The brief for this project was to film ourselves doing any sort of basic action. We could use as many shots as we needed, as long as the video was around 30 seconds long, and the camera was stationary.

For those who haven’t seen it, the video, here it is:

https://drive.google.com/a/rmit.edu.au/file/d/0BzsJ1KwHFXRTR3cwMVdMTFRXWEk/view?usp=sharing

In making this video, I wanted to simulate the way that I see myself doing any type of action, whether it be grabbing some food, or putting dishes away. I noticed that in every action that I do, and that a lot of people do, there’s a sort of rhythm that we tend to follow. With some people, it’s more subtle than others, but it’s still there. So, when I noticed this, I started trying to keep track of the rhythm that I usually follow, so that I could match it in my video. The overall result was a (hopefully) comedic quick cut of me eating a muesli bar.

Another factor that I took into account was sound. The quick cuts were meant to be kind of surprising after sixteen seconds of watching me stare at a laptop screen, and so the sudden jump from quiet to loud and back to quiet again was meant to enhance the surprise. Since it was all so quick, the overall result was jarring, and makes the audience register what actually happened about a whole second after the action was done

When story boarding, I was actually being really careful with the cinematography. I’d tried this quick cutting effect a couple of times in the past, but since I hadn’t actually planned them with a story board, there was something wrong with the way that it looked. I’d noticed that the focal points were either jumping all over the screen, creating a messy kind of… mess, or they were constantly sitting in the same place for each cut, which ruined the jarring effect. When I planned this video, I made sure that the focal point jumped from left to right and back with each individual shot, which, in my opinion, successfully pulled off the effect I was going for.