Thought Piece 2

The biggest part of this portion of the book that stood out to me was that you need to be able to adjust to your location and absolutely KNOW your plans for a video. Stockman talks about a lot of different examples of filming ideas so there’s not a ton of helpful information in this part to me because of it mostly being examples. However, adjusting and knowing everything beforehand stood out a lot. While I did find some of his examples to make this an easier read and think that maybe one would have been beneficial to the learning we are to be getting from this book, I think he could have done without a couple.

            Adjusting to your location stood out to me in this reading because he specifically stated that we should tap into our inner wedding photographer when it comes to this. I found that statement intriguing because I actually want to be a wedding photographer and I think that using these skills now that will help me in the future with be a great learning experience for me, even though it is for a different medium. But I do also think that it is very important to pay attention to your background and lighting situation because so much can go wrong in terms of these. I feel like there has been many times where I haven’t given backgrounds or lighting the proper attention and ended up with shadows where I didn’t want them, or with some unwanted thing in the background.

            The other part about knowing your plans for a video also really stuck out to me because he talked about this and different components of this for much longer than anything else in my opinion. But I think this is very important to remember because if you go in without any plans or without a script then everything can go very badly very quickly. Whereas if you go in with a set plan and specific ideas and a specific script (if one is needed) then you have a much better chance of succeeding and producing a worthwhile video that people will actually want to spend time to watch.

            Stockman also brought up the use of storyboards which I thought was really helpful to see and to consider using. This is simply due to the fact that I have never really used storyboarding before, and it was nice to see the examples of it and to hear how to do them properly and use a storyboard to your advantage. I think that this could also help me out any time that I would possibly have to make a picture story in the future.

            Finally, it was also helpful to know about the process of shooting to make things easier to shoot. The process being to line up things so that whatever shots are in the same area with the same lighting are shot at the same time before moving on to the next shot that could be in a different place with different lighting and even with different characters. I think that this was helpful to think about because my head always wants to go chronologically and would never have thought about this process on its own.