My Video Experience

At first, I was a little taken aback by the two words "group project". I think everyone can say that they've had their fair shares of bad experiences with group projects; I know I have. I think that this was one of the best group projects that I've been in. Each one of us had some good ideas, and we worked together very well. There were no problems at all really. We even hung out after some of the shooting and ate lunch together. It was really fun getting to know these two, and if possible I would work with Katherine and Anthony again.

It was my first time ever using I-Movie, and I was a little intimidated before starting to use it. Before this class, I've never used a video making program. I found that one I got the hang out it, and read through the tutorials provided on the blog, it was really easy and simple to use. Everything was pretty self explanatory, so I didn't have many problems. I did have a tendency to look at my group member's videos and compare them to mine, but I think I did an okay job for my first time using the program.
The hard part was probably editing because there were shots that I wanted to keep, but had to take out because they either didn't fit or didn't make any sense. Also, the importing the bigger files were a pain because we were working through multiple USB's. We had to wait a little while before the files were transferred. I felt bad for Professor Pabico because we had to wait for the files to transfer on the USB's and we were keeping her behind. On the other hand, it was scary knowing that something could possibly happen to our footage if we didn't take the time to wait for the imports to finish loading. After this experience, I'm pretty comfortable with using I-Movie now.

As far as the shooting went, I think that the group shooting went very well. We didn't really have any problems getting any of the shots, and we got enough footage to use for the group and for our self portraits if we needed it.
For the self portrait shooting, it was hard shooting myself because I would have to sometimes hold the camera with one hand, and describe what I was holding in the other. Other times, I used my window sill. Another problem was the lighting. I think in some shots it was just really dark, but that's because of the lighting in the dorm rooms. It's not very good, so I had to sometimes use my desk lamp for some extra light in my shots. For the reading shots of the book and the manga, I had to get other books and stack them so it would capture my face. Also, it was kind of hard to come up with ideas and how I was going to execute them. It looked good in my head, but on screen some of them didn't look very pleasing. I kept the idea of the index cards because I thought it was a good idea and it was something unique. I did edit out a lot of the cards though, due to some of the changes to our idea. I was trying to figure out ways that people will understand my self portrait, but at the same time staying true to myself and showing what I like to do to escape from reality (the main theme of our project).

I believe that video can be a good communication tool because it's more visual in a sense. Viewers can get a sense of what you're trying to convey in video compared to writing or photography. Sometimes, it takes a while to get the big picture in writing and photography.

From Katherine's post, I saw that she uploaded the video on Vimeo. I'm not sure if she uploaded it on Youtube yet. As said in my Youtube vs. Vimeo blog post, I think Vimeo outweighs Youtube by a lot. Although Youtube is great for getting a lot of views, I like the smaller community and the video quality of Vimeo. Hopefully, our video doesn't get taken down because of the music, but I think that it looks really good.