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.