Attached is the link to the video project:
http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~mvb312/commlab/week-9/video-project/index.html#
Created by: Winny, Matt, and Ploy
Description: Our idea is to create a fake social media website where users can post blogs. Our storyline follows that there are 2 vloggers who traveled to Shanghai. They kept on posting but then one of the users disappeared. No one knows where she went or what might happen to her. Later some of her fans pointed out that she was being followed by a strange guy dress in black. We ended the story with a new report who interviewed people who last seen the disappeared person. We left the story as a mystery and for the audience’s own interpretation of whether the stalker is responsible for the disappearance of this blogger.
Process: We began by creating the storyboard of what we would like to include them in the story, how many scenes, and which angle we want to use take the shots. We find that the storyboard is very useful since we always refer back to them. However, when we actually do shoot it, we changed the angle a lot since there are many other occurrences, such as too many people, and whether the camera can catch the stalker who is behind. As the project progresses, we decide to work both the website and the filming at the same time. This is because our shootings are not intended to be on the same day. For instance, one scene is in the hotel when they arrived and the other scene is also in the hotel but on another day. Therefore, our shooting has to go back and forth so that it could really make it believable that it is different days. To save time, we chose to simultaneously shoot and also code.
Methods: To make the project more realistic, we intended to shoot with our phones so that it could reflect the real nature of vloggers. A lot of the post of social media are all taken by phone. Also, we intended for the videos to be vertical as it reflects the nature of vloggers taking selfies. However, in our last scene, of the news report, we shoot it with the camera. This is because we want it to look more professional with better video qualities. We also want the sounds to be more professional so we used the shotgun microphones.
We did some basic edits to the videos of the vloggers because we want it to remain similar to what vlogs might look like. However, we did quite a lot of edit on the new reports. First of all, we need to connect the videos from the camera to the audios from the microphone because it is of different qualities. I did that by muting the camera audio and then replacing it with the microphone audio. Since we need to combine many interview scenes together, there are many issues that happened. For instance, the sounds are not at the same level. Therefore I need to go through audacities and then make those sounds on the same level by maximizing some. Then I combined those scenes together.
For the coding part, I am responsible for the codings of the captions and the comments of each person on the website. What I did is set the function so that each person have a corresponding first name, last name, and username. When someone post, I set the post number. For instance, the second person who comments, Lauren, have been set a number and then I defined the user number with let Lauren = user [2]. Then within the post, I used comment, commentUser, and commentText.
Post Modem:
I feel like the overall arching of the project was pretty successful since it is credible and believable. It looks pretty real as vloggers. However, if we have more time, I wish we can change the aesthetic of the website. Create more functions that are useful as part of a social media site. For example, we do have the like, share and comment button. However, we still do not have functions such as messaging and maybe entering into other profiles. I also think we should use the page more since there are empty spots surrounding the post. Lastly, I still find it a little unrealistic when the newest post is not at the top but rather is at the bottom. We decided that it is quite unrealistic if they have to scroll up to see the most recent post, so we stick to our plan of reverse chronological order. Overall, I am like how it turned out but we definitely could make it better if we have more time.
Reference:
we used the beginning of the news report from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU0ZWicyypM