Week 10 – Video

https://www.instagram.com/p/CA2GZyTARaz/

How did you author the video you recorded for upload to Instagram?

This video is a view that always captivates me, from the corner of my apartment in the middle of Melbourne CBD. I could spend hours listening to music and looking at the trams, cars, buses, pedestrians, buskers, traffic police training, but one the things that interest me the most is to watch the traffic and its system design. Are you scared of the hook turn? It is “very Melbourne” I can easily identify when a tourist is trying to turn compared to a local, and how the trams have to deal with so many issues using the bell more often than I would like but overall I love my corner and I wanted to share it with you.

I used my mobile phone to record the video and I wanted to capture Flinders Street Station as well, but the lens was not wide enough and my inspiration was the traffic, so I was not able to include it in the video. I shot in 16:9 format using my window ledge as a makeshift tripod, which was perfect to observe the full street corner, recording for longer than a minute to capture the moving traffic and street sounds.

How did you publish the video you recorded for upload to Instagram?

Because of the duration of the video 1 minute and 36 seconds, I realised that instead of the normal feed of Instagram I will have to use the Instagram TV (IGTV) session of the app to publish as it allows for longer videos, ‘Only with the introduction of the most recent Instagram-adjacent app, Instagram TV (IGTV), has this become a necessity: longer videos, which for verified users could be as long as an hour, have to be uploaded from a computer’ (Leaver et al, p. 70)

I published the video in 16:9 format, which can be viewed automatically when viewing on IGTV. However, one of the constraints on this format is the thumbnail still image for the video on my profile is cropped to a square with an IGTV icon in the corner for viewers to watch in the original format. Another constraint is once you are on IGTV watching using your mobile, and in a video like this landscape format when you move the phone sideways the video does not automatically adjust to landscape, the button on the bottom right (square) needs to be pressed to adjust the viewing format.

Because I uploaded the video via IGTV, I had to upload using my computer and not the mobile phone directly. While the video was uploading, I had to enter a title and description into a text box, which I wasn’t aware would be the caption for my post. The look and feel of uploading from my computer was different to the usual method of posting directly from my phone, because of this I did not realise this was where I should have added any hashtags.

As my Instagram has been inspired by the design of the city with my content over the recent weeks, I took into consideration the algorithm theory with this video which shows some intrinsic elements of the Melbourne CBD, such as trams, hook turns and city sounds of the main intersection. I would like to continue publishing content about the city, to create a niche Instagram page and take advantage of algorithms.

How did you distribute the video you published on Instagram to other social media services?

I published the IGTV video to Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter. On Facebook, a thumbnail of the video is displayed but you cannot watch the video there directly, as soon as you click on the image it redirects you to Instagram to view.

Facebook post