For our video project we decided to go with option 3, which was to create a “How To” video. After running through a bunch of ideas, we decided to go for a series of videos on how to be famous on Instagram. The goal of the video is to create a satirical piece that gives a view of people trying to get more followers on Instagram. The script was drafted to depict one person taking pictures of themselves at different locations to post on their Instagram account. The actions of this character were to be over-exaggerated to create the humor while also making a point (the point being that sometimes people go way overboard for a couple of worthless likes).
In terms of the website, we were going for a website with the purpose of marketing “Annie”, the giver of the tutorial and the tutorial itself. The satire is also reflected in comments and the About Us page of the website. To make it interactive, the website asks the user to login through their instagram account. The result is personalized experience that the user gets which helps with our “marketing” goal. I also believe that it makes our website more interactive, since the user has to actually type in their credentials and are presented with their profile picture and number of followers.
I’m not much of a social media guy. The idea was primarily from my teammates. I was quite new to all the ideas that Aleksandra and Josefina had about things that they could do to add over-exaggeration into the video. Our final idea was to shoot videos at three different locations where we would show a person overdoing everything about taking a simple picture for instagram. As the idea materialized, we also decided to have another person who would be giving this “tutorial”.
We met up 3 times to take different shots after coming together with an outline of a script. In terms of work, for most of the shots, Josefina played the role of the director, Aleksandra was acting and I was in charge of the video and the audio recording. For the parts where Josefina was being recorded, Aleksandra and I shared the directing and the audio/video part. Post processing the videos was single handedly done by Josefina (major props to her). I worked on the website’s functionality, while Aleksandra did most of the layout related design. After she was done, she sent her code to me which I then put together along with the videos to make our webpage.
I was really disappointed that in the instagram feature didn’t work out in the end, even after the amount of effort I put into it, but I understand that it’s something I do not have control over. I would have liked more time to make the website even more interactive by generating a background image from the user’s recent posts on instagram. However, this wasn’t possible in the give time frame, and it was very hard to achieve only through client side rendering. The videos came out well, even though the focus was lost on some shots. I guess it’s something you learn only after doing, since all the videos looked perfect on the camera’s little screen, but the blur because of the lack of focus was noticeable on a larger screen. I would have definitely liked the opportunity to also retake some of the shots, but we neither had the time nor the resources to do so. Overall, we did manage to create an interactive web page that shows our video and gets our point across to the user.