Project Brief 2

Project 2 Reflection:

It is my first time to do a one-minute video. When I collected materials for Project 1, I was confused that I didn’t really know which kind of video I wanted to make. Sometimes, too specific things will become boring. In my opinion, “self-portrait” is generally something about me, so I planned to shoot some short videos about my hobbies. I chose two parts which were cooking and playing with my friend’s cat. These were parts of my daily life and could be shot in a short time. For the beginning, I shot a train running video from my balcony to create a daily life feeling and added a “dip into black” effect to connect to the text scene. I set the camera to shoot the cutting vegetable scene and I found that the camera would change its focus distance automatically with my movement. As a result, it was a little bit difficult to shoot the stirring egg part. Another problem was that the task asked for at least four pictures. I thought it was strange to just insert these photos between the cuts of the videos. As a result, I did a stop motion film by Adobe Aftereffect for the catching ball scene. I took 27 photos which started from I throwing out the ball until the cat catching it. Stop motion video could create a cute and funny feeling which fitted the cat scene.

In all, I think this video is generally successful because it achieves the happy and relaxing atmosphere that I want. Also, I just used some basic and simple techniques but the result is quite satisfying.

The thing I want to improve most is the connecting of scenes, and the appearance of one shot should be more linkable with the background music.