Video 2

For this video, I focused in on taking some footage I had of NYC and going beyond my comfort zone with film. I had a whole bunch of different layers and videos/pictures going on at once. It was a lot of experimentation. I filmed this with the camera on my phone. I wanted to give it a handycam feel. I wanted to take the typical tourist video of New York and see where I could take it.  Find a link to the video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ByTC5GcwWs

Here are some shots from the film:

This movie was divided up into three different sections. The first section was the art exhibit. I used a video shot of me walking as a transitions between the parts. It is also the beginning and the ending to tie the movie together. For the art exhibit, I did not have any video shots. I had some pictures of different pieces at the exhibition and I wanted to arrange them all in different ways. I decided to put three pictures up at once for a short period of time. I wanted the pictures to move around the screen. Shots of the name of the exhibit are static in the shot, but the pieces move around the screen. It works well with the tempo of the song. The photos have a nice movement to them as they shift around the screen. I liked the way this came out as it was kind of like an "out-of-the-ordinary" slideshow.

The second section was a piece of public art I saw while walking around. It was a room full of these colored cups. It was a beautiful display. What really caught my attention, though, was the action behind the art. Watching the people and cars moving behind it provided a stunning visual effect. I decided to replicate this by first filming for over 30 seconds as a background. I then took over 30 shots within 2 minutes to give a stop motion effect when put together. I then overlaid the pictures on top of the video to give a very unusual effect. Each picture is on the screen for less than a second. The picture of the exhibit then fades up as the video shot ends.  I was very happy with the way this came out.

The third section was a collection of videos and pictures I took while walking around the city. I decided to combine the techniques I used previously in the film and put them all on top of each other. I had a combination of video(s) and picture(s) on the screen at once. All of them are switching and fading into each other. It is really visually stimulating as it is interesting to follow the progression of a day through the shots. Many sights of the city are shown on the screen at once, compressing a 4 hour trip into less than a minute of video footage. Some of the shots and layers are not perfectly even, but I intended to do that to give the movie some depth. It helped change it up from the norm. I am happy with this section, but I am unsure if I would do a technique similar to this in the future.

Overall, I was very satisfied with the way this video came out. This was very new for me and I look forward to working with these techniques in the future. In the future, I would work with a better camera than my phone because it has some problems with focus and lighting at times.