My A/V short, Buying Local, is an accompaniment to my Capstone research project. I’m building off what a part of my research will focus on. The writing process here required a little more preparation than what I’m used to. I had to think about dialogue as well as what props I needed, which was similar to the process of writing a paper, except that in this project, the words were spoken instead of typed. Another similar thing was that I improvised a bit while shooting the different clips and I suppose that’s what writing is if you’re going off of something random that drew your thinking in a particular direction.

In creating this piece, I did not plan out every second of the video. I wanted it to feel open and not constrained. In other words, I didn’t have high standards because I knew I wasn’t good with editing and technical things so I just wanted to capture the gist of the bigger idea. If I had started with the idea that I wanted this video to be extremely funny and this and that, then I would be creating a barrier for myself  in trying to live up to those expectations. If I were more open to the different ways the video could turn out, then I’m allowing different ideas to flow through, making the piece much more interesting and less predictable. I think I was constrained by my lack of creativity in creating witty banter. My voiceover could’ve been more funny if I were a stand-up comedian or something of that sort, but I’m only funny sometimes.

In the future, I would think about the point I’m trying to make more clearly. To me, my video makes sense because I know the background of my project and the research I’m doing. I hope that every seeing the video who don’t know about my research will pick up on what the purpose of my video is. I do want to give credit to the audience because I don’t want to spoon-feed them every detail behind the video, but if it turns out that my point doesn’t come across well, then I will work towards being more clear in the future. This experience let me hone my proficiency in being concise. If I have an assignment due that needs to be between 5 to 7 pages, I will probably stick closer to the 5 than anything else. I like to make my point in the least number of words as I possibly can.  

I now know that making a video is not as bad as I thought it would be—I actually had fun editing! But as for visual texts, I understand that the visual elements of a piece gives a lot more information to the audience–more than words could. For example, I “showed” instead of “told”—quite literally and with written work, it takes more descriptive language to make that happen, but with videos, people can infer and flesh out more information just by seeing what the creator shows and in what way they show it.