Final video project

This project is intended to be a fun new approach to 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 try new techniques.

The main idea of life hacks is that you can usually use everyday 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 cameraman 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 then filmed on a second day, and did a photoshoot on the same day, so that added to the rest of the footage.

I used music from https://filmmusic.io “Modern Jazz Samba” by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

When I turned in the first draft of my assignment, the video was very unfinished. It was all about life hacks, but there were no life hacks in the video. We took on too many ideas, so we cut it down to three of the hacks that actually worked.

I ended up adding music, as was suggested by my peers. I also cut out some of the fluff in my project, which made it a little bit less entertaining, but it centralized and focused my project more on my theme.

I didn’t have that much trouble with this project, but I did have a hard time realizing which parts of the narrative were relevant and which parts I just thought were funny.