Thought Piece 1

At the beginning of this reading, we learn about kind of the rules of video production. A couple of these rules that stick out to me were moving around and keeping things short. With moving around, I found it helpful to think about how my mind works. I thought about how my eyes wander all over the place and gather a lot of information about where I am, and I think it’s important to incorporate that into videos. I feel like a lot of people are the same way in having their eyes wander and look at a million different things to take in their surroundings and a video would be so much more interesting if they have that opportunity. I plan to use the keeping things short rule to sort of help with the eye wandering. If I keep different clips in my video short enough to have the right amount of information while also keeping the audience occupied and satisfied, then I can give them so many more things to look at within a given time limit. I think that staring at one thing for too long can get quite boring, even if it is moving.

            Another really helpful thing that I found was starting to shoot with intent instead of results. I think this will be really helpful for me to think about because a lot of the times, I am thinking about how I need to get a good grade or pass the class or whatever and not actually thinking about if I actually enjoy what I’m doing. I think a downfall of mine last semester was that I was trying to think more about how I could get a good grade and less about if I enjoyed what I was shooting. While that was for photos, I feel like it can be related the same way as it is for video shooting.

            I think that the examples and explanations of beginnings, middles, and ends in this book were really helpful to think about as well because it made me realize that these can be super simple moments in the beginning but just be enough to get you started and have a good direction for your filming process. I think that if I put my mind to it and start with even just the simplest of story line for my videos then I can create good videos. Even though video isn’t necessarily something I plan on doing in the future, I think that this mindset can also help me in doing picture stories as those also have beginnings, middles, and ends.

            Keeping all these things that I mentioned above in mind will help me to exceed my own expectations for myself in this class. To be honest, I don’t have the highest of expectations for myself in this class since I have never done any sort of video work outside of dumb videos on my phone of my family or pets. I believe that if I keep these tips from the book in mind and apply them in my work then I will be able to create compelling videos and do a good job in this class, or at least be satisfied with my work for this class. I feel as though I am very hard on myself when it comes to these labs because I always have a low expectation of what I will achieve, even when I try my best. But keeping these in mind will help me achieve a mindset that I will be able to do good on these video assignments.