang”, an Instagram built-in feature for making short, GIF-like video that play forward and backward in a loop. The new feature “music” is pretty awesome also with the ability to combine a song from online source to your photo or video. The “superzoom” feature will automatically zoom in with the dramatic sound to make a funny, slightly dramatic short video. The rewind will automatically play the video in reverse. The hands-free is the same with recording video in basic camera function, instead of holding on the button, you just have to click to start. But all of that amazing options are still limited in the 15-second-length.
How did you publish (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
Like I confessed above, I always take many different photos or videos. Its a kind of addiction. I can never just take one photo or video and move on. I have to take thousand and examine it carefully to select some best little fellas to go the final stage: add to VSCOcam to start editing. I’ll base on lighting, contrast, composition, the moment, color and the sound. However the sound can easily be muted so it’s not that important. After I finish that whole complicated process, I will choose whether I should add a location and text caption when publishing. For this video, I didn’t add a location but I put on a caption as “Falling down to the rabbit hole”. It fits the theme “Alice in Wonderland” and conveys perfectly my feeling when I recorded the video.
3. How did you distribute (the photo or video) you published on Instagram to other social media services?
From Instagram, I shared this photo to my Facebook easily by clicking on the share icon appear in the corner of the post. I didn’t add any caption to it. To be honest, that Facebook account is not my regular one with all my friends. It’s just a secret one I rarely use, only for some occassions. I don’t share things to my main Facebook daily so I’m quite picky in choosing thing to share. Pardon me.
I don’t have Twitter so I can’t share to it.
This is a strange process to me because I hardly ever share anything from Instagram to other social media platform directly but I’m aware that it’s a powerful one. The way everything link to each other makes the distributing process become easier and more effective than ever. This is extremely useful to business organizations or influencers.