I feel pretty neutral on my work for this exercise. On one hand I achieved what I set out to and met the requirements of the prompt, but on the other the finished product really isn’t anything particularly special and certainly isn’t nearly as interesting as many of the 50 second films we watched in class. My intention was to basically create a 50 second video that would accompany my second observation piece about the temporarily undeveloped land that sits behind my new house. I was essentially just hoping to capture the landscape and was just hoping it would have enough going on to hold someone’s attention for 50 seconds. The first part of this I think was achieved but the second I’m not so sure as there’s really not a great deal happening in the frame. In the first version of the video I had the camera placed very low to the ground, which on review I found created a lot of dead space that really wasn’t doing anything for the videos ability to capture and hold attention for that 50 second period – even I was pretty bored of looking at it before long – I also found that filming it from that height drew the eye to the street signs immediately in front of the camera rather than the landscape itself as I has originally intended. To remedy this I raised the tripod and captured the video again from much higher up. I definitely prefer this version as it succeeds more so in showing the landscape I was trying to capture and I think is just compositionally a bit stronger. It also benefits from seeing a bit more of the road in the background as this introduced the potential for more movement within the frame. I do think however that I could have gone higher again on the tripod – perhaps even to the maximum height as this would have revealed even more of the landscape and the road in the distance. If I had a third chance to film it I think this is the main thing I would have changed, but I also think that had I gone back at a different time of day where the construction had more activity this could have made the frame much more interesting again.
Link to videos:
Version 1: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15FLMRaIA-Mg70DivFiwNlES69WAfTsTI/view?usp=sharing
Version 2: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IBN4Y_yFvbCZ-XYK2JBZPdeH2C0tlHdP/view?usp=sharing
Folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1DEAirJ6hkeByT7ikmhjNSNtZUU-WhqKa?usp=sharing