This project is intended to be a fun new approach on portrait photography. I’ve seen a lot of videos on life hacks on photography. They’re always kind of fun to watch, I wanted to see if they would actually work. This video is going to be of me trying out life hacks related to photography.

My project is portrait photography, and I wanted to challenge myself to trying new techniques.

The main idea of life hacks is that you can usually use every day items to do them. They save money and supposedly, time. I challenged myself to find all of the materials to create this video at my residence hall.

I was inspired by YouTube videos of people explaining life hacks. They usually seem pretty impractical to me, but I wanted to try them to see if there is any merit to them. I was also inspired by Cody Ko’s videos of him trying other life hacks on YouTube. You can watch them here. 

I didn’t do a storyboard for this project, because I didn’t complete the planning assignment for this project.

I wanted to make this video with an informal vlog feel. I accomplished this by using a camera man to follow me around. I also used a bunch of jump cuts to make it feel snappy and fresh, like a lot of modern day YouTubers use.

Most of the video is comprised of only four shots broken up into multiple cuts.

I still have to shoot more video for this project. I plan on getting a model, and using each life hack on the model. I’ll upload the pictures that I took to the video. I also plan on making the segment where I’m finding the materials shorter, and cutting out some of the fluff.

When I do the life hacks, I plan on showing a short tutorial on how I did the life hacks. I’ll also link to some of the YouTube channels that I found the life hacks on. I don’t plan on using any footage from those channels, but I do plan on finding where I got the hacks and shouting them out.

I didn’ have that much trouble with this project, but I still do need to cut it down quiet a bit. Finding what scenes are relevant are had when you have so much footage.

This project was really engaging for me. I had never used Adobe Audition before this assignment, and I like learning new things. I have experiemented with garageband, but it was mostly making music. I was suprised by the similarities between the two.

I decided to create a monologue from an interview focusing on one of my friends who is a portrait photographer. It relates to my topic because it highlights why someone would want to be a portrait photographer, and reflects my own ideas about why portrait photography is such an amazing thing.

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Radiolab, in particular, is one of my favorites. I like how the host’s voice-over narration every once in a while, but mostly just let their guests talk. I wanted to focus on what Noah had to say rather than the questions that I had. I listened to a bunch of Radiolab before making my own audio story.

I wanted to put as much of Noah’s voice in the project as I could. I edited down the footage to make it sound more like a monologue than an interview. I also edited out a few of the pauses. I wanted to make it feel snappy and fast-paced.

I wanted to start off the story with a short audio clip to get the listener to pay attention. I did this by putting the camera sound at the front, and then I recorded some narration audio of myself. After that, I added the full interview with Noah and my voices. I then cut out the audio of myself speaking. I then used the cut tool to delete some of the less relevant bits when Noah spoke.

I recorded all of the audio for the first draft on my phone except for the camera sound. I found it a free sound website, here. 

For the final draft, I added some music. I found it here.

When I constructed my project, I used only the cut tool and the zoom in and out tool for more focused editing.

I actually redid this assignment several times. I was using the computers in the dimensions lab at Holland libraries, and it would randomly crash and delete my progress. I ended up coming back a different day to retry it. I’m not sure what was wrong with it, but the computer that I used the second time worked fine.

I read the feedback for my first draft, and I learned two things. The audio sounded empty, and it ended abruptly. For my final draft, I took this feedback into consideration. I found some music that matched the feeling of the interview, and I put it softly in the background of the interview.

I also put a fade in and out of the background music. It helped to make it feel less abrupt at the end, because I made the music go longer than the audio.  To help the abruptness, I also added Noah saying goodbye. I also faded out the laughing at the very end.