During the process of making my self-portrait video there where many obstacles to overcome, firstly my group was given the unfortunate topic of politics; involving that theme into my self-portrait proved difficult considering politics isn’t really my cup of tea. Secondly I felt rather uncomfortable being in front of the camera due to the fact that most all my interaction with film has been behind it. Don’t get me wrong I’m the opposite of shy and can be rather entertaining; I just wasn’t sure how that would translate on film.
While brain storming for ideas I decided not to take a comical route with this project as I had with most other video projects I have done in the past. Instead I wanted my project to be a commentary on the division of wealth in Buffalo New York and how I interact with it. On the east side of Elmwood avenue there is a grand collection of classic Victorian homes surrounding an Olmsted park and a fine art museum; on the west side of Elmwood is one of the more impoverished areas I have ever seen, burnt out and abandoned houses, many homeless people, crime galore etc. during the filming process I found it took me a number of sessions before I was happy with the content I had. The editing process proved easier than I anticipated, IMovie is an easy platform to work on and I feel like I can now use it to its full capability. While attempting to upload my video on Vimeo I had a number of issues; for one I had to make a Viemo account and it took an entire day before I could upload on said account. So then I used my YouTube account which proved to be much easier to deal with.
The group project was the next step; although there were some hiccups along the way as far as having all our content I still felt like our group worked well together and succeeded in producing a decent video. Our idea was to tie our self-portraits together with additional footage to show that although we are from different political, social, economic backgrounds; we are here living in Buffalo and going to school together. It was a challenge sharing the editing time and coming to an agreement on what the end video should look like; there would also be times when a group member would come unprepared which also made editing more difficult. Being on a team is all about compromise and picking up slake that you team members leave behind.
This video project was a good experience for me; I now feel more confident in my ability to shoot footage, edit it and post it on the internet. If given more time to film I’m sure the video would be more visually stimulating; but I feel good about the finished product considering the time I had to complete it.
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