INTRODUCING MY MESSAGE!
An introduction video is an extraordinary method to convey a legitimate reality to an audience because it’s a verbal and visual illusion of oneself presented towards individuals in an assessable manner. You are pretty much gaining insight into how that person works, why they are the way they are, and if you have common interests with that personality. Furthermore, during the period of COVID-19, it’s a nice way to interact with people in the ALM102 unit and just people in general.
I am a gamer girl, a full-on nerd who does accents, impressions, is a walking meme of a person, a joker someone who is very carefree. Thus, my introduction video is a social construction towards gamer, nerds’ and comedic people. My authenticity illusion is for the most part interpreted to be the aesthetic of a nerdy novelty audience. However, because I am a comedic person, I wanted to make my video humours and informative at the same time therefore, the concept of mediated authenticity is at play, due to the production and planning that went into being that authentic illusion via means of lighting, compositing, audio, and framing.
STRATEGIES:
STAGE 1: LIGHTING – FRAMING – SHOT COMPOSITION
The lighting was the most important part of my video making; as my bedroom was dark at the time, which was intentional, because my aesthetic was to have ambient lighting around my background as all my furniture is gloss and my walls are white, with red soundproofing, my television was on in the background also, therefore, the bright image of colourful jellyfish was playing and was accompanied by my novelty lighting that changed colour also. I utilised a tripod that was connected to a phone grip and a LED ring light; therefore, I could do three steps at once. Positioning was easy as the ring light was attached to the phone grip and the grip was attached to the tripod. The design of my room was perfect for the aesthetic I was going for, plus it had an interesting concept going on, the white walls were handy because the ambient lighting was shining off the whiter items which helped with softer lighting.
STAGE 2: ENGAGEMENT – RECORDING – PLAN
Regarding audience engagement, I had the idea to just act like I was having a conversation with a group of friends. Therefore, I would use terminology like, “Hey guys, it’s nice to meet you, how are you doing? don’t worry, we, you, I am interested in you guys”, made engagement by using motion as I tried to move around and did not want to be stationary, spoke within the third person to my audience and made eye contact where I could with the camera of my smartphone Len. I utilised my Blue Yeti microphone for my recording since the sound was deeper and when I was fixing the video within editing it had a better sound quality, tested my laptop audio, my phone audio and my Blue Yeti. My planning for this video was more on the simple side as I had all equipment to produce a video at a decent standard. My plan was more of a matter of iteration on my process with regards to filming and recording.
TAKE AWAYS!
What I have learned and taken away from this experience is that proper lighting is very important within video making it can make or break a good shot and that when sending files from Samsung to IOS devices image resolution can downgrade, therefore utilising editing software such as DaVinci Resolve can be very helpful to upscale the image quality.
References:
Gunn Enil (2015). “Mediated Authenticity: How the Media Constructs Reality”, Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers.