For this assignment, we were to “Create a video that tells a story where there is no dialogue or narration- only the camera, movement, and at most, a musical soundtrack, tell the story.” I found this to be extremely advantageous to me because of Jackson. He was able to help out a lot because, well, he can’t talk. That really makes creating the assignment really easy. I don’t think that it would have been the same if he were talking while looking at the camera. There’s something just innocent about him just looking at the camera and not moving his mouth.
The example that was given on the website proved to be a little bit of a help in that I kind of knew what I was to be doing with the assignment, but I wanted to take my own approach to it, much like my other Video Assignments for the week. Especially for this week, I wanted to make sure that I was creating something entirely out of my own mind rather than look at something and try to recreate it with different images or sound. I wanted to really take advantage of the video assignment week and try to do some really fun things. I think that’s why I went with this assignment and tried to create something that I hadn’t done before.
When I came up with the idea, I made sure to have Jackson at different angles and in different rooms to give the feeling that he was really moving around, despite his inability to move around a ton. When we shot the clips, we really felt that putting him in different places gave the effect that he was moving. I’m not sure if people are going to pick up on that without me mentioning something, so I thought it would be best to go ahead and mention something. In coming up with the idea, however, I really felt that it would be great to have something like this to look back on. I’ve taken a ton of footage of Jackson so far, but I haven’t taken footage based off an assignment. With this, I was really able to get creative and think about how I wanted it to look. That made it a lot more fun when I was in FCPX and doing the editing. For the audio in this one, I used Thomas Newman’s Any Other Name. It does feel a little ‘sad’ but I kind of wanted the memory feel to the video.
I hope you guys enjoy looking at this clip. When I shot all of the footage, it was about an 8 GB file (my camera shoots in really high quality). I used Handbrake on my Mac to convert it from a .mov to a .mkv and it cut the file from 8 GB to about 300 MB. The quality in terms of looking at it obviously took a huge decrease, but it turned out the same. You can change the quality on the YouTube link to 1080p if you want, but it still doesn’t look as good because I cut so much of the quality in converting it.
Okay, this is REALLY beautiful. It has a magical quality to it, I think from the combination of the music and the video which really makes you stop and think about the world from Jackson’s perspective. It’s like everything else that was likely going on while this was happening, just sort of disappears. When you think about it, there’s nothing really extraordinary about the moment you’ve captured, but it still feels extraordinary. Which make you stop to consider who often we forget that for a baby the whole world is extraordinary. Really, wonderful work. I hope that someday when Jackson is older, you’ll look back on this fondly.
The ONLY suggestion I would make would be to re-edit the end so that the video fades out instead of abruptly stopping — perhaps fading right as you close in on his face and it becomes blurry?
I agree with Martha in the beauty of your filming and editing, and the music is both somber and a bit transcending, like it is building to something. You did some really good camera work be getting on Jackson;s level, and dealing with the challenges of not know what your lead actor was going to do.
I would try to avoid to many zooms in and out on the lasts sequence, it would have worked better to be that single zoom in that locks on his face filling the frame, it is his eyes, curious and expressive that are winning shots.
A tendency in probing onto the story would be to try and narrate Jackson’s thoughts as he pulls magazines down and tries to climb the chair (think of trying to scale something 3x your own height). I wonder how you can go into more what this moment means, for Jackson, for you.
But all in all really brilliant editing work.