Thought Piece 5

It’s important to note that if your audience is confused at all during your video, they will become bored. A bored audience is not a good audience, and you need to make sure that your audience is engaged and not confused for the entirety of your video. The book explains that you basically need to pretend that your audience is full of not so smart people, and they need everything to be very clear in your video. Your audience should be able to infer things about the video, but it should still be very clear to them.

            The book also mentions different types of cuts. I think these different cuts are important to note because they can add different emotions to different parts of your videos or make your video have a whole different vibe throughout. Stockman explains what the different types of cuts do and the different emotions or feelings they evoke, and I think he does a really good job of explaining it and I completely agree. I think that for my case in this class, having dissolves or just direct cuts would be best for my videos. I think having fades wouldn’t really make a lot of sense for the video topics or types of videos I will be creating. But I do think that even transitions that I probably wouldn’t use in this class would be fun to experiment with on my own.

            Sound effects are also a very important component to videos and/or movies. Stockman mentions that adding sound effects can make your video really pop. I don’t think that sound effects are really going to be something that is relevant in this class, but I do think that it is an important contribution to videos and movies. I think it might be fun to mess around with sound effects in the future if I end up doing more video type projects and things, but I don’t think it will be used a ton if at all in this class. The videos for this class kind of seem like they are going to be more news type videos and don’t require unreal or untrue sound effects just to add dimension and entertainment. I think that through this class, I should be able to successfully create a video that is entertaining to my audience without the use of different sound effects. By only using the noise, interviews, and sounds that I have recorded. Maybe if we were doing nonfictional videos, I would consider adding sound effects. Not for these though.

            The last thing that really stood out to me was Stockman’s tips on receiving and applying feedback. He mentions that if multiple people have the same thing to say about a problem in your video, then you should take that into consideration and work on improving that part or that technique. On the other hand, it is also important to note the things people think you did well on in your videos and to make sure you are able to make the rest of your videos be as good at that is. I think that it is also important to make sure that whatever techniques you are using help tell the story that you are trying to tell and don’t go against it. I think making sure you really listen and pay attention to your feedback is a very valuable thing to do because then you know exactly how to make people more interested in your work and exactly where you need to improve.