Paper Bag Boy
http://youtu.be/jE2F-A_xI5U
About a day after I submitted my digital media project proposal I spoke to my sister in England – a young girl rather sad about a pretty common affliction. Pimples, the ugly remnants of adolescence, could still be seen on her face. Ironically, she had been given the task of addressing a class about adolescence and her experience with high school etc. She was a bit worried about it, so I decided to change my mind on the project and do an informational, educational, yet humorous video for her. This is what I came up with.
(NB: She never actually played the video, as I couldn’t finish editing it in time. Probably a good thing, considering the advice contained within could easily be misinterpreted by anyone under the age…. Actually, anyone really.)
My role in the production was pretty overarching. I came up with the concept and then used an old video camera and tripod my housemate had stashed away in a cupboard over the summer to film it. I did the script, most of the camerawork, the directing, and also provided all post-shoot beers for the cast.
I then used iMovie ’11 to edit and share the video via Youtube.
I’ve only had a small amount of film experience, and I think there were several elements I could have handled a lot better. Many camera shots were shaky and illegible, and because I did not use a wind buffer on the camera, some of the spoken audio is distorted. I was able to fix this to some intent during the editing, but unfortunately some of the audio was too far-gone to repair. And, as usual, I feel that if I had given myself some more time editing, I would have been able to really tighten up a few cuts and shots, and make the entire thing just a little smoother.
One thing that surprised and slightly impressed me was the way the narrative ended up working in the end. Although I think I could have melded the two parts of the film more clearly and amusingly together, each works for its separate intents. The initial part of the film intends to entertain, following the amusing antics of the paper bag boy; the second aims to inform, with a silly digression on ways of getting rid of pimples.
In the future, I think I would allow myself more time at each stage of production. This would have allowed me to sharpen up the script and connect the separate narratives, ensure all shots were composed well, and to allow for an audio experience that doesn’t jolt the listener too often. That being said, I had a lot of fun doing it, and am overall glad at the final results.
I learnt about a number of things doing this project. For one, I saw firsthand how easy it is to literally lose the plot whilst directing and producing a short film. As aforementioned, I’m quite glad this never got shown to children, because I opted for entertainment over education. It really makes me appreciate the hard work and extreme creative drain real producers of educational content go through, trying to find the balance between engagement and information objectives. If you think this is beginning to sound like marketing speak, you’re right.
Completing this video drew massive parallels to the creation of advertising. Being someone that is about to go and work on the media side of the fence, this creative exercise showed me the difficulty a production company must have in completing projects. And they have hundreds of people involved in the process. As hard as it was, it was a good time, and I can see myself trying out a camera hand job in the future, if all else fails.